ANTH/SOC 012 Globalization and Its Historical Significance August 31st, 2021 Course Introduction Dr. Andrew Carruthers and Dr. Douglas Smit “The Excursion of One Who is Eager to Traverse the Regions of the World” (Muhammad al-Idrisi 1154) World Map (Henricus Martellus Germanus 1491) Universalis Cosmographia (Martin Waldseemüller 1507) First Shot of Earth from Space (V-2 Rocket 1946) “Blue Marble” (Apollo 17 1972) Introductions Community Archaeology in Peru Community Archaeology in West Philly • Dr. Douglas Smit • dksmit@sas.upenn.edu • Office Hours: Friday by appointment • Research Interests • States and Markets • Indigenous responses to colonialism • Labor/Mining • Community Formation • Racial Capitalism • Latin America • West Philadelphia Dr. Andrew M. Carruthers • (Ph.D., Yale University) • Linguistic and Sociocultural Anthropology • Southeast Asian Studies • Indonesia • Malaysia • Nusantara Studies • Thematic interests: • Language and Semiotics • Migration • Borders • Infrastructures Course interests: • What might we learn by engaging with places and peoples often overlooked in more mainstream discourses of “globalization” or “globalizing” dynamics? • How are large-scale sociological phenomena mediated through everyday talk and communicative interaction? • How might we complicate our understanding of “migration” by examining border-settings that go typically unstudied in the American context? (e.g. the Indonesia-Malaysia borderlands). • How are the so-called ”pushes” and “pulls” of migration and other globalizing processes reckoned, rationalized, and characterized by everyday people? Syllabus Overview See you on Thursday! When is Globalization? Thursday, September 9th, 2021 ANTH 12: Globalization and its historical significance Outline • I. What is Archaeology? • II. When is Globalization? Course Updates • Course Delivery • Masks! • No food or drink • Recitations • Response Papers • Masks! I. What is Archaeology? What is Anthropology again? What is Archaeology? What do archaeologists actually study? • Traces of the human past: sites, artifacts, features. • Patterned by past and present human activities and the natural environment. • The stuff we leave behind, our garbage, the materials of cultural and society Essential Tools • The most important tools in archaeology are a small mason’s trowel, a folding ruler, and a notebook (and now, a total station). The Basics of Fieldwork • • ARCHAEOLOGY IS DESTRUCTIVE! • Proper training • Careful excavation • Detailed records • Careful with context! Field time is expensive. The Basics of Fieldwork • • ARCHAEOLOGY IS DESTRUCTIVE! • Proper training • Careful excavation • Detailed records • Careful with context! Field time is expensive. The Basics of Fieldwork • • ARCHAEOLOGY IS DESTRUCTIVE! • Proper training • Careful excavation • Detailed records • Careful with context! Field time is expensive. II. When is Globalization? Defining the Past • What are the stakes of defining “globalization”? • Does “Globalization” = “Modernity”? • Many, many, many definitions • Questions about definitions… • What is moving? • Who is moving? • Where is the power? • When is globalization? Where is globalization? Who is globalization? • Local sites/global processes One example: “North Atlantic Fictions: Global Transformations, 1492-1945” • Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949-2012) • Haitian-American • Interests: • • • • Haitian Revolution Banana Economies Globalization Politics of history • “any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences” “The world became global in the sixteenth century. Europe became Europe in part by severing itself from what lay south of the Mediterranean, but in part also through a Westward move that made the Atlantic the center of the first planetary empires. As such empires overlapped or succeeded one another within the modern world system, they brought populations from all continents closer in time and space. The rise of the West, the conquest of the Americas, plantation slavery, the Industrial Revolution, and the population flows of the nineteenth century can be summarized as "a first moment of globality," an Atlantic moment culminating in U.S. hegemony after World War II.” Case Study: Huancavelica, Peru Case Study: Huancavelica, Peru • 1491: Highland province of the indigenous Inka Empire • 1564: Spanish Mercury Mine Registered • 1821: Peruvian Independence • 2021: Peruvian department (state) • Periodization • 1492-1800: Colonial Conquests • 1800-1945: Consumer Revolution • 1945-Present: Global Institutions 1492-1800: Colonial Projects • Global: Spain militarily conquers much of Latin America, seeking wealth to fund their European imperial ambitions • Regional: Colonial Peru becomes the world’s largest exporter of silver • Local: Mercury Mining and Forced Labor • Research Question: How did mercury mining proceed across the landscape? What kinds of patterns emerged, what might that say about the way the colonial economy worked at the local level? • Methodology: Archaeological Survey Survey Recording a 17th century refinery Archives Mining Landscapes Oral History Survey 1800-1945: Consumer Revolution • Global: Spain’s imperial power recedes, England’s grows • Regional: Peru gains independence, English capital flows into Peru • Local: British merchants attempts to secure mining and railroad rights • Research Question: How did the changing global economy reflect a change in consumption patterns? How did indigenous Andean incorporate “global” consumer goods? • Methodology: Household Excavation Excavation The Mining Community of Santa Bárbara Elevation 4250 masl (13,944 ft) 1790 2015 1779 Santa Bárbara Population Total = 503 Mestizos 18% Espanoles 1% BNP C5028, Transcription courtesy of Di Hu Indios 81% 1930’s 2015 Unit 13 Unit 13 Stratigraphy and the law of superposition Unit 13 Level E-1 (C14: 1647-1778) Level D “Copeland and Garrett New Blanche” England 1830’s (C14 1721-1846) Level E-2 Level F Tablewares across all units with a SB III and SB I/SB II components (% of MNV) 45.00% 40.00% 