Donated summary based on lectures called 'introduction to area studies'
Session 2: Introduction II
Re-Inventing Japan. Chapter 1
Samuel Johnson defined a nation as “people distinguished from other people”. This book is an attempt to sketch a new model of Japanese culture or to say something novel about the Japanese race (Jinshu) or ethnic group (Minzoku). It is an attempt to delve into the categories which underlie concepts of nationhood and how these have been used in the Japanese context.
Theme running through the book is the relationship between time and space. The sense of the nation as a spatially bounded natural entity is often closely connected with ideas of ethnicity: citizens sharing a genetic and cultural heritage adapted to the natural environment of the spatial realm they live in. But nations can also be seen as “time zones” separated from others by chronology rather than geography. This point of view states “our nation” and others may be understood as a relationship between a more advanced form and more primitive forms. What is ours is present/future, foreigners are the past.
Japan, unlike some continental countries, appears a readily defined “natural nation”. Even though its frontiers are recent, and in some places still disputed, inventions. The creation of nationhood involves not only the drawing of political frontiers but the development of an image of the nation as a single natural environment or habitat → Fúdo .
During the twentieth century notions of culture, race and ethnicity became key concepts in the understanding of nationhood. These notions were used to define an image of Japan in relation to images of other powerful nation-states. In order to say anything we have to generalize, but by doing so we use conceptual categories (based on history/power) which will never capture the fluid, changing reality.
When looking at Japan or any other nation, we shouldn't look at ethnicity, civilization or culture, but at the idea of “traditions”. These depend on political and social developments within Japan and Japan’s relationship with the world, and therefore give a clear picture.
It's not meaningful to talk about one single “Japanese culture” but we can define a multitude of traditions as the intellectual repertoire of large groups of people in Japan, although they may be interpreted in different ways by different individuals; Haiku, Shinto. But also others whose roots may be traced to societies more recently incorporated in the Japanese state (Okinawa, Ainu).
The point is that categories of exclusion, like race, culture or ethnicity, do not exist only within the boundaries of each nation, but replicate themselves across frontiers like a chain reaction. Although dividing lines, categories, and simplifications are necessary to make sense of the world we live in, we can try to erase the rigid lines laid down by dogmas and to sketch out new boundaries which allow room for intersection, mobility, change and multiplicity.
In this globalized world, the world, refracted through a host of invisible lenses, comes to you.
Marks. The Origins of the Modern World, introduction
Rise of the West
Eurocentrism emphasizes the superiority of Western Europe but also sees that package as having universal applicability (this makes it different from other ethnocentrisms). It is a paradigm: a set of assumptions about how the world works. It is a matrix that you can’t get out of. Eurocentrism also prevails in the US.
G7: the Group of Seven major industrial countries. G7 countries account for 2/3 of the world's economic output and wealth. It is stated that the world is divided between the industrialized and the not industrialized/trying to industrialize countries.
200 years ago 2/3 of the economy was in the hands of India and China, now Western countries and Japan hold the cards. But how is this possible? How has the growing gap between the poorest and the richest parts of the world appeared in the past 200 years? And as a last question, why can the G7 countries rule the economy, make the rules and have military power to back them up?
Dominant explanation: The rise of the West
The idea of the Rise of the West emerged shortly after the Spanish conquest of the Americas (Columbus) and the voyages to Africa and India (De Gama), during the Italian Renaissance of the 16th century. Firstly Europeans attributed their superiority to the Christian Religion, but during the Enlightenment (17th/18th century) they attributed their superiority to the Greek heritage. In the late 1700s the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution reinforced the idea that Europe was superior. Classical British Political Economics developed the ideas of capitalist development as “progress”, the West (The Occident) as “progressive and dynamic” and Asia (The Orient) as “backward and stagnating”. Even Karl Marx believed that the 19th century European expansionism was bringing “progress” to the rest of the world. Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Weber have propounded a “diffusionist” theory of how world history was unfolded. Europeans found out how to get rich by industrialization, Japan caught up with the Europeans and eventually other places around the globe would too (when they eliminate local institutions and cultural trait that prevent them from becoming modern). The gap between the modernized and not-modernized countries actually became bigger. It is a Master narrative: a grand scheme of organizing interpretation and writing of history.
Eurocentrism:
The history from a European point of view
There are different people and cultures, but the European is better
The superiority of Europe; everything good, progressive and innovative starts in Europe and it also spreads around the globe
Eurocentric views of the world see Europe as being the only active creator of world history. Europe acts and the rest of the world will respond. The Eurocentric way of seeing the world is deeply held by the Americans.
Tell the story about Eurocentrism outside the “matrix” will accomplish 3 things:
It will provide an independent way to tell which parts of the Rise of the West can be kept and which can be rejected
It will help readers to critically examine their own assumption about how the world works
Raise the more general issue of how we know and what we know about the world.
Historical contingency: The interpretation that Western dominance was not inevitable, it is contingent (dependent) on other developments elsewhere in the world. This does not mean that Western dominance was an accident (though some causes are!), because there were causes for the development.
Most important; the economic engine driving global trade was in Asia. Also very significant is the beginning of the Islam and the expansion of the Islamic empire. Asia attracted the attention of traders from all over Eurasia, but the Islamic empire blocked direct European access to the wealth of Asia.
If history is inevitable, there is nothing we can do to change the future. But if it was contingent, actions of the here and now do indeed have the possibility of changing the world.
Conjuncture: several otherwise independent developments come together in ways that interact with one another, creating a unique historical moment. Conjuncture can explain major historical developments in different regions. For example: The Chinese monetary system was based on silver and in the New World (held by Europe) there was enough silver. So the silver flowed to China and Asian silks, spices and porcelains flowed to Europe (first age of globalization).
Conclusion: the world could be in a very different place, hadn't it been for contingency, accident and conjuncture.
Why do we construct a new, non-Eurocentric narrative of the making of the modern-world?
The story of the rise of the West can be misleading and wrong in fundamental ways. Scholars have shown that virtually every factor that its proponents have identified with the European Miracle van be found in other parts of the world.
Much of the narrative will be devoted to showing the ways in which other parts of the world were either more advanced/developed than parts of Europe.
Session 3: Mappings
Re-Inventing Japan. Chapter 2
One term seldom needs discussion: Japan. Japan seems self-explanatory: a “natural region” whose isolation and climatic uniformity accounted for the early rise of national consciousness and because of the surrounding sea had very little infusion of other ethnic groups, resulting in a contemporary population that is fundamentally homogeneous.
Japan in its present form is a modern artifact, whose frontiers were drawn in the middle of the nineteenth century. The sea/moat surrounding Japan is dotted with islands which have acted as zones of continuous economic and cultural interchange; for example through the Ainu and Okinawans.
These societies suddenly found themselves stranded on the margins of a modern state. The policies of assimilation, used to turn the people of the frontier into Japanese citizens, involved a sharpening of the official definition of what it meant to be Japanese. But that definition was never constant.
At the core of this changing definition of the nation lay notions of time and space. The modern nation state has commonly been presented, not just as a clearly bounded geographic space, but also as the bearer of historical progress.
The formation of “Japan” as a modern nation within its contemporary boundaries involved an important reworking of the relationship between the Japanese state and the regional communities whose ties to the central government had often been tenuous and the frontier societies of the Ainu and Okinawans.
Re-conceptualization (19th century): the unfamiliar outer lying societies were not symptoms of foreignness, but backwardness. This was crucial in the formation of an image of Japan and the Japanese ethnic group.
Three Views of the World
The Ainu (North of Japan) saw themselves as ordinary people. Ainu is the word for 'human being'. Ainu society was structured around small self-organizing communities called kotan with defined areas to hunt, fish, grow crops etc. Kotan in turn participated in wider groups known as kur or utar which loosely means clan. The Ainu called the Japanese shisam, Great and Nearby (open attitude to strangers). By the beginning of the Togukawa period this realm had been brought under control of the Japanese state and divided among domain lords (Matsumae family). As borders were redefined, the chief dividing line was between those incorporated into the control systems of the domain and the Japanese state, referred to as Shisam in Ainu and as Wajin in Japanese. The Ainu open society profited from the trade with the Japan and it flourished. But when the realm became of the Togukawa, the Japanese exploited the Ainu (18th century). The Ainu worked in semi-slavery. This was for the Ainu a sense of betrayal.
The Metropolis, the educated urban section of the Japanese population. Among intellectuals, the sudden expansion of contacts with the outside world in the 16th century stimulated curiosity of Japan's place in the world which was not extinguished by the tight controls on foreign trade imposed from the mid-17th century onward. Visions on the outside world were powerfully influenced by China (18th century).
The vision of the world was drawn from the ka-i model (Circles of increasing strangeness) of the world in which barbarism (i) increases the farther one moves away from the settled and civilized center (ka)Okinawa, Ryukyu Kingdom, South of Japan. The intellectual life of the Ryuku kingdom was deeply influenced by China and absorbed the same ka-i model of the global order. They Okinawa's were aware of how small they were and respected their larger neighbors. At the same time however, the kingdom's social elite were aware and proud of their special place as a crossroads of East Asian trade (good trade relations). 17th century: invaded Japan but lost, now they had a tributary overlord
The Ka-i order and the Logic of Differences
The path which led to the redefinition of Ainu and Ryukyuans as Japanese was shaped by two forces.
The force of Japan's changing relationship with China (they become part of Ka-i). The symmetry between north and South was not perfect. In the south, Satsuma, posted its officials in the Ryukyu capital and claimed the right to regulate the kingdom's trade and taxation system. In the north, the domain of Matsumae showed little interest to intervene in the life of the Ainu and allowed to exploit and trade as they wished. Matsumae levied no tax but creamed of profits of the trade. The common cornerstone of the Ka-I model was the logic of difference. Everything in the relationship with Ainu and Ryukyu was precise because it had to represent the subordination of foreign people to Japanese dominion, the exotic character of the Ainu and Ryukyu had to be magnified → they couldn't learn the Japanese language or dress like Japanese, they had to make tribute missions.
Japan's growing contact with Europe (they become part of Bunmei). Japan's growing contact with the European powers from the 18th century onward, on the other hand, exposed Japan to the European idea of the frontier: a single line marking the boundary between one nation and another, instead of the idea of a series of frontiers marking gradually increasing degrees of difference. Because of the European influence, there emerged a sense of ethnicity as a chief criterion of nationhood. Arise of the nation as a Geo-Body, possessing a integrity and life of its own. Japan's first encounter with this European order occurred in the north with Russians. Their response was predictable; Ainu redefined as Japanese. As the Russian threat intensified, Ainu territory was placed under direct Shogunal control and the Ainu were encouraged to “turn into Japanese”. Two points about these policies are particularly interesting. Firstly, the acknowledgment that people could be “turned into Wajin (Japanese)”: that national identity was a matter of customs not race. Secondly, the form of “Japaneseness” imposed upon the Ainu.
Modernity, Civilization and Assimilation
A comprehensive effort to “Japanize” the periphery began only after Japan's wholehearted entry into the modern world order in the mid-19th century.
1855: Japan and Russia completed the first attempt to define their mutual border.
1869: Land of the Ainu was incorporated under the name: Hokkaido
1879: The last king of Ryukyu was forced to abdicate to the Meiji government and Ryukyu became the Okinawa prefecture.
Once the outlines of the state had been defined, there followed a period of cultural coloring: an attempt to blend the societies of the periphery into the official image of a united and centralized nation. But the Japanese society to which the people of the periphery were to be assimilated was itself in the midst of rapid and profound change.
The Western-inspired version of civilization for which Meiji scholars were obliged to invent a Japanese translation: bunmei. Unlike ka, bunmei was a dynamic concept, laden with overtones of progress. Its basis was progress and production: the ability to create material wealth which would release the human spirit from the bonds imposed on it by nature. There were 3 stages of development; The Primitive Stage, The Semi-developed stage, and the Stage of Full Civilization.
This shifting vision of the world order ad three crucial consequences for Meiji assimilation policy:
Assimilation went far beyond the outward forms of clothing or language, its central element was now a restructuring of the relationship between humans and nature.
The emergence of a more ambitious and totaling vision of “Japaneseness” than had existed in the Tokugawa period. But the enforcement of normality required a definition of what normal was. The Meiji state did succeed in imposing order on many aspects of the existing regional diversity of Japanese culture, including enforcing the use of “normal language”. Social standardization was through education and military training was imposed, on both the people on the frontier and the people of the various Japanese regions
But the most interesting implication of the notion of bunmei was the way it allowed difference to be transposed from the realm of space to the realm of time, so that 'foreignness' came to be interpreted as “underdevelopment” → unfamiliar features of Ainu and Okinawa.
The transfer of difference from geography (foreignness) to history (backwardness) was encouraged by early 20th century research on societies of the periphery. The Ainu didn’t have to adapt to the Japanese culture anymore: they already were part of the Japanese culture, just an earlier form. They were redefined as ‘hunter-gatherers’. This counted for Okinawa as well.