35.00% 30.00% 25.00% 20.00% 15.00% 10.00% 5.00% 0.00% Burnished Red Lead-Glazed Undecorated Colonial Tableware Painted Republican Tableware Majolica Whiteware Types of Questions? What is it a part of? What is the design? What was it used for? Where did you find it? Where did it come from? What was it used for? What did it mean (to those who used it)? What is it a part of? A large plate What is the design? An Amazonian macaw Where did you find it? Where did it come from? What is it used for? What did it mean (to those who used it)? What is it a part of? A large plate What is the design? An Amazonian macaw Where did you find it? In an indigenous Peruvian household (1840s) Where did it come from? Staffordshire, England What is it used for? What did it mean (to those who used it)? What is it a part of? A large plate What is the design? An Amazonian macaw Where did you find it? In an indigenous Peruvian household (1840s) Where did it come from? Staffordshire, England What is it used for? What did it mean (to those who used it)? 1945-Present • Global: Bretton-Woods, IMF, and the emergence of global institutions, global governance. • Regional: UNESCO and World Heritage • Local: 2017- Mercury mines placed on the UNESCO tentative list • Research Question: How do indigenous Andean peoples view their global heritage? How do they shape their heritage narratives? Community International/National Regional Community History Heritage Ethnography Photovoice Photo Analysis Archaeologists sleeping during lunch Next Week • Recitations • Tsing, Anna. (2015). Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University • Press. Prologue and Chapter 8 • Tuesday 9/14: Who is Globalization? • Berg, M. (2019). “Sea otters and iron: A global microhistory of value and exchange at Nootka sound, 1774–1792.” Past & Present, 242, 50-82. • Thursday 9/16: Where is Globalization? • Archer, Matthew and Hannah Elliot (2021). “‘It’s up to the market to decide’: Revealing and concealing power in the sustainable tea supply chain.” Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 41(3), pp. 195-205. • Cook, Ian (2004). “Follow the Thing: Papaya.” Antipode, Vol. 36, Issue 4, pp.642- 664. See you next week! When and Who is Globalization? Tuesday, September 14th, 2021 ANTH 012: Globalization and its historical significance Dr. Douglas Smit Outline • I. When is Globalization? • II. Who is Globalization? • Recitations Updates • Response Papers • Contact I. When is Globalization? 1974 1991 2003 1993 2019 1500s 1200s 3000 BC 1492 3000 BC When is globalization? What is globalization? Global Moments • 1. The growing frequency, volume and interrelatedness of cultures, commodities, information and peoples across both time and space; • 2. The increasing capacity of information technologies to reduce and compress time and space (giving rise to notions such as the global village) • 3. The diffusion of routine practices and protocols for processing global flows of information, money, commodities and people; • 4. The emergence of institutions and social movements to promote, regulate, oversee or reject globalization; • 5. The emergence of new types of global consciousness or ideologies of globalism that give some expression to this social interconnectedness such as cosmopolitanism. 15,000 – 20,000 BP • Why? • First global spread of humans • Who? • All of humanity • Critiques? • Where is the connection? 5000 BP • Why? • Much of Eurasia becomes connected via trade • Basis for contemporary economy? • Who? • “River Valley Civilizations” • Critiques? • Do the Americas and Africa count? 1200s • Why? • Interconnected • Who? • The 8 circuits • Critiques? • Do the Americas and Africa count? 1492 • Why? • Sustained union of Western and Eastern hemispheres • Who? • Colonial projects • Critiques? • Eurocentric 1500s • Why? • Commodity trade • Who? • Merchants, laborers, factories • Critiques? • Eurocentric • Overly trade focused • Lack of price convergence 1800s • Why? • The two revolutions, “modernity” • Who? • Merchants, laborers, factories, steam ships, railroads, ideas • Critiques? • Overly econometric • Not all goods are commodities Forster, P.; Ramawamy, V.; Artaxo, P.; Berntsen, T.; Betts, R.; Fahey, D.W.; Haywood, J.; Lean, J. et al. (2007), "Changes in Atmospheric Constituents and in Radiative Forcing", Climate Change 2007: the Physical Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 1945 • Why? • Global governance, global institutions, free trade • Who? • Bretton Woods, IMF, World Bank • Critiques? • US-centric II. Who is Globalization? Types of History • Historical perspectives • • • • • • Military Diplomatic Political Social Cultural Linguistic • Scales of history • • • • • • Global Oceanic National Regional Local Micro Global and Microhistory • Social Sciences and the Humanities; Quantitative and Qualitative • The challenge of global histories • Multiple voices • Sameness and difference • Why microhistories? • Greater balance • Different ways of locating the global • • • • Person/Families Places Events Things • Challenges? Late 1700s Nootka Sound “Such localities, ‘small spaces’ in the words of David Bell, and the economic and social interactions that took place in them, offer us a glimpse into the history of lived environments, commercial interactions and social practices taking place within networks that spanned the entire globe. In this way, a focus on sites such as Nootka Sound reconnects us with the importance of local divergences in economic and social histories of the world.” (Berg 2019:59) Otters and Iron • Who? • British Traders and Mowachaht people • Russian fur economy, Chinese imperial demand, US fur traders, Macao, Manilla, India • Source? • Alexander Walker’s diary • What did we learn from this microhistory? • Trading sophistication • Local politics and trade • Gender? Next Up • Recitations • Tsing, Anna. (2015). Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University • Press. Prologue and Chapter 8 • Thursday 9/16: Where is Globalization? • Archer, Matthew and Hannah Elliot (2021). “‘It’s up to the market to decide’: Revealing and concealing power in the sustainable tea supply chain.” Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 41(3), pp. 195205. • Cook, Ian (2004). “Follow the Thing: Papaya.” Antipode, Vol. 36, Issue 4, pp.642-664. See you Thursday! WEEK 4: ANTH 012: GLOBALIZATION AND ITS HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE SEPTEMBER 23, 2021 PART I: COLONIALISM AND ITS FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE PART II: IMPERIAL EXTRACTIONS PART I GOALS 1. Brief Recap 2. Keywords: From “Globalization” to “Colonization” (Mignolo) 3. “Investigative Modalities” (Cohn) WEEK 4: SEPTEMBER 23 2021 “WHAT IS BEHIND THE T-SHIRT? IT’S A WORLD.” DORIS RESTREPO, GARMENT WORKER, COLOMBIA “SUPPLY CHAIN” “[A] supply chain is defined as a set of three or more entities (organizations or individuals) directly involved in the upstream [i.e., supply] and downstream [i.e., distribution] flows of products, services, finances, and/or information from a source to a customer.” Mentzer et al (2001), “Defining Supply Chain Management,” Journal of Business Logistics “GLOBALIZATION” [Glob[al[iz[ation]]]] Globe (n.): late 14th-c., “a large mass;” mid 15th-c., “spherical solid body, a sphere” Global (adj.): late 17th-c, “spherical”; late 19th-c., “worldwide, universal, globe of the earth”; mid 20th century, “Global village” Globalize (v.): mid 20th-c, special reference to economic systems Globalization (n.): mid 20th-c, compare with “”mondialization” (The Economist, 1960s) “COLONIZATION” Colony (n.) Colonial (adj.) Coloniality (n.) Colonialism (n.) Colonize (v.) Colonization (n.) Decolonial (adj.) Decoloniality (n.) Decolonialism (n.) Decolonize (v.) Decolonization (n.) Coloniality is different from colonialism. Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administration. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. NELSON MALDONADO-TORRES (2007) “ON THE COLONIALITY OF BEING”, P.243 “INVESTIGATIVE MODALITIES” (COHN 1996) “[A]n investigative modality includes the definition of a body of information that is needed, the procedures by which appropriate knowledge is gathered, its ordering and classification, and then how it is transformed into usable forms such as published reports, statistical returns, histories, gazetteers, legal codes, and encyclopedias” (1996:5). “INVESTIGATIVE MODALITIES” (COHN 1996) 1) Historiographic modality 2) Survey modality 3) Enumerative modality 4) Surveillance modality 5) Museological modality 6) Travel modality Colonialism, Imperialism, and Extraction Two Waves of Colonialism What is colonialism? • “the domination of people, the exploitation of human and natural resources and the redistribution of those resources to benefit imperial interests, and the construction of racial and cultural difference that privileged the colonial ruler over the populations they ruled.” (Kroll 2016) What is colonialism? • “the domination of people, the exploitation of human and natural resources and the redistribution of those resources to benefit imperial interests, and the construction of racial and cultural difference that privileged the colonial ruler over the populations they ruled.” (Kroll 2016) What is colonialism? • “the domination of people, the exploitation of human and natural resources and the redistribution of those resources to benefit imperial interests, and the construction of racial and cultural difference that privileged the colonial ruler over the populations they ruled.” (Kroll 2016) What is colonialism? • “the domination of people, the exploitation of human and natural resources and the redistribution of those resources to benefit imperial interests, and the construction of racial and cultural difference that privileged the colonial ruler over the populations they ruled.” (Kroll 2016) Colonialism vs. Imperialism • • The term colony comes from the Latin word colonus, meaning farmer. Imperialism, on the other hand, comes from the Latin term imperium, meaning to command. Historiographically, emphasis on its evilness has tended to crowd out from the literature studies focused on demonstrating the significant contribution of Atlantic slavery to the rise of the capitalist global economy, a far more difficult subject to deal with conceptually and empirically than its morality. The moral question has also tended to create an ideological problem. As articulated by Rowan Williams, there has been a compulsive tendency for some to resist the idea that their “historic prosperity was built in large part on this atrocity.” (Inikori 2020: 169) Food and Drink • • Why Food or Drink? • Food is portable, consumable, and profitable • Food has meaning • Food reflects power……power to consumer, power to produce, power to trade Colonialism disrupts, unsettles, and creates new categories of peoples and products An Gorta Mór “The Great Hunger” or Great Famine (1845-1849) Back up….where are potatoes from again? Andean Altiplano Where did potatoes come from? • • Genetic evidence: 8,000-10,000 years ago, Andean altiplano (Peru/Bolivia) Earliest archaeological evidence: 5,000 years ago Potatoes go global • • • 1532: Spanish conquest of Inka Empire Introduced to Europe in 1600s, considered dangerous Higher yields, better storage=supports Industrial Revolution and Capitalism “The First Colony”: Ireland • • • • Plantation system of the 1600’s Catholic Laws of centuries th 17 and th 18 Enclosure Acts, Loss of Land The First Colony and Colonial Practices Percent of land-owned by Irish (Green) vs English (Yellow) So where did the famine come from? Shitty Colonialism • Potato blight: Phytophthora infestans fungus (Peruvian in Origin) • Chincha Islands of Peru • Guano→ Nitrates→ Fertilizer • British monopoly (1840-1861) • 1843-1844: Philadelphia, New York, Europe The Great Hunger • • • • • • 1845: 45% of Irish family farms: 1-5 acres (330 by 660 feet) Average consumption: 14 pounds of potato a day 1845: Famine Begins Initial British Response in 1846 1847-1849 Response: laissez faire 1 million deaths, 1.5 million emigrated What do potatoes teach us about colonialism? • • • Unforeseen consequences of connection Extraction is not just gold/silver, but people, land, and ways of living Microbes, Peoples, and Plants See you next week! • Recitations Thongchai Winichakul. (1997). Siam Mapped. University of Hawai’i Press. Chapter 1. • • Tuesday 9/28: Nation-States and Revolutions Mihok, L. D., & Wells, E. C. (2014). “Miskitu labor and English royalization at Augusta, Roatan Island, Honduras.