Japan is not a natural nation, it's a recent construction. The borders enclosed groups whose language and history had little in common. The ‘exotic’ frontier regions were perceived as ‘backwards’ rather than ‘foreign’ and were therefore part of Japan.
The modern transfer of difference from the dimension of space to the dimension of time was closely linked to the emerging sense of ethnicity as the chief criterion of nationhood. European racial theories were enthusiastically studied and adopted by scholars in the Meiji era and the Japanese national identity was increasingly being linked to the idea of an organically united Japanese “Volk” (minzoku). Japan was now seen as a racial designation, this meant that the Ainu and Okinawans were left in the curious position of being commonly defined as ethnically distinct from Japan (Nihonjin) and at the very same moment being Japanese citizens.
The definition of the geographic boundaries of the modern nation gave birth to the image of the nation as a 'geo-body', possessing a primordial integrity and life of its own. Japan was thus a nation with an united “body” made up of a single minzoku.
Winachakul. Siam Mapped
A map, by itself, has a certain power. In the past, borders were porous due to competing kingdoms. Maps were (and are) used as an ideology; the geo-body is not a modern creation. It is not an objective truth about reality. There is some kind of motivation behind the making of a map. By creating historical maps, you create a past, which means including certain people while excluding others; you make a distinction and thus an ‘us’ and ‘them’. Maps carry a background assumption of places and borders naturally being there, which then follows the idea that a land can ‘lose’ a certain area as part of their property.
After the revolution in 1932, the Thai overthrew the absolute Monarchy. There was agony for the lost territories. When the monarchy was abdicated in 1935, the regimes had to build up legitimacy and credibility. The Phibun government espoused the chauvinistic idea of the Thai civilized nation. They changed the name to Thailand and had many nationalistic ideas (from public to individual level). The Thai wanted to recover the lost territories (bank of the Mekhong), risk because of Vichy France. The Phibun government decided to cooperate with Japan. Thailand gave military support to Japan and in return they received the western part of Cambodia. During this situation a map was produced, the Map of the History of Thailand's Boundary ( Phaenthi prawat-anakhet-thai), the total legitimate realm of Siam. What actually belongs to Siam is still up for debate.
The Maps with the total Siamese territory are logically speculative, so the losses of territory are also a logical speculation imposed by the agonized elite. The map is merely a creation out of an elitist memory off the crisis and the modern geo-body of Siam. The map is not a scientific record of geographic reality outside itself. The map is a visual text of a historical proposition (most important task is independence).
The map was distributed to schools and government offices, the British and French protested. The ministry said it was only for education, but eventually it was also used for the return of territory from the French. The Phibun government promised to stop the distribution of the maps, but until now the maps are still found in schoolbooks. After WWII and the post-colonial era the map lost its immediate political thrust, but it remained it's function as a sentimental visual code of history.
In 1935-1936 the Historical Atlas of Thailand was produced by the Ministry of Defense. The map shows Thai historical kingdoms from the eight century until the Bangkok period. Considering this atlas as the most comprehensive and accurate account of the number, location and status of centers known to have been in existence during several important periods prior to the nineteenth century.
How does this atlas create emotional effects and shape our memory?
The maps are based on retrospective speculations, and maybe therefore you don't need knowledge of the map. The origin of these historical maps is not the remote past, the origin is the geo-body of Siam in the present. So they're retrospective speculations based on the present geo-body of Siam. The recent birth of the geo-body and nationhood was suppressed by a map, the same technology that gave the Thai birth. It is through this mediation of historical maps that the domains of space and memory are transgressed (overtreden). Anachronistic devices make the past familiar to the present, without anachronism, plays and historical maps are doomed to fail. The geo-body in the historical maps has a similar function, it provides access expropriate the past in the light of present needs. The geo-body helps to represent the continuity of Thai history.
The notion that modern Siam is the result of ruptures, not continuity, is precluded. The geo-body mediates a continuum of the life of the nation.
Another emotional effect that can be visualized in these maps is the beauty of Siam. The maps are not for a study of historical geography, but for historical consciousness about the life of the nation. The Atlas is also selective: It highlights Siam's biography in just 7 frames.
The historiography and maps discussed in this chapter use anachronistic assumptions and devices such as the geo-body, boundary lines, the modern concept of independence and so on.
Throughout the whole life of the nation, the major problem has always been the danger from outside (foreign enemies, external threats etc.). This demonstrates development, change or progress during the course of the nation's life, but also for the motif of external threat and the struggle for independence is repetitive. This redundancy has an important function for remembering and admiring the maps.
Session 4: Orientalism
Edward Said. Orientalism, Introduction
Orientalism: a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe, it's also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture.
Anyone who teaches, writes or researches the Orient is an Orientalist, but the term is a bit vague and it connotes the high-handed executive attitude of the European Colonialism.
It's a European invention, a place of romance and exoticism, but also a representation of what is unknown and therefore dangerous to the dominant other.
Interdependent meanings of Orientalism
Academic: That what anyone in the academic world, that has to do with the Orient, does.
General: a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and “the Occident”, the basic distinction between East and West.
Historical: Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient.
Because Orientalism is a discourse, it was not a free subject of thought or action. This is not to say that Orientalism unilaterally determines what can be said about the Orient.
Discourse: You need to understand discourse in relation to Foucault's idea of discourse, which is basically power relationships in society. Whomever holds the power/authority is the one to determine what/who the "other" is and what is or is not true about them; the one holding the power decides the truth of things.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century France and Britain dominated the Orient (until 19th century only India and the Bible Lands) and Orientalism, since WWII America has dominated the Orient.
The Orient is not an inert fact of nature, it's not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just here. Men makes their own history and extend it to geography; as both geographical and cultural entities like the Orient and the Occident are man-made. The two geographical entities thus support and reflect each other.
The Orient wasn't essentially an idea or a creation with no corresponding reality. The lives of the people in the Orient have a brute reality greater than anything that the West could say about them. Orientalism studies the Western ideas beyond correspondence with the real Orient.
Ideas, Cultures and histories cannot seriously be studied without their force, or more precisely, their configurations of power, also being studied. To believe that the Orient was “Orientalized” is to be disingenuous. The relationship between the Orient and the Occident is a relationship of power, domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony. The Orient was Orientalized because it could be made Oriental by Western Powers.
Flaubert's encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman, He represented the woman and spoke for her. This stands for the pattern of relative strength between East and West, and the discourse about the Orient that it enabled.
Never should be assumed that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or of myths which could simply blow away. Orientalism is not just a European fantasy about the Orient. Continued investment made Orientalism, as a system of knowledge about the Orient, a body of theory and practice. It is cultural hegemony (how a certain way of thinking becomes the norm) what gives Orientalism the durability and the strength.
Gramsci: distinction between civil and political society. Civil society is made up of voluntary affiliations like schools whose role in the polity is direct domination. Culture is to be found operating within civil society, in the influence of ideas, of institutions and of others work not through domination but by consent. In any society certain cultural forms predominate the others, this is what Gramsci calls Hegemony; an indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life in the West. Hegemony gives the strength and durability to Orientalism.
There are two kinds of Orientalism in texts. The general group of writers with ideas of overriding the mass material or the much more varied texts produced by almost uncountable individual writers (general vs detailed).
Said's two fears: Distortion and Inaccuracy, or rather the kind of inaccuracy produced by too dogmatic and generality and too positivistic a localized focus.
Said's 3 aspects of contemporary reality:
The distinction between pure and political knowledge. For a scholar studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of his actuality. The interest in the Orient is political, but it is culture that created it. Orientalism is a dimension of modern political-intellectual culture. Politics in the form of Imperialism that bears upon the production of literature etc. by no means equivalent to saying that culture is therefore a demeaned thing. Orientalism must be studied as a dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires.
The methodological question. Starting point → Orientalism was originated by the British and French, and American experience of the Arabs and Islam, as that represented Orientalism for over a thousand years. When you are looking for a starting point you automatically exclude things. Methodological devices:
Strategic location: the author’s position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about.
Strategic formation, analyzing the relationship between texts and the way they acquire mass, density and referential power.
Intertextuality creates a box. Each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other works.
Focus on the text’s surface, its exteriority to what it describes. Evidence of representations of the Orient, in truthful and avowedly artistic texts.
Difference in representation after the 18th century (modern Orientalism): range of representation expanded.
Disagreement with Foucault: texts and authors on their own do matter.
The personal dimension. Said is ‘Oriental’ himself, therefore the Islamic Orient had to be the center of attention. Three things contributed to making even the simplest perception of the Arabs into a highly politicized matter, and Said's experiences of these stimulated him to write Orientalism:
History of popular anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice in the West.
The struggle between the Arabs and Israeli Zionism.
The almost total absence of cultural position making it possible either to identify with or dispassionately discuss the Arabs or Islam.
Session 5: Orientalism since
Burke III and Prochaska. Genealogies of Orientalism, Introduction
Orientalism from Postcolonial Theory to World History
Orientalism and Nationalism both derive form the Enlightenment thought! After 9/11 the debate of Orientalism came up again. Orientalism is no longer the philologically driven discipline of the study of Asian language. Orientalism as discursive practice linking culture and power is more important than ever. The US watches the Middle East through a lens to spotlight the essential culture features that make them “hate” us.
Said's Orientalism marked a paradigm shift in thinking about the West and the non-West. Said coupled his critique of European discourse on the Middle East to issues of representation, demonstrating that Western discourse on the Middle East was linked to power, trafficked in racist stereotypes, and continually reproduced itself.
Despite important achievements in theorizing orientalism as a discourse and some notable work that explores specific instances of how it shaped and was shaped by colonialism, the critique of colonial representation is still abstract.
Colonial representations were instrumental in shaping the culture worlds, because those representations were deeply infused with power.
Orientalism involved two distinct intellectual operations. First was Said's appropriation of Foucalt's re-visioning of Enlightenment science, how knowledge and power were fused in Enlightenment thought and practice. This made clear the functioning of the binary logic of orientalism, as well as its deeper roots in European culture. The second operation involved revealing the racist implications of the Enlightenment (imperialism).
Critique on Orientalism:
The critique of orientalism avoids history. We can’t understand cultures as if they’re standing still. Can we never change? It’s too monolithic: what happens when resistance comes into the picture?
Orientalism has failed to consider the political contexts in which it arose.
Problem of agency: Insufficiently aware of the active role of non-Western peoples → a form of eurocentrism. Said represents Orientalism as the discourse of power, but this is inadequate to explain the relationship between the West and the Rest, and in fact imports the dichotomies that Said seeks to avoid.
Text-centered, too one-sided. Cultural products don’t determine their historical contexts, the historical context is necessarily determinative and cultural artifacts simply mirror this. Literary texts and historical contexts are autonomous, they battle with each other and make each other happen. We have to find a middle way between text and context.
We don’t see were nationalism comes from. Said explains it as the resistance against the dominant west, but the Orient still adapts a lot of western features. It’s not just domination, it’s also consent, mediation and exchange.
Orientalism shaped the culture of colonialism, but it wasn't alone, and we need deeper historical engagement.
Relocate the critique of Orientalism in the wider history of Human sciences.
Insertion of the object of study into its political and intellectual field. Orientalism has failed to consider the political context in which it arose.
A more adequate historicization of Orientalism necessarily implies the re-inscription of the colonial moment in the context of world history, and not that just of the West.
Power (Marx and Weber ideas): understood as structural, the power of armies and economies.
Power (Second sense by Foucault and Gramsci): discursive system. Power is an omnipresent vector that defines cultures and helps to determine the histories that organize cultural meanings.
Where does Nationalism come from? Said lacked a theoretical basis for incorporating nationalism-as-resistance into orientalism.
Anderson's Nationalism: nations are 'Imagined communities' rather than entities determined by social characteristics (like language). He formulates “printing-capitalism”, the combination of printing and capitalism. Anderson adds Creole (Americas) and Official (Russia) (Modular Forms) and they are ready for export to Africa and Asia. Orientalism is of little interest to him.
Chatterjee: If countries can choose their imagined community from these 'modular' forms, what do they have left to imagine? Chatterjee distinguished between the 'problematic and 'thematic' of Orientalism.
Problematic: Nationalism (Orientals are active historical Agents) and Orientalism (Orientals are passive historical objects) are reverse.
Thematic: Nationalism and Orientalism are the same; distinguishing the East from the West.
Scholars from China and Japan initially refused to engage the Saidean critique even more than Middle East specialists, imbued as they were with a sense of the East Asian experience as singular. In China, outsiders were barbarians. Japanese scholars claimed that Japan's historical experience was unique and resisted applying the approach of Orientalism to Japan.
Critique of colonial forms of knowledge can also help us understand how China and Japan have come to modernity. Orientalism constitutes one among many “othering” discourses, its geographical referent is the main characteristic that distinguishes it from other areas of history and post-colonial studies.
When modern nationalism emerged in in 20th century in China, it was in part as a response to Western Imperialism. With the emergence of Chinese nationalism and an independent China, the power relationship that had been a condition for the emergence of orientalism had shifted, but not disappeared.
Japan; Gluck: Meiji statesmen wanted to forge a “Modern Japan” and also a “Traditional Japan”. Fear of social conflict drove Japanese elites to develop “Meiji ideology” (didn't directly focus on Orientalism). Tanaka: Shina (Japanese construction of Chinese Confucianism) served as the source of Meiji innovations. Doing this, it looked like Japan was culturally derivative of China.
Foucault distinguished the discursive bases of modernity within the West (study of discursive bases of power in modern Europe), Said pointed out that the fact of European dominance was inseparable discursively from its deep Eurocentrism and power-laden character (critique outward to the discursive roots of the modern world). Said argued that by producing the intellectual grid through which Europe saw the rest of the world, the discourse of orientalism sustained and justified European dominance.
Post-colonial studies emerged out of the critique on Orientalism and other projects of critique (feminist, ethnic etc.). With this study it was possible for the first time to theorize the ways race and power shaped to modern world.
Thick description and thin coherence.
Orientalism as an outgrowth of Enlightenment, tended to construct an essentialized or thickly coherent Orient. Thick description generates homogeneous narratives and stands outside history. To view culture as thinly coherent is to move beyond orientalist views of the Middle East.
Deconstruction: What are taken as the certainties and truths of text are in fact disputable and unstable.
This critique is not just about the non-western other, but is also about the historical self-fashioning of the West itself. The West obtained a large amount of innovations from outside the region, mostly unacknowledged, for example gunpowder and printing. Western civilization is the form of auto-orientalism by which the West represented itself to itself. A reconsideration of Orientalism leads us to rethink the Enlightenment from a world historical point of view, it leads us to rethink the place of the West in the long-term history. The critique of Orientalism; by opening up new theoretical and historical perspectives, is in the process of transforming itself again.
Mamdani. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Introduction
Political Islam was produced in the colonial period in the encounter with Western power, but it did not give rise to a terrorist movement until the Cold War. After 9/11, Bush made an unguarded reference to pursuing a “crusade”, making distinctions between “Good Muslims” and “Bad Muslims”. Bad Muslims were clearly responsible for terrorism and Good Muslims were anxious to clear their names and they would support the Americas in a war against “them”. The message in this was, that all Muslims were presumed to be “bad”, unless they proved to be “good”. Of course, no such distinction can be made. It masks a refusal to address failure to make a political analysis of our times. These differences made between Muslims refer to political identities, not to cultural or religious ones.
It's not anymore the market (capitalism) or the state (democracy), but culture (modernity) that is said to be the dividing line between those in favor of peaceful, civic existence and those inclined to terror, the divide between those who are modern and those who are premodern. The moderns make culture and are its master; the premoderns are said to be but conduits.
Culture Talk assumes that every culture has a tangible essence that defines it. Politics is a consequence of this essence → politics and culture are intertwined. Culture is the line between those in favor of peace and those inclined to terror.
Two distinct ideas of the premodern:
Premodern people are not yet modern, just lagging behind
Premodern as antimodern. For example: Africa is incapable of modernity, the Islam is incapable of modernity and also resistant.
Huntington: The fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or economic. The dominating source is cultural. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. Said argued with Huntington, the clash of civilizations will be inside the civilizations instead of between them. Western countries should prepare themselves for this clash. Huntington casts the Islam in the role of an enemy civilization, the Bad Muslims. After the Cold War (the last of the Western Civil Wars), the real enemy occurred, the lines of global conflict become cast in cultural terms. The Green Peril (Islam) was far more dangerous than the red scares.
Lewis sees history as the movement of large cultural blocs called civilizations. In his clash inside civilizations, the good Muslims will overcome the bad Muslims. Because of lac of freedom and the absence of secularism in Islamic Countries there is still a yawning gap between the Good and Bad Muslims.
Fundamentalism is not the only Muslims tradition, the Muslims need to figure out the issues themselves. The West on the other hand, needs to avoid the danger of a new era of religious wars.
Huntington said that the West needs to prepare themselves for a clash of civilizations. Lewis has a different point, the West must remain a bystander while the Muslims fight their internal war.
Culture talk also turned religion into a political category: democracy lacks in the Muslim world. The roots of terrorism really lie in a sectarian branch of Islam, the Wahhabi.
The good Muslims are modern, secular, and Westernized, but bad Muslims are doctrinal, antimodern and virulent.
It does not make sense to think of culture in political- and therefore territorial-terms.
The key historical points lies in the relationship between history writing and forms of power.
Nationalist history writing has been mainly about giving the nation an identifiable and often glorious past.
Metanationalist writings have given us equally glorified civilizational histories, locating the nation in a global context.
The civilization history of the West came to a triumphant point in the nineteenth century, along with European Imperialism. Civilizational history gave the West an identity that marched through time unscathed. West occupied the center of the global stage and the Orient was its periphery (Visible Periphery). Because of the divide between the East and the West, there was a third part in the world that was left out, it lacked history of civilization. This blank darkness comprised Africa, the pre-Columbian Americas and the lands of the Pacific (the invisible periphery.).
The notion of the West had 3 shifts.
The West referred originally and properly to the western or Latin-using half of the Roman Empire.
The West European lands generally. This was not a simple extension, it excluded the Mediterranean lands which turned Muslim.
All European Christendom (Western and Eastern) → racialized notion
Because of the Eurocentric history, 2 peripheries were constructed. Because of this, a self-standing history of Africa was produced. Africa was turned into a racialized object, debased rather than defined.
Said’s principal dogmas of Orientalism:
The same Orientalist histories that portray the West as rational, developed, humane, superior, caricature the Orient as aberrant, undeveloped, inferior.
The Orient lives according to set rules inscribed in sacred texts, not in response to the changing demands of life.
The Orient is eternal, uniform, incapable of defining itself; it is assumed that defining the Orient from a Western standpoint is inevitable and objective.
The Orient is at the bottom something either to be feared or to be controlled.
One has to distinguish between civilization (history) and power (politics). History is linked to political agendas in both the Western and Arabian world. Sometimes they double each other, but sometimes they don’t! When two different cultures live together, the need for a rewritten history arises → a change in consciousness. When you equate politics and culture, things become too one-dimensional. Even if political identities are singular, cultural identities tend to be cumulative. We should distinguish between fundamentalism as a religious identity and political identities that use a religious idiom. Fundamentalism is not political terrorism. It’s a religious phenomenon.
Two kinds of racial movements:
Society-centered: problem of democracy in a society linked with the state.
State-centered: pose the problem of the state at the expense of democracy. This is where political terror comes from.
Session 6: Reverse Orientalism
Re-Inventing Japan. Chapter 8
Global Knowledge and the Formatting of Difference
In the course of the 19th century, Japan's place in the world was redefined by the creation of a new, Western-dominated world order which transformed the older, China-centered East Asian system. This new order was not simply a matter of political power and trade relations: it was also a global system of knowledge.
A recent study by Jan Aart Scholte points out that a key element in the creation of global system has been the establishment of international “norms” or “regimes”: that is, globally accepted standardized forms of knowledge and behavior which provide the essential basis for international communication and interaction. In two categories
Formal regimes: established by treaties or international organizations
Informal regimes: which are essentially matters of practice and convention.
The example of Greenwich Mean Time illustrates an important point about international regimes. What they created was not in fact absolute global uniformity but an agreed set of rules which made sub-regimes possible. The key process was “formatting”, the creation of a single underlying common framework or set of rules which is used to coordinate local sub-regimes (Global format + Local content).
The formation of global knowledge system involved the worldwide spread of a common set of basic ideas about scientific research. Japan naturally followed this pattern. At the same time though Japanese scientific research wasn't the same, the content was often local.
The distinction between the global format of methods, theories and taxonomies of knowledge and local content was an important one for early Japanese scientific researchers. People used the local content as a basis for defining distinct identities. By this time (20's) Japanese scholars were beginning to claim a place in the global scientific community but also on the uniqueness of Japanese science itself.
The example of scientific research can help us to understand why the spread of global knowledge formats was accompanied by a growing sense of national distinctiveness. The very fact that Japan's modern research laboratories were based on the same rules of knowledge and behavior as the Westerns made it all the easier to spot the differences.
Formatting the colonial state
Nature of Japanese ethnic and cultural identity began to take shape around the 1890's. A time when new social and political institutions were beginning to have a impact on Japanese society. The bureaucracy grew rapidly as the role of the government expanded. The large Japanese corporations which came to be known as zaibatsu also established their hierarchical structures between the 1890's and the 20's, and the need for managerial and administrative skills stimulated the expansion of an educated urban middle class.
At the end of the 1880's onward a stream of studies attempted to locate and define the distinctive essence of Japaneseness.
First wave of Globalization: Japan became part of the Global System. The first feature was the uneven impact of global knowledge regimes on Japanese society, regional and social differences arose. It was a system based on the colonial nation-state. Japan did not have global uniformity but it was possible to coordinate slightly differing sub-regimes, this national system of sub-regimes was complicated during the first half of the 20th century because that Japan was a colonial power. They exported their system of sub-regimes to the colonies (Assimilation and Discrimination).
Like other colonial systems the Japanese empire embodied essentially a two-tier structure. The institutions of the “Japan proper” (naichi) provided the basic model for the colonies, but were adapted to maintain the control of the colonizer on the colonized. In general, colonial policy was high assimilationist and discriminative. It was necessary for the state to intervene in the private lives and to restrict individual rights to turn them in to Japanese.
Throughout the early 20th century was an urge of Japanese intellectuals to define Japan's uniqueness, but on the other hand identify the international commonalities which justified colonization.
Japan is a mixed race; they successfully assimilated many ethnic groups in the past and would continue to do so.
Define Japan's position in the world order not in terms of a distinct “Japanese” identity but in terms of an “Asian” or “Oriental” identity. Japan as Super-Asia, which therefore had cultural and political destiny in the region.
The implication was that Japanese culture embodied a uniquely advanced form of the essence of Asian culture and that this gave Japan a special position in Asia: a position epitomized in the person of the emperor.
Globalization and Identity in Postwar Japan
The decades which followed Japan's defeat in the Pacific War can be seen as a second phase of globalization (1950's and 60's), in which internationally standardized economic, political, technological, and media regimes made new inroads into the structures of everyday life. But, once again was accompanied by a new wave of interest in analyzing and defining national identity.
During the occupation ('45-'52) in Japan, the age of mass consumption was both transforming and standardizing many aspects of daily life but it did not westernize Japanese family life, more blending. Japan had lost its colonial empire. Sub-regimes of the global system were largely national.
More than ever Japan tended to be seen as an entity unto itself: an approach embodied most notably in the outpouring of Nihonjinron. These theories focused on the contrast between Japan and “the west”. Nihonjinron tended to define Japanese identity in positive terms, identifying the unique features of Japanese systems with social harmony and successful economic development.
Globalization and Identity in the Age of Signs
Third wave of globalization (1980's-): By the mid-90's Japan had over one million (+ 300.00 ill.) foreign residents. The presence of foreigners was encouraged by an outflow of Japanese capital to the Asian region and beyond. By the second half of the 80's Japanese structures and practices, celebrated by Nihonjinron, were being exported around the globe.
Japan's cultural influence makes itself felt around the world in other ways too. Japanese companies are not just investing in foreign manufacturing also in other stuff like movies and music (growing range of Japanese Goods).
But in this age of information technology, the flows of influence are complex and intersecting. Japan is also on the receiving end of new information systems devised and developed abroad. Most important the Internet.
One of the unmistakable characteristics of the new wave of globalization is the multinational origin of its underlying codes and norms, a more complex and multidirectional negotiation of global formats.
Second feature of contemporary globalization is its pervasiveness. It affects the most intimate corners of daily life. Erosion of the boundaries that separated public and private spheres.
As in earlier waves of globalization, the creation of internationally standardized norms or regimes does not simply produce worldwide uniformity, but creates a framework in which various sub-regimes can be coordinated and compared. Key-characteristic is that sub-regimes are no longer built around the nation-state.
At the same time, the end of the Cold War and liberalization of economic regulations have created scope for other regional grouping which cross national boundaries. Many of the subregimes of the contemporary system, do not simply cross international frontiers: they are no longer grounded in geographical space at all.
New debate about identity doesn’t take place on a purely national stage anymore. Uniquely Japanese values have become Asian values. Also, there is an emergence of subnational and regional identities.
1. Example: Okinawa. Important for US military bases → social disruptions. US authorities persuade Ryukyuans that they are not part of Japan. Desire to be reunited with the mainland was emphasized in protests. When this would happen, a civilian economy would arise. But it didn’t: US military bases still dominate the islands. Distinctions between Okinawa and the mainland are now emphasized.