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 18(1), 100-121. • • Thursday 9/30: Imagined Communities Anderson, Benedict (2006 [1983]). Imagined Communities. London: Verso (Selections) • Identities and Nationalities Tuesday, September 28th, 2021 ANTH 012: Globalization and its historical significance Dr. Douglas Smit I. Identity Outline II. Royal Identities III. National Identities I. Identity “I use the term social identity to refer to the many ways that individuals and groups of people are taxonomically categorized through socially constructed relationships of difference. It is through such taxonomies, for example, that we come to understand that a “soccer mom,” in the present-day United States, is very different from a “NASCAR dad,” who both are altogether different from “queer youth.” Identities simultaneously provide ontological security (we know who we are) and are flashpoints in social conflict (“Don’t call me that!”). Identity can refer to the ways that people name themselves, to the ways that people are named by others in their own culture, and to the ways that they are named by outsiders. The politics of such namings point to relationships of authority and coercion in cultural discourse—the power to name oneself is, for example, quite different from the power to assign a name to others.” (Voss 2005: 261) “I use the term social identity to refer to the many ways that individuals and groups of people are taxonomically categorized through socially constructed relationships of difference. It is through such taxonomies, for example, that we come to understand that a “soccer mom,” in the present-day United States, is very different from a “NASCAR dad,” who both are altogether different from “queer youth.” Identities simultaneously provide ontological security (we know who we are) and are flashpoints in social conflict (“Don’t call me that!”). Identity can refer to the ways that people name themselves, to the ways that people are named by others in their own culture, and to the ways that they are named by outsiders. The politics of such namings point to relationships of authority and coercion in cultural discourse—the power to name oneself is, for example, quite different from the power to assign a name to others.” (Voss 2005: 261) “I use the term social identity to refer to the many ways that individuals and groups of people are taxonomically categorized through socially constructed relationships of difference. It is through such taxonomies, for example, that we come to understand that a “soccer mom,” in the present-day United States, is very different from a “NASCAR dad,” who both are altogether different from “queer youth.” Identities simultaneously provide ontological security (we know who we are) and are flashpoints in social conflict (“Don’t call me that!”). Identity can refer to the ways that people name themselves, to the ways that people are named by others in their own culture, and to the ways that they are named by outsiders. The politics of such namings point to relationships of authority and coercion in cultural discourse—the power to name oneself is, for example, quite different from the power to assign a name to others.” (Voss 2005: 261) “I use the term social identity to refer to the many ways that individuals and groups of people are taxonomically categorized through socially constructed relationships of difference. It is through such taxonomies, for example, that we come to understand that a “soccer mom,” in the present-day United States, is very different from a “NASCAR dad,” who both are altogether different from “queer youth.” Identities simultaneously provide ontological security (we know who we are) and are flashpoints in social conflict (“Don’t call me that!”). Identity can refer to the ways that people name themselves, to the ways that people are named by others in their own culture, and to the ways that they are named by outsiders. The politics of such namings point to relationships of authority and coercion in cultural discourse—the power to name oneself is, for example, quite different from the power to assign a name to others.” (Voss 2005: 261) What is a national identity? “The state . . . is a partnership . . . not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Edmund Burke (2004:194–195 [1790]) Feinstein 2010 How do you know a national identity? What is a national identity? • • • • • • • • • Citizenship Language Culture Ideology Media Space/Architecture Food Dress Everyday objects What is a national identity? • • • • • • • • • Citizenship Culture Ideology Language Media Space/Architecture Food Dress Everyday objects A few definitions • National Identity: “the development of a sense of shared identity and collective belonging within a state or geographical region; this need not necessarily be based on ethnicity” • Nationalism: “the political use of national identity” • National identity is: • Constructed, or constantly in the process of being constructed • Built upon “Invented Traditions” (Hobsbawm 1991) • Creates an “Imagined Community” (Anderson 1991) Perspectives on National Identities and Nationalisms • Universal or Particular? • Universal: National identities have emerged at various times and contexts • Particular: National identities emerged during the 18th and 19th centuries • National Identity as particular to the “modern” period • 1648: Treaty of Westphalia – State sovereignty • 1790s: French Revolution – Romantic Enlightenment - Nationalism • 18th/19th centuries: Print media • Top-down? Bottom-up? II. The Miskitu and Royalization Late 1700s Miskitu Peoples • The Caribbean as the cradle of globalization • Imperial entanglements • Capital flows • Labor • Miskitu People • • • • • Colonial ethnic emergence Black/Indigenous “Mosquito Kingdom” 1740: Alliance with the British 1740s: First “international trade war” 1860: Annexed by Nicaragua “While historical documents provide details on the intentions of English settlers of Roatán, we know very little about how relationships between English and Miskitu peoples actually developed in the Bay Islands, how English and Miskitu interacted on a daily basis, the degree to which English and Miskitu groups adopted or adapted to each other’s lifestyles, and the long-term social and economic outcomes of these interactions. To begin to address these questions, in this article we turn to the material record and discuss the results of our archaeological investigations of the settlement of Augusta on Roatán” (Mihok and Wells 2014: 101-102) Royalization • Royalization consists of “strategies deployed by monarchies to engender loyalty to a state.” • Significance for early global world • Colony-metropole communications • Information and media • Royalization as an institutional process • Royalization as a set of day-to-day practices • Loyalty to a person, rather than a “nation-state” • Domestic Royalization • “In what ways and to what extent did Augusta’s site plan and domestic inventories of material culture represent English worldview? • How did settlers negotiate their perceptions of the ideal community with the biophysical realities of the island? • How did the English organize Miskitu residence and labor (and to what extent were Miskitu collaborators or willing participants in these efforts)? • What kinds of activities did English and Miskitu pursue on a daily basis, and did some work involve cooperation?” • “In what ways and to what extent did Augusta’s site plan and domestic inventories of material culture represent English worldview? • Close spatial proximity, different than other British colonies • How did settlers negotiate their perceptions of the ideal community with the biophysical realities of the island? • Ridgetop, defensive settlements • How did the English organize Miskitu residence and labor (and to what extent were Miskitu collaborators or willing participants in these efforts)? • Cooperative labor in workshops • What kinds of activities did English and Miskitu pursue on a daily basis, and did some work involve cooperation?” • Mixed material culture signified royalization that was contested III. National Identity Formation in PostRevolutionary NYC (George 2019) New York City and Brooklyn in the 1800s (John Bachmann) American Identity • What is our “imagined community”? What are our “invented traditions” • God-given power/authority • Manifest Destiny/Commercialism • What can archaeology tell us? • How these constructions became materialized • Beekman Street archaeological project • Lower Manhattan – South Street Seaport • Household excavation • Well-off merchant in the early 1800s Chinese Porcelain Chinese Porcelain • Chinese porcelain saucer set for tea • Sepia and gilt eagle decoration • 1782 National Seal • Trade with China as a symbol of an American merchant • No trade prior to revolution George Washington Creamware Chinese Porcelain • Chinese porcelain saucer set for tea • Sepia and gilt eagle decoration • 1782 National Seal • Trade with China as a symbol of an American merchant • No trade prior to revolution George Washington Creamware • Goddess Libertas • Plate fabricated in Britain Chinese Porcelain • Chinese porcelain saucer set for tea • Sepia and gilt eagle decoration • 1782 National Seal • Trade with China as a symbol of an American merchant • No trade prior to revolution George Washington Creamware • Goddess Libertas • Plate fabricated in Britain • Guns and Olive Branches Chinese Porcelain • Chinese porcelain saucer set for tea • Sepia and gilt eagle decoration • 1782 National Seal • Trade with China as a symbol of an American merchant • No trade prior to revolution George Washington Creamware • Goddess Libertas • Plate fabricated in Britain • Guns and Olive Branches • “Sacred to the memory of Washington.” Chinese Porcelain • Chinese porcelain saucer set for tea • Sepia and gilt eagle decoration • 1782 National Seal • Trade with China as a symbol of an American merchant • No trade prior to revolution George Washington Creamware • Goddess Libertas • Plate fabricated in Britain • Guns and Olive Branches • “Sacred to the memory of Washington.” • Waving to a merchant ship See you on Thursday! • Recitations • Thongchai Winichakul. (1997). Siam Mapped. University of Hawai’i Press. Chapter 1. • Thursday 9/30: Imagined Communities • Anderson, Benedict (2006 [1983]). Imagined Communities. London: Verso (Selections) ANTH 012 GLOBALIZATION AND ITS HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE SEPTEMBER 30, 2021: IMAGINED COMMUNITIES TODAY’S AGENDA 1. Why Imagined Communities? 2. Benedict R. O’G. Anderson (1936-2015) 3. Imagined Communities (2006 [1986]) in a nutshell 4. How will Imagined Communities inform our continued study of globalization? ANTH 012 - SEPTEMBER 30 2021 I. WHY IMAGINED COMMUNITIES? II. BENEDICT R. O’G. ANDERSON (1936-2015) BENEDICT ANDERSON EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION • 1936: Born to an Irish father and English mother in Kunming, China. • 1941: Moved from China to California during Second SinoJapanese War. • 1945: “Returned” to Ireland. • Studied at Eton College, then King’s College, Cambridge, where he received a degree in Classics. Then undertook graduate training at Cornell University, receiving a Ph.D. in Government in 1967 under the supervision of George Kahin. • Learned Latin at age 9, then French, Russian, German, Dutch, and Spanish in his teens. Came to learn Indonesian, Javanese, Tagalog, and Thai. ANTH 012 - SEPTEMBER 30 2021 BENEDICT ANDERSON CAREER • During graduate studies, published the infamous “Cornell Paper” with fellow Indonesianist Ruth McVey. The paper contested official Indonesian