2. Example: Ainu. Always been marked as different from the Japanese. But eventually incorporated into Japanese society. Repressive hand of assimilation policy did not destroy a sense of distinct identity. They hold on to a sense of distinct history. More visible forms appear gradually → possibility of a nation which contains multiple origins and memories of the past. Basis for the resurgence of Ainu identity politics.
Okinawan and Ainu protests are products of the new age of globalization.
Okinawa: revival of cross-border links, local government, small business, educational exchange.
Ainu: connections to other indigenous groups in Asia, North America, etc.
Session 7: Race I
Van der Veer. Imperial Encounters, Chapter 6 'Aryan Origins'
Phrenology: Reading the skull how the human capacities of love, understanding and sexual desire are developed and how it can be classified. The skull is read to find physical evidence for the moral character of the person. Gosh (the writer) highlights the great obsessions of colonial ethnography; Phrenology and anthropometry as methods to determine racial types.
Race studies: All about the connections between habitat, racial distinctions and morality. This way of categorizing slowly replaced the one based mainly on religion in the colonial states.
The science of race gradually replaced religion as the marker of colonial difference after the Mutiny and after Darwin's discoveries. There is not only a great debate about the interpretation of race in the 19th century, but there is also the crucial link between race and morality which never leaves religion entirely out of the equation.
The differentiation between a science based on language and a science based on biology.
Müller: Rejected philology (study of language) as the method to determine racial groups and their evolution. He connects the Aryan theory not with language but with biological evidence of racial groupings in India.
Look at the political and practical implications of race science, both in the formulation of Aryanism and in the identification of racial identity and criminality.
Romantic search for origins, the basis of the philological fascination with the Aryan Myth
These myths of origin become the subject of the emerging fields of legal, philological, and historical scholarship. This scholarship did not challenge the main frame of thought about origin in Europe, which was obviously biblical. This was the British' myth of origin, which talked about the origin of mankind in general.
→ Science playing a decisive role in the legitimation of dark theories of racial difference, criminality and colonial relations. The science of Origin changed from a science based on language to a science based on biology.
A crucial development in the thinking about race, language, and culture was the rise of comparative philology after Jones' articulation of the concept of Indo-European language family (1786). The main thrust of this mono-genetic line of thought was that Indians were not essentially different form the British, nor significantly inferior. This sympathetic view of India is gradually marginalized in the 19th century through attacks on Hinduism by Utilitarians and evangelicals alike.
English and Sanskrit (Indian Language) were shown to belong to the same linguistic family, so they were close kin.
After the Anglicist victory, comparative philology continued to instill a certain element of love and kinship with Hindu India. The term Aryan still had a more positive connotation in this time.
In Sanskrit, the term Arya meant “honorable man”, and was used by Müller for “Indo-European” language family.
The term Aryan expressed a kinship tie between the British and the Indians. It also represented perhaps the most pernicious opposition in the history of modern Europe; between the Aryan language family and race, on the one hand, and the Semitic language family and race, on the other hand. Thirdly, it expressed pernicious opposition in Modern India between Aryan invaders into India, and the Others (the adivasis aboriginals, Dravidian Language family).
The interest in Aryanism in Germany and elsewhere is not innocent of the conceptualization of the difference between Christians and Jews, and second, that the Sanskrit ideology (aryan) could be appropriated for expressing the opposition between a master race and a slave race. In the British case the emphasis was on the relationship between the British and Indians, in Germany it was the relationship between the Indo-European Aryans and the Semitic Jews that was stressed → led to the adoption of Aryanism in the Third Reich.
→ Aryanism being adopted by Third Reich so the scientific notion of language being the key to racial identification had a number of political implications.
Gobineau's “Essay on the Inequality of Races” most clearly expressed the Aryan Myth. According to Gobineau, the Aryan race was the carrier of civilization, it is the Aryan blood that is capable of true civilization. The civilization can not be transmitted by education and missionary work, but only by cross-breeding. → At the same time, cross-breeding is dangerous for the Aryan Race.
Renan: The Semitic race was a degenerate one and the Aryan race the newly chosen one. Aryans were the masters of the planet.
According to Müller, the same blood ran in the English soldiers as in the veins of the dark Bengalees. This view was supported by the idealistic theory of religion, which subsumed both Christianity and Hinduism but located it in the “Aryan tradition” of the World. This kind of view became less popular in Britain. Müller's reconsideration of the relationship between language and race was based on an acknowledgment of the paradigmatic shift in scientific theory after Darwin's publications.
In India, the most far-reaching consequence of the Aryan was the negative impact it had on the relation between the British and Indians. Müller developed a distinction between Sanskrit-derived languages and other languages (1847).
Aboriginals in India turned from slaves to more civilized by the Aryan civilization, showing that race was not destiny. In the same period, British scholars in India made a quick jump from linguistic evidence to physiological observations → light skinned civilized Aryans in North India and dark-skinned people in South India (Dravidian). The Aryan-Dravidian divide is one of the most salient ideological elements in Indian politics in the 20th century. The other divide is between the High Aryans and the Low non-Aryan outcasts and tribals. The Aryan theory didn't reunite races, it did the exact opposite.
A fascinating link between the Aryanist theories in India and in Europe is the theme of invasion.
The original inhabitants of the land are celebrated as the “owners of the land” who have privileged access to the magical resources of the natural environment.
The invaders are celebrated as valiant warriors, as deliverers of a higher, stronger civilization.
The Norman Conquest was the source of rich folklore traditions that were systematized and popularized in the 19th century → Ivanhoe, King Arthur and Robin Hood became part of the national mythology of the island and its invasions. Another narrative development is that of the Celts. They were the original inhabitants of the land and were mythologized as both femininely weak and romantically connected to the land. The British, Scots, Welsh and Irish (seen as the British ‘colonial other’) complemented the British identity.
The theme of invasion Is also crucial in the application of the Aryan theory in India. Horse-mounted fighters who worshiped sky-gods had invaded the Indian planes. The indigenous people were pushed to the margins (hill tribes) or included them as a fourth category of slaves in their caste system. Müller proposed a 2-race theory; light-skinned civilized Aryans and dark-skinned savages.
These invasions were different from the later invasions by the Muslims. The difference in the interpretation of the Aryan invasion and the Muslim invasions neatly shows the the 2 ways of using the “myth of invasion” (described above) in dealing with the past → Aryan meets Hindu, equating language with race and religion, and thus excluding a large portion of the population not on the basis of language but on the basis of their Islamic beliefs.
Besant: Hindu India had a golden Aryan past which had declined and had to be rescued through the agency of British Colonialism. With Marx and so many others she shared the notion that Imperialism was thought to be bad on short term, but good in the long run.
The differences in the evolution of races and their spiritual miscegenation brought about by the movement of peoples and imperialism, would lead in the end to a human brotherhood at a higher level of spirituality.
From Language to Skulls
The success of Darwin's evolutionary biology had reinforced a tendency already present in the intellectual opinion of Britain from the mid-nineteenth century, namely to assume a graduation from monkey to Negro to White Victorian man → idea that black sin people were closer to monkeys than to white humans.
Darwin argued for the essential continuity between animals and humans. Huxley, Darwin's assistant, showed that there were no significant differences between the brain structure of man and that of a monkey. Darwin's work marked a victory for science over religion.
Evolutionary thought further legitimized the search for the missing link between monkey and Victorian Man in other races. Müller's insistence on the faulty of language as an essential difference between humans and animals was thus an extremely significant anti-imperialist and anti-racist intervention. Müller already had given up on his idea that Language was linked to race, but he continued to insist on the importance of language and linguistics.
Possibly the most important empirical element of race science was comparative anatomy, especially craniometry → the measuring of skulls. By measuring the shape of the skull, one could ascertain the internal structure of the brain and thereby determine racial and individual differences in intelligence, temperament, and morality.
Gall: “Craniology”, a scientific method of investigating the skull in order to diagnose the internal state of one's mental faculties. Remarkable in this research is then notion that head shape is a stable indicator of race difference. Another feature was that one can read a person's or a race's character scientifically from the external appearance of the skull. Phrenology had a notion of balance between the different parts of the brain, allowing for the possibility of self-improvement by eliminating bad habits such as drinking or sexual license.
Research on the people of India became more interesting, as they were seen as ‘unable to form a nation’ and therefore were very diverse. The main conceptual difficulty in the census was how to classify the Indian population. Caste was the available indigenous category, but the problem was how to make it the basis of an All-Indian form of classification. The standardization of caste names and a standard All-India hierarchy of castes were required procedures. → Priest (Brahmans), Warriors, Commoners and The Rest.
The British Risley searched for a scientific method to order the immense diversity of Indian Society. He found it in the Nasal index. The caste with the finest nose shall be at the top, and that with the coarsest nose at the bottom. Anthropology gave the British not only the ability to categories the people of India, but also to place themselves above all of that; after all, they were the ones who’d brought civilization to India. According to Risley, the “race sentiment” was the basis of the caste system. Risley continued to build the theory of the Aryan-Dravidian divide, but now with anthropometrical evidence rather than philological confirmation.
Race, Class and Criminality
In the Victorian period savages were compared either to children or to the lower classes. The poor were described as “wandering tribes in civilized society”. The recurring ambivalence about heredity (nature) versus improvement (nurture) is seen. It was a nationalist imperative, however, that the urban poor were not only to be contained but had to be improved. The criminality of the poor was a direct result of their morality. Criminality was thought to be caused by a interconnected reinforcement of the two. One already had a ‘bad nature’ but only made that worse by behaving badly (nurture) and not trying to climb up in civilization.
In the first half of the 19th century, the British were very concerned with the criminality in India's countryside. All kinds of migrant groups (religious garb) which especially mystified the British, roamed the hillsides begging, robbing, extorting, and competing the British in controlling trade routes. The British put all criminality in India under the sign of “caste”, “tribe” and “race”, but they still attributed it to “religion”.
Example: Thugs and the war on thugs
Thugs robbed and strangled travelers and offered them to the Goddess Kali. They were not individual cases, but a well-organized network of thuggery. An Anti-Thug campaign was launched and money was given to any person with valuable information. Who the thugs were is unclear, since the only sources are written texts by the executive of the Anti-Thug campaign. Fact and Fiction is intertwined, so in this case it is almost impossible to disentangle them.
4 Elements converged in the way Thugs were imagined by the British:
The fact of banditry in the countryside which made traveling a hazardous adventure.
The British felt a great disgust for the animal sacrifices made in worship of the Mother-Goddess Kali.
A famous icon in the iconography of Kali shows her dancing with a string of skulls in one of her four hands on the corpse of Shiva.
The British were engaged in stamping out a number of “Barbarous” Hindu practices, such as widow burning.
Henry Spy examined the skulls of a view thugs. His research showed that the criminal nature of the thugs derived from the shape of their skulls. It was believed, however, that they could change their ways if they changed their surroundings, but this was often seen as impossible, as jobs (and thus also criminality) were a family business. Criminality was inherent in someone's caste, and therefore it was both racial and occupational in India.
The British Salvation Army was taken to India. First with a lot of opposition, but later with one of the greatest and most successful enterprises, the transformation of criminal tribes to decent, law-abiding citizens.
Cannandine. Ornamentalism, Part One
Ornamentalism
The British Empire had a complex racial hierarchy, but a less complex gender hierarchy.
Nations are in part imagined communities, depending for their credibility and identity both on the legitimacy of government and on invented traditions, myths and shared perceptions of social order.
The British Empire after the First World War had four great dominions of settlement. Because the British Empire was so geographically divided, the idea of one British Empire was imaginative.
The Britons saw their own society as dynamic, individualistic, egalitarian, modernizing and thus superior. Britons saw society in their “tropical and Oriental” colonies as enervated, hierarchical, backwards, and thus inferior. This, however, is a misunderstood version of what the British really thought. Britons saw themselves as belonging to an unequal society, characterized by a seamless web of layered gradations, which were sanctioned by tradition and religion, and which extended in a great chain of being from the monarch at the top to the humblest subject at the bottom. The British regarded their empire as one vast interconnected world.
Out of this theory, they created a system of races. In this system, the British, naturally, stood on top, as they were the most ‘perfect’ race, they were superior and saw themselves as lord of all the world. Underneath that they ordered all the other races, including those of the colonies they had taken. By the end of the 19th century, these notions of racial hierarchy, supremacy and stereotyping had become more fully developed. This system was broadened and sharpened over the centuries until the perfect view of the world was created; “There are only those who are British and those who are mere subject races.” This mode of imperial ranking and imaging was not just based on the Enlightenment view of the intrinsic inferiority of dark-skinned peoples (Equated with the workers in the factories. It was also based on the comparison of Great Towns at home and Dark Continents overseas. Natives were seen as a overseas equivalent of the “poor in Britain” (inferior).