state narratives of the military’s September 1965 coup. Subsequently banned from entering Indonesia from 1972 until 1998. • Remained at Cornell as an Assistant Professor. Appointed as Professor, then Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies upon retiring in 2002. • 1994: Elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. • 1998: Returned to Indonesia. • 2015: Died in his sleep in East Java, Indonesia. ANTH 012 - SEPTEMBER 30 2021 BENEDICT ANDERSON LEGACY • Author of 17 books, translated into dozens of languages. • Author of more than 250 articles, many written in or translated into Southeast Asian languages. • Most famous for 1983 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, which has been translated into more than two dozen languages. ANTH 012 - SEPTEMBER 30 2021 III. IMAGINED COMMUNITIES IN A NUTSHELL ANDERSON’S “PARADOXES” Theorists of nationalism have been perplexed/irritated by three paradoxes: 1) The objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists. 2) The formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept vs. the particularity of its concrete manifestations. 3) The ‘political’ power of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence. WHY “IMAGINED”? “In an anthropological spirit … I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” BENEDICT ANDERSON, IMAGINED COMMUNITIES, PP. 5-6. WHY “ANTHROPOLOGICAL”? “[I]n the modern world everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender … It would, I think, make things easier if one treated [nationalism] as if it belonged with ‘kinship’ and ‘religion,’ rather than with ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism.’” BENEDICT ANDERSON, IMAGINED COMMUNITIES, P. 5 WHY “IMAGINED”? “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” BENEDICT ANDERSON, IMAGINED COMMUNITIES, P. 6. WHY “LIMITED”? “The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.” BENEDICT ANDERSON, IMAGINED COMMUNITIES, P. 7. WHY “SOVEREIGN”? “It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinelyordained, hierarchical dynastic realm.” BENEDICT ANDERSON, IMAGINED COMMUNITIES, P. 7. WHY “COMMUNITY”? “Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.” BENEDICT ANDERSON, IMAGINED COMMUNITIES, P. 7. HOW DID THESE “IMAGINED COMMUNITIES” COME TO BE? OR, WHAT WERE THE CONDITIONS OF POSSIBILITY FOR THEIR IMAGINING? “The very possibility of imagining the nation only arose historically when, and where, three fundamental cultural conceptions, all of great antiquity, lost their axiomatic grip on men’s minds” 1) “The idea that a particular script-language offered privileged access to ontological truth” 2) “The belief that society was naturally organized around and under high centers” 3) “A conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable” “THE REVOLUTIONARY VERNACULARIZING THRUST OF CAPITALISM” (P. 39) HOW DID THESE “IMAGINED COMMUNITIES” COME TO BE? What “made the new communities imaginable was a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity.” In other words… “print-capitalism” … which in turn led to new ways of envisioning TIME ANTH 012 – SEPTEMBER 30 2021 A: CREOLE PIONEERS AND THE “MODULARITY” OF NATIONALISM B: CENSUS, MAP, MUSEUM IV. HOW WILL “IMAGINED COMMUNITIES” INFORM OUR CONTINUED STUDY OF GLOBALIZATION? FROM “IMAGINED COMMUNITIES” TO “IMAGINED GLOBAL COMMUNITIES” Week 6: Borders and Migrations (10/4 - 10/8) Tuesday 10/5: Pushes and Pulls Van Hear, Nicholas et. al. (2018). “Push-pull plus: reconsidering the drivers of migration.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Thursday 10/7: Migrating Materialities De León, J. (2012). “Better to be hot than caught”: Excavating the conflicting roles of migrant material culture. American Anthropologist. Recitations: New York Times (July 23, 2020). “The Great Climate Migration.” ANTH 012: GLOBALIZATION AND ITS HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE WEEK 6: MIGRATION AND BORDERS WEEK 6: MIGRATION AND BORDERS TUESDAY OCTOBER 5: “PUSHES” AND “PULLS” 1. A brief note on the midterm 2. Review 3. Migration Studies and “Push-Pull” Models II. REVIEW 1. INTRODUCTION 2. GLOBAL QUESTIONS I (what/when) 3. GLOBAL QUESTIONS II (who/where) 4. IMPERIALISM AND COLONIALISM 5. NATIONAL IDENTITIES AND NATION-STATES IMAGINED COMMUNITIES (1983) ANDERSON’S MAJOR POINTS 1. The nation is an imagined community (and it is imagined as inherently limited and sovereign) 2. Languages became infrastructural for protonational readerships 3. “Vernacularizing thrust of capitalism” (p. 39) 4. The emergence of reading “publics” (and new ideas about time/simultaneity) created the conditions of possibility for the imagining of the nation. ON RACISM / XENOPHOBIC ETHNO-NATIONALISM [On the subject of English ethno-nationalists in 1990s Britain] Ben Anderson: “In the minds of some English people, you can’t be English unless you are white.” Interviewer: “So you wouldn’t call them nationalists”? Ben Anderson: “No. I think most of them are racists, and if they’re not racists then they’re people who have retreated to a kind of ethnic identity rather than a national one.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNJuL-Ewp-A III. MIGRATION STUDIES AND PUSH-PULL MODELS What is migration? “A migration is defined as a move from one migration-defining area to another (or a move of some specified minimum distance) that was made during a given migration interval and that involved a change of residence. A migrant is a person who has changed [their] usual place of residence from one migration-defining area to another (or who moved some specified minimum distance) at least once during the migration interval.” United Nations (1970). Method of measuring internal migration, manual VI. New York, NY, p. 2 1871 Register General (British Census) “The improved roads, the facilities offered under the railway system, the wonderful development of the mercantile marine, the habit of traveling about, and the increasing knowledge of workmen, have all tended to facilitate the flow of people from spots where they are not wanted to fields where their labor is in demand. The establishment of a manufacture or the opening of a new mine rallies men to it, not only from the vicinity, but from remote parts of the kingdom. The great towns afford such extraordinary facilities for the division and for the combination of labor, for the exercise of all the arts, and for the practice of all the professions, that they are every year drawing people within their limits.” Keep moving! Steam, or Gas, or Stage, Hold, cabin, steerage, hencoop’s cage — Tour, Journey, Voyage, Lounge, Ride, Walk Skim, Sketch, Excursion, Travel-talk — For move you must! ’Tis now the rage, The law and fashion of the Age. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, “THE DELINQUENT TRAVELERS” (1912) MIGRATIONSTUDIES E.G. RAVENSTEIN (1834-1913) • Born in Germany to a family of cartographers • Moved to England, naturalized as a British Subject, worked in Topographical Dept of the War office. • Member of Royal Statistical and Royal Geographical Societies. CATEGORIES OF MIGRANTS 1. The local migrant 2. Short-journey migrants 3. Migration by stages 4. Long-journey migrants. 5. Temporary migrants. (COUNTER)CURRENTS OF MIGRATION 1. Counties of absorption: “chief seats of commerce and industry” 2. Counties of dispersion: “population falls short of the number of natives enumerated throughout the kingdom” 3. Counter-currents: “with each stream or current of migrants there runs a countercurrent” RAVENSTEIN’S (1885) LAWS 1. The majority of migrants go only a short distance. 2. Migration proceeds step by step. 3. Migrants going long distances generally go by preference to one of the great centers of commerce or industry. 4. Each current of migration produces a compensating counter current. 5. The natives of towns are less migratory than those of rural areas. 6. Females are more migratory than males within the Kingdom of their birth, but males more frequently venture beyond. RAVENSTEIN’S (1885) LAWS 7. Most migrants are adults; families rarely migrate out of their country of birth. 8. Large towns grow more by migration than by natural increase. 9. Migration increases in volume as industries and commerce develop and transport improves. 10. The major direction of migration is from the agricultural areas to the centers of industry and commerce. 11. The major causes of migration are economic.e Sjaastad’s (1962) “Human Capital Model” of Migration Holds that migration is an effort to maximize the “Present Value” PV of migrants’ “Human Capital” Migration occurs from a location i to a location j Moving from i to j involves a change of expected income (moving from Ei to Ej) And a change in expected cost of living (moving from Ci to Cj) So…. The greater the difference between (Ej - Cj) - (Ei -Ci) The greater the PV, and the Greater the “Push” to Migrate WHAT IS LEFT OUT OF SUCH AN ACCOUNT? EVERETT S. LEE (1966) VAN HEAR, BAKEWELL, AND LONG (2017) DRIVERS: “DRIVERS CAN BE UNDERSTOOD AS FORCES LEADING TO THE INCEPTION OF MIGRATION AND THE PERPETUATION OF MOVEMENT.” 1. PREDISPOSING DRIVERS 2. PROXIMATE DRIVERS 3. PRECIPITATING DRIVERS 4. MEDIATING DRIVERS FOR THURS: DE LEON, J. (2012). “BETTER TO BE HOT THAN CAUGHT”. Migration Thursday, October 7th, 2021 ANTH 012: Globalization and its historical significance Dr. Douglas Smit Outline I. Final Exam II. Materializing III. Archaeology of the Now I. Midterm Anthropology 012: Globalization and its Historical Significance Midterm • Answer the following short answer and essay questions according to the instructions below. This assignment is due at 11:59pm on CANVAS on Wednesday, October 13th. • Short Answer: Choose 3 of 5 questions • Essay: Choose 1 of 2 Anthropology 012: Globalization and its Historical Significance Midterm • Please use the Chicago Author-Date style for in-text citations. For example, Benedict Anderson defines the nation as “an imagined political community” that is “imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson 1983: 6). • More information on the Chicago Author-Date style can be found here: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citationguide-2.html Short Answer • In your own words, what does the bridge and door signify in Georg Simmel’s essay “Bridge and Door” In your answer, use at least two examples from other texts/lecture material (not Simmel) to support your answer. Essay • How did Arjun Appadurai propose analyzing globalization as a “complex, overlapping, and disjunctive order” (296)? What dimensions of flow should scholars focus on? Drawing on course readings and information covered in lectures, assess how Appadurai approached globalization.. Organize your response around at least 3 additional readings/lecture materials. While you should use Appadurai’s article in your response, Appadurai will not count toward the minimum requirement of three additional articles or case studies from lecture. II. Materializing Migration Feinstein 2010 What does a material perspective on migration look like? What are archaeological indicators of migration? • Things • Value, necessity, or something else? • Pots or people • People • Health and nutritional histories • Who gets a burial? • Infrastructure • Ports, Roads, Railways, Trails, Houses? Case Study: The American West • Romantic Visions • Cowboys and Class • Landed estates/JSCs • “Freedom” • Wage and independent labor • ¼ of cowboys – African American Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Chinese Railroad Workers in North America • Transcontinental Railroad: 1863-1869 • 15,000 Chinese railroad workers • What can materials tell us? • Negotiating Precarity • Diet: Rice, dried vegetables, dried oysters, dried abalone fish, and some pork and poultry • Clothes more “western” • Chinese ceramics, Chinese tea • Labor and Households “Double Happiness” rice bowl recovered in Nevada III. Archaeology of the Present Archaeology of the Present Archaeology of the Now Contemporary Archaeology When does archaeology end? When does history begin? When does the present become the past? Archaeology of the Now “If you want