The Enlightenments notions of racial superiority and inferiority of the British Empire has been viewed by contemporaries and by historians as an enterprise that was built and maintained on the basis of the collective, institutionalized and politicized ranking of races. → Notion of British Empire was based solely and completely on hierarchy of race. Britons envisioned their empire and its empirical society as an essential hierarchical organism.
When the English first encountered the native peoples of North America, they did not see them collectively as a race of inferior savages, the British viewed them as fellow human beings. The English saw that these foreign civilizations had a hierarchical order, too, and regarded them in the same manner. These two essentially hierarchical societies were seen as coexisting, not in relationship of (English) superiority and (North-American) inferiority.
The English saw the native Americans as social equals rather than as social inferiors. Their prime grid of analysis was individual status rather than collective race.
Social colour of skin in contemplating the extra-metropolitan world, remained important for the English and for the British long after has been generally supposed they ceased to matter.
The Enlightenment brought a new way of looking at races and colors, but it did not subvert the pre-racial way of seeing “the Other”.
→ Skin color was less important than class and race but also mattered.
Two visions were present in Britain: the one based on race (“The British are racially superior to everyone, especially to the Black.”) and the one based on status/class. Sometimes the two clashed. The theory and practice of social hierarchy, however, has served to eradicate the differences, and to homogenize the heterogeneities, of empire.
In the peak of empire these hierarchical structures and constructs, impulses and images, imaginings and ideologies, based on status rather than race were never wholly pervasive or persuasive. They were often founded on serious misunderstandings of imperial society whether in the metropolis if the periphery.
Session 8: Race II
Re-Inventing Japan. Chapter 5
This chapter is on 'race'. Race in the modern sense was first written by Georges Louis Comte de Buffon. It was in his work that nature had a history, in the sense that nature was animated by a sense of time. Buffon claimed that race was the result of historical experiences which had slowly created diversity within an original single human stock. Buffon's concept of race was connected ot humankind as a single, global species (crucial connection). In other words, no races are superior to others in the Darwinian sense.
Notions of race can be seen as efforts to reduce the bewildering variety of humans into manageable categories. This of course happened when explorers discovered that humans were spread all over the globe, each having their own unique culture. Modern racism can be seen as: 'behavior, ideas, and structures which seek to exclude individuals or groups, on the grounds of beliefs about their racial origins, from rights to which they would otherwise be entitled. In so doing, it also reinforces the imagined bonds which draw 'the included' into the community of the nation-state.' The evolution of the ideas of race and racism coincides with the idea of human rights and citizenship.
''Inside'' and ''Outside'' in Early Modern Japan
Paragraph discusses the absent of the notion of race or racism in early Japan due to the isolation of Japan from the outside world. In other words, the idea was never introduced. However, Japanese society had an 'inside' and an 'outside'. Race was defined as singlar in Japan as it considered itself ethnically pure. It is interesting to note that there were ethnically mixed children from Dutch traders, but these were regarded as Japanese. An exclusion or inclusion in social order did exist in relation to the state and submission to the state, but not on racial grounds. Distinctions were also made in dress and clothing. The pre-Meiji Japanese society was thus inherently unequal as a social order where everyone theoretically had a place. Power lay in the center of the state and diminished outwards (like Ainu and the Ryky Islands).
Race in modern Japan
Transformation of Japanese society after the Meiji Restoration redefined patterns of exclusion and inclusion in two fundamental ways:
Western notions of citizenship were introduced in a narrow and diluted form. All were to be considered 'Japanese', but there was no equality or rights. The image of the family is used to explain this division: all are part of the same family but each person has a different role with different rights.
Importation of notions of race (1860s and 70s) and Volk or ethnic group (1880s). A important person to introduce these notions was Fukuzawa Yukichi who translated European maps that for example distinguished Africans as black and Asians as yellow. Moreover, these ideas moved over two axis: geographical space and time. Space meaning blood bonds, common culture, language and traditions. Time meaning 'progress' or 'civilization' ('we' are further then 'they'). The latter often called Social Darwinism.
The progress in ethnic groups was popular in Japan and used to create a national identity. Consequently, some groups, like the Ainu, were seen as backwards. The ideas of race, ethnicity and civilization expanded further in Japan as they colonized other area's, like Taiwan (1895). The idea of progress on the path of civilization of humankind became more popular as Japan colonized more area's. It is worth noting that Japanese preferred the idea of nation or Volk over race. This emphasized the common language and culture over physical appearance. This was because of Japan was an exception in a Western-dominated world where most texts on the subject described the white man as the superior race.
Images of Racial Purity & Images of Racial Hybridity
The expressions of Japanese superiority appeared as Japan's economic and military might increased. This happened in the years leading up to and during the Second World War. Oguma Eiji argues that there are two contradictory approaches to the exaltation of the Japanese ethnos:
Japan as a racially homogeneous group descended from a common blood line. This led to a belief of a 'divine mission' in Asia for Japan as the superior ethnos.
The approach that Japanese were of mixed racial origins and imaged this hybridity as source of national strength and power. This approach was research by historian Kita Sadakichi in a study (1929). Kita concluded that Japan was originally inhabited by a variety of races. These races were molded into a single ethnicity. The image of national family still existed on a metaphorical rather than biological level. The strength of Japanese thus lied in their racial mix and the ability to shape and mold this into one political and cultural community, headed by the imperial family. In other words, a Darwinian struggle had taken place between the cultures that lead to the single Japanese culture today, therefore being the strongest and superior culture. The Japanese 'melting-pot' theory meshed well with colonial assimilation policies during WWII.
A problematic text that comprises both approach is the Kokutai no hongi (Principles of the National Entity) published in 1937 for schools and colleges. It was called the Japanese ideological equivalent text of Mein Kampf. This book offers the quintessential statement on the uniqueness and superiority of the Japanese nation. Never being expressed in terms of biological race, but always in terms of spiritualy, morality, emotion and loyality. I tis heavy on poetry and Shinto mythology. Its main claim is its global superiority rests on their unselfish ability to assimilate foreign influences.
The Wartime Critique of Race
Debates on race and ethnicity peaked in Japan during the Pacific War. German Nazi ideology did not attract a large following in Japan (there were some supporters). Nazi racial theories conflicted with assimilation policies of the colonial governments, like in Korea. Two leading representatives of wartime rhetoric of race were Shinmei Masamichi and Kada Tetsuji. Both of them studied in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s and had similar ideas on race, ethnicity and nationalism. They also rejected Nazi racial theory. Physical racial differences could not determine cultural superiority or inferiority, according to Shinmei and Kada. Although they rejected race, they strongly proposed the idea of the nation-state or ethnic group. Nations were naturally dynamic and expanding entities, either by population growth or territorial expansion.
The dominant nation and culture would thus absorb weaker nations. Both scholars aruged that nations have 'blood-lines' that predate the modern state and were present in tribal times, which they called 'basic societies'.
Postwar Reinterpretions
After WWII and especially during the 1950s and 1960s Japanese military imperialism was viewed and interpreted as a reaction against modernity. The author argues that it is worth noting that Shinmei and Kada argued against scientific racism. Moreover, the idea that the Japanese were the product of a prehistorical intermingling of diverse people is now accepted as being correct. Some of their assumptions however are also problematic. Their aim of claiming Japan's place as the universal center was false and problematic. As in reality during WWII in the colonies racism took place and there was no absorption of other people. Japan's wartime history has continued to haunt debates about nations and identity in postwar Japan. In addition, little was written about Japanese problems of racism and issues of human inequality. Since the 1980s this has slowly changed. The main problem is not whether the logic of exclusion and belonging, superiority and inferiority is based on notions of biology, progress or culture. Rather, it is the way in which language is developed and shaped to carve the world up in 'us' and 'them', and the way that hose vocabularies become the bearers of unexamined images.
Mark. Contingent Closeness
Asia for the Asians: the Japanese empire expanded aggressively and violently into Asia, supplementing its previous holdings Taiwan, Korea and Micronesia with a host of new additions.
→ Primary objective was to obtain resources and territory, but a Japan's spokesman claimed that the aim was to 'liberate Asia' from the oppression, exploitation and racial discrimination of Western Imperialism, replacing it with a principle of Asian Brotherhood under Japanese leadership.
Northeast Asians greeted Japan's wartime propaganda with skepticism (where no colonies), while Southeast Asia welcomed the Japanese with open arms (because of the oppression by Japan's Western enemies).
However, the Japanese also revealed there colonial attitude and exploitative practices that not only rivaled, but also outdid those of the Westerners they replaced. The Japanese remain notorious for their barbaric, racist and sexist recruitment and treatment of Southeast Asians (and likewise Northeast Asians) as corvée laborers, auxiliary soldiers and comfort women. But also culture (customs), religion (Islam, Hinduism and Theravada Buddhism vs. Shintoism, Bushido and Confucianism), language (ignorance of one anothers' language) and history (absence of shared history) prefigured the 2 sides of friction: it was impossible to create any real sense of “Asian Brotherhood”. It created a large gap between Asia and Japan.
Another sense of cultural and racial distance between the Japanese and Southeast Asian have been further nurtured by the positioning of Southeast Asia. Along the geographical fringes of a Japanese empire in which social status was to some degree dictated by ones geographical position (the sense of Inner and Outer).
The Japanese wartime behavior is a distinct Japanese sense of distance between “us” and “them”. Not only between the Japanese and the non-Japanese, but also among the Japanese. Japan's imperial social system could be best understood as a hierarchy ordered according to one's 'degree of proximity' to the emperor, who represented the “ultimate value”. According to Maruyama, this presented a continuity of a premodern, feudal psychology of identification. The emperor was the political and religious leader, so everyone had to “obey” him. Being close to the emperor made the Japanese superior.
Maruyama's influential conceptualizations focused primarily on inter-Japanese political relations, but he also implied their explanatory power regarding “inhuman” wartime Japanese behavior and attitudes towards “outsiders” in broader geographical, cultural, and racist terms as well. Concentric circles can be used to visualize this, the further away form Japan/Tokyo, the lower the imperial status.
The “comfort women” comprised an empire-wide system of sexual slavery, but also here was a social hierarchy. The Japanese Comfort Women in China and Southeast Asia were located on the top of the hierarchy, they were the most expensive and best-treated. The Koreans and Taiwanese were lower in the hierarchy, they were subjected to worse conditions. At the bottom were the local Chinese women, least expansive and subjected to terrible conditions.
Classification scheme of fellow Japanese according to racial preference:
Japanese who favored white women were “White-Japanese”
Japanese who favored Indonesians were “Black-Japanese”
The Japanese limited to a exclusively small number of geishas and comfort women from Japan were the “Japanese-Japanese”.
Koreans were seen as a kind of surrogate to the Japanese, inferior to those at the core but constructed as Nationals in relation to those “outside”. Policies of forced Japanization were remembered by Koreans as cultural genocide, but by the Japanese perceived as a generous acknowledgment of Koreans as “fellow Japanese”.
Unforgiving and unyielding social distinctions, not only between races, but even among those of the same imperial race, rigidly limiting social mobility and fearsome enough to drive even a women of the “dominant race” to the desperation of a long sea journey at the height of pregnancy (example of the reading) → a “feudal” social and cultural structure.
Global ideological trend in the late 19th and early 20th century: Imperial metropoles defined the hegemonic core value of “progress” in terms of a rejection of “feudalistic” modes of thinking and social organization in favor of liberalism, equality, democracy and the separation of Church and State (meritocracy). However, for the modern colonial empires and colonial structures of the same period, did not simply retain “feudal elements” but reinforced, reshaped and reinvented them to fit a modern agenda of domination. Mostly because of importing foreign ideas (such as British Capitalism in India) the moving forward could begin.
The invention of Race enabled the Europeans to maintain and in fact elaborate a colonial regime based on “birthright” even as they proclaimed that such “feudal thinking” had been transcended by the revolutionary bourgeois liberal values of liberty, equality and fraternity back home (Social Darwinism). It was natural that the world's weaker and backward uncivilized races should be perpetually presided over by the stronger ones. The Orient was seen as the place of eternal “backwardness” and historical behindness, its forward motion only was made possible through Western Invention.
Birth-based hierarchical structures of imperial status arose to systematically block colonial native access to metropolitan privileges were not limited to biological racial constructs alone. The location of one's birth alone came to represent an immense constraint upon one's imperial prospects.
Japan's renowned isolation was above all isolation from Europe and the Europeans. When the world of competing empires (in the 19th century) was at the height of powers and their ruthlessness, Japan's leaders hardly needed much help from local traditions to apprehend international relations in the stark terms of “conquer or be conquered”. Meiji Japan picked up these new discourses of imperial power legitimation and projection with remarkable speed.
Global too in this period of high imperialism were trends of closer connections between metropolitan and colonial societies (polishing of racial boundaries between metropolitans and “natives”), intensified exploitation of the colonies, and heightened unrest and ambition among the colonized (Koreans that resisted the Japanese annexation were treated brutally). It was the persistence of feudalism or simply the underdevelopment of modern, Western-style notions of a common humanity, universal morality and universal law, that made it possible that the Japanese were so brutal and barbaric.
Japanese behavior in the Sino-Japanese War might be most usefully compared not with that seen in the Western European theater of WWII (showdown of racial equals), but rather to that in other conflicts whose heightened brutality was shaped by an eminently colonial notion of racial superiority. An important role in Japan is played by positioning in a global system of imperial nation-states, not only for resources, but also for the loyalties of “subject-peoples”.
Regional as well as global power balances are important in the making of Japanese racism. It it striking to see that the entire series of Japanese atrocities are precisely against those with whom they shared “ideographic traditions” and a a clear “genetic relationship”. There was a little relation between the cultural, historical, geographical, and racial “distance” that presumably separated Southeast Asians from Japanese, and the relative sense of brotherhood experienced by members of the two sides.
The central role in making racial ideologies is not played by cultural or biological factors, but above all by political, social and relational factors. A sense of proximity and closeness are very important.
Session 9: Missionaries and their missions
Comaroff. Images of Empire
This study examines 19th-century South Africa, where settlers, administrators and evangelists contested the terms of European domination. It does so through the “gaze” of Protestant missionaries
John Philip was a Superintendent of the London Missionary Society at the Cape, who stepped up in his controversial campaign for the right of “Colored people” proposing to sell their labor in a free market. Using the body as a metaphor, he argued: If one member of the state suffers, than all the members suffer. If the colored were freed, the colonists and their families would be converted into useful farmers, instead of merely idle tyrants. The colonizers weren't used to being told that they would become a useful agrarian bourgeoisie if they only would led their slaves cultivate in freedom, so they opposed his views.
The Images of Colonialism
The image of colonialism as a coherent, monolithic process seems, at last, to be wearing thin. This piece is concerned with the tensions of empire and with the contradictions of colonialism.
Colonialism, as an object of historical anthropology, has reached a moment of new reckoning.
The writer focuses on the nonconformist missionaries to the Griqua and Tsawana. The shaping of these historical figures reveals much about the contradictions of colonialism.
The evangelists of the London Missionary Society and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society came from the interstices of a class structure undergoing reconstruction. Many of them were caught uneasily between a displaced peasantry, an expanding proletariat, and the lower reaches of the rising British bourgeoisie. On the colonial stage itself, they were a dominated fraction of the dominant class. The missionaries saw themselves as “friends and protectors of the natives”.
The nonconformist missionaries (Protestant) saw themselves not merely as heroic figures in the creation of a new Empire of the Spirit. The nonconformist missionaries also saw themselves as the conscience of British Colonialism, this self-appointed stance that was later to legitimize their occasional forays into colonial politics (e.g. they debated on how the natives should be ruled).
The Origins of the colonial mission in South Africa: Britain 1810-40
From 1810 on Industrial revolution had cut deep into the physical, social and cultural terrain of Britain. The machine was the dominant metaphor of the age. But also the essence of the industrial revolution lay in the transformation of relations of production and relations among classes. The revolution hinged in the reconstruction of the division labor and, with it, the social order at large.
The industrial revolution has been portrayed as the triumph of a “conquering bourgeoisie”. However, it would be simplifying matters to describe the emerging social structure purely in terms of two classes locked in mortal embrace.
Dodd gives account of social and economic divisions in England, asserting that there existed 8 classes. Four of them were privileged (royalty; nobility; capitalists; and gentlemen of trade, the professions and the clergy). They made the law and profited from the toils of others. The other four composed the non privileged mass (skilled laborers; common laborers; honorable paupers; and the dishonorable poor). Dodd made the observation that there were no connections between and inside the two groups of classes, and that the humbler clergy were occupied as the lowest in the privileged ranks (least secure reaches). Move up the ladder in the class structure was possible, but you would find yourself as a not secure member of a more elevated class, neither rich or poor. The low churchmen that had climbed up the ladder as simple peasants lacking wealth or distinction.
The army of the nonconformist missionaries to South Africa emerged in the Industrial Revolution. That they came from here (the ideological core yet the social margins of bourgeois Britain) was not only to affect their place in colonial society and its politics. It was also to shape the moral terms in which they were to deal both with other Europeans and with the “savage” on the frontiers of empire.
The individual and civilized society
The triumph of the bourgeoisie in the age of revolution was most visibly expressed in the dominant world view of early capitalism (individualists, private property, science and technology. Poverty is failure). → There was critique on these notions.
The rise of Capitalism entailed the inculcation of a set of signs and images into the collective consciousness of Britain. The most far-reaching among these signs and images was the essence of the person. The self was viewed as a divided entity. People were seen less as products of a social context than as autonomous beings. The social values of bourgeois ideology could be internalized as qualities of individual personality. This image of the person was expressed in the doctrine of self-improvement: the notion that, through methodical behavior and the avoidance of indulgence, one might better oneself. For men this would be an upgrade to upward mobility. Reading was a good example of this. It did not only expand the mind, it also engaged the self in a properly profound manner. The social impact of the printed world was closely tied to the ascendancy of the reflective, inner-directed self.
Even more crucial for the development of capitalism was the notion that individuals could separate from the rest of their being, and sell a part of themselves: their capacity to work.
Time and money became important for dividing the self, detaching work-time from leisure time etc.
Protestantism envisaged the human career as a cumulative moral voyage, unrelieved by the possibility of atonement or absolution. The person laid up treasures in heaven in the same way as he/she did on earth. According to Warner/Wesley: “a diversity of ranks” was taken to be perfectly natural and eternal. The Nonconformist missions of the missionaries were to export these images of self-hood and society, transposing them from factory and foundry, mine an mill, pithead and pulpit onto African soil.
The city and the countryside
Three Estates:
The Feudal Establishment: lord and servant were bound in a web of mutual obligation
Yeomanry: independent peasant who produced for the market, employing wage-labor and shared the outlook and interests of gentleman and merchants rather than of landless laborers.
Mass of poor: honest small-holder engaged in both agriculture and domestic industry.
The transformation of the countryside was associated with the fall of the yeomanry. Many people migrated to the industrialized cities. This passing was typically ascribed to the enclosure and the agrarian revolution that preceded industrialization. This transformation of the landscape shows the contradiction between the new bourgeoisie and the working class.
The industrial revolution had a contradictory impact on contemporary images of the relationship between country and city. The chasm dividing them was seen to grow even wider. The contrast between metropolis and meadow became a key concept in British historical consciousness. Also, the industrial revolution blurred the ecological distinction between country and city. As the ecological and social separation between city and country dissolved under the impact of industrial capitalism, the resulting dislocation was acutely felt throughout Britain.
The Empire of God
The time of the Industrial Revolution was a secularizing age in which the suzerainty or power of religion was in decline. Religion and Politics were first very connected, the parish church was the nub of political and social life for most Britons. With the profound economic turmoil of the mid-16th century, however, all of Europe witnessed a spiritual crisis and a bitter struggle for control over religious life. This led to the birth of Congregationalism:a form of church governance based on the local congregation, a movement that would spread quickly among the lower classes of society.
The breakdown of the unity and authority of Anglicanism was a critical moment, the Kingdom and God were separated and would never again exist as one. Spiritual sovereignty had lost its ineffability. Christianity had become a topic of debate and struggle, and the growing disunity of the church was an element in this. It lost its hegemony and it was transformed by the forces that drove the age of revolution. Recreate the Kingdom of God in the fringes of the European World:
Abolition of slave trade in 1807.
The collapse of the “Old British Empire” (colonial expansion became distasteful to the English)
As time past the Kingdom of God would pave a way for the Empire of Britain, a process in which some missionaries were to play a lively part. The Kingdom of God was to built on a moral economy of Christian commerce and manufacture, methodical self-construction and reason, private property and the practical arts of civilized life. Savage society would be made into an independent peasantry, much like the late British yeomanry.
The Social Roots of the Nonconformist Missionaries
Nonconformist Missionaries were men who had risen from laboring, peasant and artisan backgrounds to the lower end of the bourgeoisie, often via the church. Most of the missionaries were different from each other, some had schooling, some didn't. The missionary movement in Britain cannot be separated from the rise of the lower middle class, because here the most evangelists came from.
Missionaries in the social history because:
Reconstruction of class divisions
The ascendancy of a new moral economy
The social, ecological and aesthetic despoliation of the countryside
The secularization of the age.
Robert Moffat (life typical for the first generation of nonconformist evangelists): The countryside of Ormiston started to merge with the town, and the peasantry became an agrarian and industrial work force. He grew up in a strict Calvinist family, and he didn't have any schooling. At the age of 14 he met a group of Methodists (Congregationalist) in Cheshire, with views and style of worship that attracted him. His path led to the LMS,ordination and a long stay among the Tswana.
David Livingstone (bit the same as Moffat): Grew up in the fissures of the emerging class structure. The Livingstones devoted themselves energetically to education and self-improvement, just like the Moffats. When David's father moved from the established church to the independent Hamilton church, David Livingstone took a pamphlet on medical mission in China home. David went to study medicine in Glasgow, and got into the LMS. 16 of the 17 LMS missionaries who began to work among the Southern Tswana were persons caught between rich and poor, either indeterminate in their class affiliation or struggling to cross the invisible boundary into the bourgeoisie. Many of the missionaries, like Moffat and Livingstone, were from displaced rural families. For all of them, the church conferred respectability and a measure of security in their social position.
Colonialism in Conflict: The Southern African Frontier
When the Missionaries arrived in South Africa, the Cape of Good Hope was already a field of tension. The terrain sported four sets of characters:
His Majesty's administrators and officers, most of them gentlemen of high birth/rank. (State Colonialism)
British Settlers, largely respectable middle-class burghers of Cape Town and farmers in the colony.
Boers (farmers), of Dutch, German, and French descent who were regarded as “rude”. (Settler Colonialism)
Missionaries. (Civilizing Colonialism).
Few qualifications are to be made. When one is associated with a specific set of characters, it did not follow that everyone on the colonial stage would act according to type. Second, while the 3 colonialisms were quite discrete, evangelists often underplayed the differences between themselves and administrators, stressing their mutual involvement in the imperial project. Third, the content of the different colonialisms was to be transformed by subcontinental and global forces.
State Colonialism
The colonial government has as its first priority to oversee the territory. Pax Brittanica: the pacification of “tribes” in an ever widening radius outward from the Cape of Good Hope. This was to be achieved by trade and by making alliances with native chiefs.
The Britons did not concern itself with civilization of indigenous, their improvement would follow naturally from trade and contact with whites. Also, the state did not impose any rules on the inland peoples. Besides, the state wanted to Protect the Aborigines. State colonialism was to change over time. It would involve the imposition of taxes, the limitation of chiefly authority and many other forms of regulation.
Settler Colonialism
The Boer model was represented by the missionaries in starkly negative terms. Boers were seen by them as half-savages, and therefore the settler colonialism was seen to be founded on brute coercion and domination by force. This model was revealed most clearly in the Great Trek, when the settlers, loudly protesting abolition, left the Colony for the inferior. It did not only strike a blow for Boer independence, it also established a new order of relations between these Europeans and the peoples of the inferior.
Civilizing Colonialism
The Christians believed that their designs for the transformation of indigenous life to be more positively comprehensive than any other. This form of colonialism wanted to cultivate the African desert and its inhabitants by planting seeds of bourgeois individualism, private property and commerce, rational minds and of course the devotion to God.
The evangelists set out to:
Create a theater of the everyday, demonstrating benefits of methodical routine and good personal habits.
Banish “superstition in favor of rational technique and Christian belief
Reduce the landscape from chaotic mass of crude dirty huts to an ordered array of bounded residences.
The division of labor → men are hardworking farmers and the women were “indoors”
Teaching the families to produce for the market.
Teaching the Africans to become self-reflective and self-disciplined.
The Missionaries didn't want to interfere in “tribal” government and politics. However, seeking “religious” freedom and fighting “superstition” they tried to drive a wedge between the temporal and ritual aspects of the chief-ship → conflicts with the chiefs.
Moffat: If only the missions were careful to rebuild African life in all its aspects, “civilizations would advance as the natural affects, and Christianity operate as the proximate cause of the happy change”. Moffat also took pains into point out that his entire career was given over to leading the Tswana along the high road to refinement, at the apex of which lay European Civil Society. Livingstone echoed this point, mentioning that the he was working toward the elevation of man in Africa.
The Three models taken together owed much to the missionaries' self-appointed role as the conscience of the colonizer. Each was a moral refraction of bourgeois ideology, a measure of the ethics of the imperial impulse (Settler Model of the Boers). But this ideology also permeated the churchman's view of state colonialism. The appointed role of government was not merely to administer the territory and population of the colony. It was also the creation of a space, a “body of corporate nations” under Pax Brittanica. While some of the missionaries did not admire the British aristocracy, they did not question the ruling classes to govern.
The Evangelists saw their own position between ruler and settler. The upper-class gentlemen of His Majesty's administration might govern by right of their nobility and worldly authority, and the lowly Boers might dominate by brute force. But the Missionaries were there to implant a reign of civility, a state of colonization more pervasive and powerful than the colonial state, and more enduring that the rancher republicanism of the Boers. The missionaries were the least potent whites in this colonial theater. They lacked social and material resources, and strength of the Boers; just as they were subject to the authority of the Cape Government.
The Boers were seen as barbarians/half-savages, but they weren't. Also the implications that they were kidnapping black slaves and attacking various chiefdoms in pursuit of stock and prisoners is not true. Because of the established sovereign jurisdiction (because of Great Trek). In return for protection, peace, and the right to live within the settlers territories, these peoples had to do military service and pay taxes in cash or labor.
From Models to Struggles
The “Dutchmen” had a great aversion to missionaries, because they had the idea that “we” would wish to furnish the natives with fire-arms. Guns had taken on enormous significance for both the blacks (icon of the potency of European ways) and the Boers (an affirmation of the exclusive control over force). Livingstone was presumed by his enemies to be most guilty of gun running. He denied, and said that is was Boers traders who sere selling firearms to the chiefs. The strife over the supply of firearms to the Tswana was as much a symbolic as a material issue. The deep interior had become a combat zone, alike political and ideological, in which the various protagonists were battling to lay down the terms on which black South Africa was to be ruled.
The involvement of the Evangelists betokened 2 things:
Because the churchman were handing weapons to the Tswana, they were acknowledging them as Homo Sapiens. There seems to have been little doubt among Boers that the evangelists stood for a competing colonialism, a colonialism that promised resistance and rebellion. Thus, for instance, one community went so far as to write into its constitution that members had to "take a solemn oath to have no connection with the London Missionary Society.
The opposition to, and effort to free themselves from, state colonialism.
Session 10: Gender, nation, self and other
Reinventing-Japan. Chapter 6
On Japanese debates on national identity the key word ‘gender’ is missing. This is not because the issue was not discussed, but rather that images of gender were rarely addressed in relation to the idea of nationhood. Yet gender is always present, if only because of the central place of the family in Japanese national symbolism. The chapter focuses on the 1930’s onwards, but also briefly discusses earlier periods.
The state is often gendered male, and the nation female – the mother country. States are related to power and dominant male actors, while nation is related to a nurturing image – like Mother Russia. This distinction also applies to Japan, but not entirely. Women were excluded from citizenship until after the end of the Pacific War and still till today the role of women is different.
The femininity of the nation is more complex in Japan since the symbol of nationhood and the soul of Japan was the bushid – way of the warrior. However, the bushid is not only male. Women could also participate in the bushid and they could also be Samurai.
In the late 19th and early 20th century Europeans and Americans depicted two distinct ‘Japans’:
Female Japan: submissive, delicate, exotic. This was presented in positive terms. Femininity was further associated with the home, and the home with stability and continuity.
Male Japan: modernizing, militaristic and menacing. The Japan that was seen as dangerous. This representation of Japan was reinforced by the Meiji Restoration government’s policies. The public domain was considered to be masculine.
Although the 1930’s included women into the workforce and they were exhorted to go out into society. After the Second World War the occupation forces transformed the legal position of women and of family in Japan. Even though women were to participate fully in political life and attained equal rights, the differences in gender role continue to haunt constructions of ‘Japaneseness’ in the postwar era.
Consuming the Female: The Household and National Identity
In the 18th century notions of ‘male’ and ‘female’ in Japanese thought were tied to status within the family, ie. The ie was family with vertical relationships between parents and children; where power of the male household head was paramount, and the family name was more important than blood ties. In practice, the divorce rates were higher than in the West and women in rural areas admitted to having casual sexual relationships with different men.
The Emperor of Japan is imagined as having two bodies: one male and the other female. This is radically different from the Medieval European tradition of duality of the King: one material body that dies and one political body that survives on eternally and is inherited by the successor. In Japan the fact that the Emperor, as head of state, also enabled the family state itself to become a place where the realities of gender differences were obliterated. National identity thus absorbed gender, racial and cultural differences.
Critiques of the Family State
The point of view of the family state was also criticized, mostly by feminists. Japanese feminism in the early 20th century spanned a wide range of political positions. Practical goals included women’s suffrage, improvement of the social status of married women and quality of social welfare for mothers and children. Women’s participating in the war effort was also put forward by feminists. However, opposition to patriarchal power of the family was considered critique of the state and its constructions of nationhood.
Modern Japan as Male: Nihonjinron
The concept of differing relationships between gender and social time is reflected in many representation of Japan in postwar media. Projection of ‘Japaneseness’ was profoundly biased in major texts on Nihonjinron (‘theories of the Japanese’). Examples of studies on Nihonjinron are Nakane Chie’s study Tate shake no ningen kankei (Human Relationships in a Vertical Society) and Doi Takeo’s Amae no kz (the Anatomy of Dependence).
Modern Japan as Female: Oshin
At the peak of influence of the social images of Nihonjinron during the 1980s a shift in the gendering of popular representations of the nation began to be visible. The most influential vision of Japan as female was the drama series Oshin. The series were also popular in China, Hong Kong, United States, Belgium and even Iran. The series revolve around the matriarch of a family in Western Japan called Oshin, who is a representation of Japan. Oshin was born in 1901 and the series follows her life through the decades of the 20th century. The series takes the viewers on a geographical and historical journey. The gender of Oshin provides the series with a certain perspective of history that is pacifist and liberal. Japan is presented as peace-loving and suffering at times. This perspective or view of history was largely different from the ‘normal’ historical view. It empathized different parts of Japan’s history.
Gender, Family and Identity
Constructions of national identity almost always embody explicit or implicit images of gender. Notions of femininity and masculinity have been combined in various ways to create visions of the nation which suited particular historical and political contexts. This meant that it could either absorb gender differences or create differences. Japan as modernizing economy was depicted male, while Japan as flexible was depicted female.
The rhetoric of nationhood proved major challenges to feminists who tried to create space for different social understandings and practices. This was especially the case in postwar Japan. Only recently has research, for example into ‘comfort women’ during WWII, slowly opened up political space to debate gender in historical sense in Japan.
Stoler. Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers
'Metissage' was the interracial unions and the sorts of progeny to which it gave rise → “indos”, “métis” and “mixed-bloods”. For Example Indonesians with European blood. French Indochina was a colony of commerce, occupied by the military in 1860, and settled by Colons in 1870 with a Métis population of not more than a several 100. The Netherlands Indies had been settled since 1600, and had a population of mixed-descent or borne in the Indies in the Tens of Thousands in 1900.
→ French Colonialism is often defined by its assimilation policy and “acceptance of racial equality”, whereas the Netherlands Indies were less racial equal.
Méttisage was a focal point of political, legal and social debate, conceived as a dangerous source of subversion, a threat to white prestige. Méttisage represented not only the dangers of foreign enemies at national borders, but also “interior frontiers”. This means that there is an enclosure, but also with a sense of internal distinctions within a territory.
In both Indochina and the Netherlands Indies the Métis were rejected as a legal distinct category. The Métis/Indo problem produced a discourse in which facile theories of racial hierarchy were rejected, while confirming the European superiority at the same time. Indonesian and Vietnamese nationalist movements arose, and therefore the European nationalist rhetoric can be part of the nationalist resistance in the colonies.
French juridical tracts wanted to make the Métis a separate legal category, and the political effects of doing so were forged in the tense environment in which Vietnamese nationalists were making their opposition most strongly felt. However, they never predominantly led the anti-colonial challenges.
The French government started projects, through Education and Upbringing, to let the sense of national identity flow from the metropolitan core to the periphery. Patriotic feelings on the national level had to be learned. However, the education, moral instruction and language did not help the “frenchification” of France and its colonies.
The convergence of domestic and colonial social reform in the Netherlands was somewhat different, marked by 2 socio-political projects: Middle-class preoccupation with the childrearing practices of Dutch working-class families, and with a more general “civilizing offensive” that focused on moral “uplift” in both locales. Upbringing (marked as danger for the state) and education brought metropolitan class and imperial visions together in new sorts of ways.
So, who can be considered as “Truly” French or Dutch? In the Netherlands Indies and Indochina, it was cultural milieu, both Upbringing and Education, that were seen to demarcate which Métis children would turn into revolutionaries, patricides, loyal subjects or full-fledged citizens of the nation-state. Métis education was about retaining colonial boundaries and regenerating the nation.
The decision that a Métis should be granted citizenship on or subject status could not be made on race alone, while all Métis shared some degree of European descent.
→ How then to mark out the candidates for exclusion from the national community while retaining the possibility that some individuals would be granted the rights of inclusion because French and Dutch "blood prevailed in their veins?" This is what the writer wants to clarify with a few examples.
On the issue of Métissage: class distinctions, gender prescriptions, cultural knowledge and racial membership simultaneously invoked and strategically filled with different meaning of varied projects.
Cultural Competence and Metissage
19 year old Métis assaulted a German naval mechanic and got 6 months prison. The case was easily dismissed, because he was a Métis, a son of a French naval employee. The Governor-General invoked the double meaning of the son, and suggesting the dubious nature of his cultural affinities. The Father affirmed the Frenchness of the son by just calling him Lucien, without the Vietnamese names. The Haiphong Tribunal Court only named the boy Nguyen van Thinh, and therefore seeing the kid as Vietnamese only.
The father protested that the court only saw him as a “vulgaire annamite”, that the son was raised in a French patriotic milieu. The issue, however, was mostly based on if Nguyen van Thinh dit Lucien could be really considered culturally and politically French.
There was a lot of sentiment between father and son. The father had not only recognized his son, but it went so far to plead the case of a boy who had virtually none of the exterior qualities (skin tone, language) and none of the interior attributes of being French at all.
On Metis Children and the Question of Abandonment
The formulation of the “Métis Question” at the turn of the century as a problem of abandonment, of children culturally on the loose, sexually abused, economically impoverished, and politically dangerous. Abandonment of Métis children, in the colonial context, was not a biological, but a social death. A loss to European Society, forced banishment from the European culture and milieu in which these Métis children could potentially thrive. Exposure focused on the native milieu.
Abandonment in the colonial context has specific race, class and gender coordinates and it primarily refers to the abandonment of Métis children by European men.
The child was abandoned, whether or not she was remained cared for by the mother, because the child was left by the Annamite mother and the European father had left.
It could also be the other way around, where mothers had to leave their children to the superior environment if state institutions. The children would be shaped into very special colonial citizens.
There are loads of reports were girls were forced into prostitution by “concubin” (native men who were subsequent lovers of the girls' native mothers) → “traffic in filles francaises” (Abandoned Métisse daughters). This concubinage happened a lot. In French Indochina there were a lot of warnings on this issue. The Gendered and Racist assumptions on which they were based, were not about to disappear by government fiat alone. Abandoned métis children not only represented the sexual excesses and indiscretions of European men, but signified the "degenerate" dangers of the "absence of paternal discipline", of a world in which mothers took charge
Fraudulent Recognitions and other Dangers of Mettisage
The question whether Métis should be classified as a distinct legal category subject to special education, or so thoroughly assimilated into French Culture that they would pose no threat.
In the Netherlands Indies there was a form no form of segregation, nor distinguishing, and that was the humane and politically safe course to pursue. The French Government was urged to pick up some Dutch features:
Abandoned Métis were assigned European status until proof of filiation was made
Private Organizations in each legal grouping be charged with poor relief, rather than the government
European standing not be confined to those with the proper “dosage of blood” alone.
Concubinage and poor education could be responded to European pauperism was also attributed to a more unsettling problem: a surreptitious penetration of Inlanders into legal category of European.
Fraudulent Recognition: Children who ambiguously or falsely crossed the cultural and racial divide, on a nefarious class of European men who were willing to facilitate the efforts of native mothers who sought such arrangements. Colonial officials expressed a profound fear that the Europeanness of Métis children could never be assured, despite a rhetoric affirming that education and upbringing were transforming processes.
Making the Métis a legal category was rejected explicitly on political grounds → French jurists taught that would infect the colonies with a destructive virus. From 1928 on all people born on the French soil of Indochina could obtain Frenchness if the child's physical features or race was French and a “moral certainty” derived form the fact that the child has a French name, lived in a European milieu and was considered by all as being of French descent.
→ So, French Citizenship was not for all Métis, it was heavily restricted by an “interior frontier”.
The Cultural Frontiers of the National Community
The Europeans born and bred in the colonies, The ones who stayed, lived in surroundings which stripped them of the pure European sensibilities. There emerges a new tension between culture and race; as race dropped out of certain legal discriminations, it re-emerged, marked out by specific cultural criteria → Cultural Racism, replacing the physiological distinctions on which earlier racisms had so strongly relied.
Session 11: Conclusions and legacies
Van Leeuwen. Wreker Van Zijn Indische Grootouders
How Geert Wilders got Blond Hair
In June 2009, throughout all of Europe, it was reported that Geert Wilders introduced plans to permanently deport European Muslims if they cause any problems. All over the world Wilders casts off restraints when he brings up his usual theme of the “Impending Islamization of the free West”. Whereas political scientists claim that he goes beyond ordinary right-wing extremists, that his proposals go disturbingly far beyond the limits of constitutional law, Wilder's has claimed himself a “Dutch Freedom Fighter”. The author of this article aims to give a context in which the rhetoric and figure of Wilders might be located, going beyond prejudices of his Limburg origins and blond hair.
In an article in Trouw, Roel de Neve quoted that Geert Wilders is of Indonesian origin. This story is interesting to look further into. What does his hidden “cultural” “Indo-ness”imply? It can be thought of as something that manifested itself in his political genealogy. Maybe his rhetoric is formed by a post-colonial (family) history. When Wilders was asked about his Indonesian roots, he gave a very incoherent story in an attempt to hide it.
Territorial issues and their potential demographic consequence play a central role in Wilders’ political career. His geopolitical obsessions were clearly visible with his break with the VVD, as they disagreed on Turkey's accession to the EU. In Wilder's perspective, Turkey could not join the EU, because a “Muslim country” would be incompatible with European culture. Ever since then, Wilders has seemed to reduce politics to questions of border controls, the census, and the displacement of people in general. This showcases the displacedness issue of his hidden Indisch' family history. During and after WWII these families dealt with exclusion, persecution, violence and were forced to leave. The racist occupation policies of the Japanese significantly exacerbated the longstanding identity problematic of the Indonesians as an indistinct “intermediate class.”
Since the 70s, aversion and fear of Muslim immigration and the phenomenon of multiculturalism have strikingly marked the visible political activity of Dutch Indonesians. These sentiments took on serious forms in the 80s, with the establishment of the Centrumpartij by the Indo Henry Brookman. The Centrumpartij criticized minorities policies and presented itself as a nationalist anti-immigration party. Indos felt that they were being discarded as a cultural minority, even though they were loyal to Dutch traditions. They could not be categorized in the same category as Turkish and Moroccan Muslims, who were “brothers” of the Indonesians that chased Indos out of Indonesia.
Moesson: Bulletin devoted to the construction and development of New Guinea, the intended homeland for Dutch-Indonesians. However, this idea came in question, because the Republic demanded even this last remnant of the colonial Netherlands. The symbolic value, however, was great, especially for Dutch Indonesians. The VVD (party in The Netherlands) was greatly influenced by its colonialist branch.
Dutch Indonesians were far more likely to form parties based on conservative-nationalist, (neo)colonial principles, instead of progressive movement. Guarding and protecting borders, together with excluding/including groups was of utmost importance. A lot of Dutch-Indonesians joined the NSB in 1930, because of the ultra-nationalist Dutch character of the Party, and because of the great fear of growing Indonesian nationalism. However, the character of the NSB in the Netherlands Indies was different than in the Netherlands. It offered Indos a chance to pose themselves to be “More Dutch than the Dutch” → they completely identified themselves with the Dutch cultural heritage.
Even before the NSB party, the Indies Fascist Organization had already emerged. This party also strove to reduce “native” influence on the administration and for the restoration of the leading role of the Dutch in the colony, but received fewer followers.
In the postwar years it was still about “maintaining the unity of the realm”, but after the Indos' assimilation in the Netherlands, many conservative politicians and activists of Dutch-Indonesian descent focused on the themes of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration. For example, Bolkenstein: a VVD politician (Indonesian Mother) expressed strikingly contradictory thoughts about immigration policy and multiculturalism. Only EU commissioner who was against the possible EU membership of Turkey. Through Bolkenstein, Wilder became part of the VVD.
The rise of the Netherlands-Indies NSB in the thirties was not only caused by Dutch-Indonesian patriotism and fear of Indonesian nationalism. The economic crisis had very profound effects, and consequently the cry for an authoritarian and decisive government grew louder. There was a fear for an Indonesian revolution, out of uncertainty whether the Indos would be accepted after such a revolution by the Indonesians. Moreover, Indonesians increasingly took jobs at the lower end of the labor market that were previously meant for Indos. This was due to better education and because the Indonesians were paid less that Europeans for the same work. These forces led the Indos to plan “homeland New Guinea”.
The article gives an overview of Wilders' family's history: his grandfather Ording was deputy inspector for the financial supervision of the regencies and municipalities in the province of East Java. He was fired in 1934, because of unsuitability for service. He applied for Pension as soon as possible, but payments from this pension were suspended, which caused him great financial problems. He also did not get passage back to the Netherlands East Indies, because he was born in the Netherlands, however his wife and (7) children were all born in Java. Ording didn't know why he was suspended for duty after 17 years. He struggled with great financial difficulties and bankruptcies in the private sphere.
What became apparent later was that Ording had misled several creditors on purpose, not only in the Netherlands East Indies, but also on leave in Nice. When he asked the Minister of Colonies Colijn to save his family “at the last minute, from total ruination”, he also rejected Ording's pension application. According to Colijn, Ording was guilty of serious misconduct and therefore he had spoiled all his changes of a pension. For Ording's wife Johanna, this was a deep traumatic experience. She couldn't go back to her homeland, nor her family and she lived in bitter poverty. Ording succeeded in making career again in the Netherlands, this time in the military prison system. But the sour experiences while on leave left traces of bitterness in his family. In 1961, 2 years before Geert Wilders would be born, Ording and his wife settled in Venlo once again.
Wilder's statements and attitudes seem to fit remarkably well into the conservative and colonialist frameworks that other politicians of Dutch-Indonesian descent constructed more than half a century ago. Patriotism, the strengthening and maintaining of Dutch influence, values and culture and a holy belief in the nation-state as a panacea (as was “homeland” New Guinea) are central elements. For Wilders, “the going back to they way things were” is often the main motif leading to sometimes surprising claims, such as the “reunification” of Flanders with The Netherlands. This was a well-known pursuit of the NSB in its time too.
Wilders’ aversion towards immigration and the Muslim presence (in this context he uses the terms “Muslim tsunami” and “Moroccan settlers”), and Islam and multiculturalism in general, remains his main theme still. In his obsession with reversal of postwar geopolitical and demographic changes, and the “redressing of historical errors”, Wilders can be seen as a postcolonial revanchist. Vengeance and extreme patriotism in the shape of “retaining our own dominant culture,” the “rescue of specifically European values” and the “repulsion of Islam” shape his neocolonial motives, which seem as if they’ve been copied from the Netherlands-Indies NSB. The fact that Wilders blatantly operates in a postcolonial political dimension without that being noticed says a lot about how the Netherlands dealt, and still deals with, the colonial past. Ignoring, forgetting, and silencing issues has been the consensus in Dutch politics. Therefore, nobody will expect that the events which happened in Indonesia still influence politics today, through figures like Wilders. These events are not to be taken lightly, many of the people that were involved with them still deal with traumas. The experiences of second-class citizenship of Indos, both in the colony and later in The Netherlands, has not yet been studied but can be the formation of dubious politics of displacedness. Wilders' dyeing of his hair made him unrecognizable as a neocolonist, a political revanchist. The author concludes: “By knowingly consigning the political legacy of the Netherlands Indies to oblivion, the Netherlands has grown blind to the symbols and rhetoric that have long been vital to its own imperialism.”
Mark. Monuments to a Forgotten WWII
The author discusses the interbellum, period between the Great War and the Second World War, by looking at the Dutch Indies and the bigger developments that took place between 1918-1945. He reflects on the expansion of Japan in Asia and their occupation of the Dutch Indies. Mark uses the construction of a monument as a metaphor to explain the larger developments of the interbellum. Monuments as symbols reflect the political environments in which they are constructed. The main monument is constructed in honor of Van Heutsz, an old colonial commander of the Dutch Indies. The monument plays a part throughout his article as it stood through the Second World War and Japanese rule.
During the interbellum both in the European nations and in their respective colonies unrest was growing. The old and the new world clashed. It was a time of increasingly confounding contradictions: the Dutch businesses had profited from Holland’s neutral position during the Great War, but suffered along with the rest of Europe in the unstable climate that followed. The Great War had called into question not only the legitimacy of the old order, but the very foundations of Western civilization itself. This contradiction was also reflected in social tensions between the old established elite, the new middle class and the masses. The Great Depression sped up the developments that were set in motion after the Great War.
This unprecedented crisis in Europe made European nations, like the Dutch, focus on their empires for support, a source of prosperity and for opportunity. European nations that did not have colonies were also prompted to acquire a piece of the world for themselves. For example Italy.
The colonies turned against their colonial masters. During the Great War, the Western powers drew on their colonial subjects for support. After the Great War these colonies expected something in return for their support. A new anti-colonial movement, for example in British India and China, sprung up in the colonies. In Europe new labor movements, together with the Soviet Union’s mission to export workers’ revolution, encouraged these anti-colonial movements. These developments, combined with the Western pledge of to uphold ‘the right of national self-determination’ after the Great War, fired the hopes for colonies around the globe.
Many of these anti-colonial movements started out on a smaller scale, usually calling for reform in the colonial framework. In the Netherlands Indies the People’s Council (Volksraad) was such an initiative, established to promote greater local autonomy. However, most of these initiatives and ideas failed to satisfy the call for reform. Through educations native Indonesians gained knowledge and insight into the unjust colonial system. A popular frustration mounted and evolved into a confrontational anti-colonial movement made up of impatient men from lower classes. These not only protested against the Dutch, but also against traditional ‘native’ elites who historically cooperated with the Dutch. Parallel to this movement rose nationalism amongst Islamic leaders. The charismatic Sukarno, who led the Indonesia’s national movement since 1927, was one of the main figures who pursued Indonesian independence.
In the image portrayed by the author, he distinguishes both fascism and communism as global ideas and movements that were supported by those with frustrated social ambitions. The social upper crust tried to defend the status quo and to oppose change. One other idea in the colonies was to turn away from the Western identity to a ‘native’ identity.
In Indonesia for example an ‘Asian’ identity was envisioned by some. However this was not meant as less developed or backwards, but rather progressive and civilized. This idea of an ‘Asian’ identity gained traction during the Second World War, particularly in Japan.
At the end of the 1920s Japan invaded and occupied Manchuria. The author explains this move by looking at Germany and Italy during the same time, where authoritarian politics at home and aggressive imperial expansion abroad were supported by the rapidly expanding middle classes. Japan is a special case for being a non-Western empire in a Western-dominated world. Japan’s solution to the interwar crisis was to reject ‘Western’ individualism and liberalism and ‘return’ to its original Asian values.
In the Dutch Indies the colonial elite were supportive of fascism. Anton Mussert, leader of the NSB (fascist party), was popular in the Dutch Indies. The NSB was the largest political and most popular party in the colony. Until 1940 donations from the Dutch colonial community were to remain the single most important source of revenue for the NSB. In the Netherlands the NSB was politically ostracized and supporters of NSB were seen as ‘outsiders’. The NSB was not popular in the Netherlands and was put into power by the Nazi’s after they occupied the Netherlands. This led to criticism and anger towards the NSB in the Dutch Indies.
Japan’s aim in expanding into Asia was not selfish imperialism of the Western type, but rather to create a ‘Greater Asia’. Japan conquered Java in just 9 days and the Indonesians lined up to welcome the Japanese. Japan’s first step in building the Japanese-Asian order was to undermine Dutch imperial legacy and to move the Dutch to prison camps. Ironically, Van Heutsz’ monument was one of few buildings and monuments to remain unscathed by the Japanese. The Indonesian ambitious middle class, including Sukarno, worked with the Japanese as they saw the opportunity to claim national leadership. However, most of these Indonesians operated under Japanese auspices. Japan was proclaimed to be an example of an opposite model of progress compared to the ‘Western’ model. This was recognized in Indonesia, who according to Indonesians shared a lot of cultural traditions and beliefs.
Indonesia in turn was viewed as a supply area by the Japanese, who did not give them independence. Only when Japan began losing the war did Japan offer the Indonesians independence. The Japanese rule over the Indonesian people was similar to that of the Dutch. There was no greater political autonomy, freedom of expression was restricted, labor and resources were used in a military-colonial fashion. After Japan was driven out of Indonesia, the Dutch fought a war to regain their former colony. They did not succeed in retaking Indonesia and accepted Indonesian independence in 1949. In 1953 the independent Indonesian government destroyed Van Heutsz’ monument.
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