to know what is really going on in a community, look at its garbage” -Emil Haury “What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things” - Margaret Mead The Garbology Project • 1971 – University of Arizona • Set out to use archaeological methods to systematically study modern waste • What kind of questions can you ask and answer by studying trash? The Garbology Project • How do municipal waste and recycling programs work? • How can we then improve these programs? • What are a societies actual patterns of consumption? • How does consumption relate to other factors such as social status, health and economics • What can trash tell us about hidden sections of societies? The Garbology Project • What are some of the results of the Garbology Project? • Alcohol consumption • Health messaging effects Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past: The Land of Open Graves Undocumented Migration Project • Jason De Leon and the Undocumented Migration Project (2009-2013) • Ancient Olmec Obsidian to Contemporary Archaeology • “Prevention through Deterrence” Have a good weekend and fall break! Midterm Exam Posted: 11:59pm, Sunday, October 10th Due: 11:59pm, Wednesday, October 13th 1 THE BOOK OF BOOKS Some 1,000 kilometres inland from Sydney, over the Blue Mountains, past the trees that drink the tributaries of the Darling River, there stands a little red mosque. It marks where the desert begins. The mosque was built from corrugated iron in around 1887 in the town of Broken Hill. Its green interiors feature simple arabesque and its shelves house stories once precious to people from across the Indian Ocean. Today it is a peaceful place of retreat from the gritty dust storms and brilliant sunlight that assault travellers at this gateway to Australia’s deserts. By a rocky hill that winds had ‘polished black’, the town of Broken Hill was founded on the country of Wiljakali people.1 In June 1885, an Aboriginal man whom prospectors called ‘Harry’ led them to a silverstreaked boulder of ironstone and Europeans declared the discovery of a ‘jeweller’s shop’.2 Soon, leading strings of camels, South Asian merchants and drivers began arriving in greater numbers at the silver mines, camel transportation operating as a crucial adjunct to colonial industries throughout Australian deserts. The town grew with the fortunes of the nascent firm Broken Hill Propriety Limited (BHP)—a parent company of the largest mining conglomerate in the world today, BHP-Billiton. As mining firms funnelled lead, iron ore and silver from Wiljakali lands to Indian Ocean ports and British markets, Broken Hill became a busy industrial node in the geography of the British Empire. The numbers of camel merchants and drivers fluctuated with the Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia. Samia Khatun, Oxford University Press (2018). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190922603.003.0001 AUSTRALIANAMA arrival and departure of goods, and by the turn of the twentieth century an estimated 400 South Asians were living in Broken Hill.3 They built two mosques. Only one remains. In the 1960s, long after the end of the era of camel transportation, when members of the Broken Hill Historical Society were restoring the mosque on the corner of William Street and Buck Street, they found a book in the yard, its ‘pages blowing in the red dust’ in the words of historian Christine Stevens.4 Dusting the book free of sand, they placed it inside the mosque, labelling it as ‘The Holy Koran’. In 1989, Stevens reproduced a photo of the book in her history of the ‘Afghan cameldrivers’. I travelled to Broken Hill in July 2009. As I searched the shelves of the mosque for the book, a winter dust storm was underway outside. Amongst letters, a peacock feather fan and bottles of scent from Delhi, the large book lay, bearing a handwritten English label: ‘The Holy Koran’. Turning the first few pages revealed it was not a Quran, but a 500-page volume of Bengali Sufi poetry. Sitting on the floor, I set out to decipher Bengali characters I had not read for years. The book was titled Kasasol Ambia (Stories of the Prophets). Printed in Calcutta, it was a compendium of eight volumes published separately between 1861 and 1895. It was a book of books. Every story began by naming the tempo at which it should be performed, for these poems were written to be sung out loud to audiences. As I strained to parse unfamiliar Persian, Hindi and Arabic words, woven into a tapestry of nineteenth-century Bengali grammar, I started to visualise Chitpur Road in Calcutta, the main artery of the cheap Bengali print industry where the book was published. There, poets, publishers and compositors were engaged in the process of yoking stories to these eight books, each available for the price of 8 annas.5 Further into the book, beyond the din of the publishing industry, awaited the imaginative world of the poetry itself. The first of the book’s three poets, Munshi Rezaulla, wrote that his poetry was a translation from Persian and Hindi poetry. The creative process of translation, Rezaulla wrote, was like stepping into a sea of stories, in which he found gem after gem, with which he began to thread together a string of pearls. Over the 500 pages of verse that follow, Adam meets Purusha, Alexander the Great searches for immor2 THE BOOK OF BOOKS tal Khidr, and married Zulekha falls hopelessly in love with Yusuf. Its pages stringing together motif after motif from narratives that have long circulated the Indian Ocean, Kasasol Ambia described events spanning thousands of years, ending in the sixth year of the Muslim Hijri calendar. Cocooned from the winds raging outside, I realised I was reading a Bengali book of popular history (Fig. 1). In the time since Broken Hill locals dusted Kasasol Ambia of sand in the 1960s, why had four Australian historians mislabelled the book? Why did the history books accompanying South Asian travellers to the West play no role in the histories that are written about them? Moreover, as Christine Stevens writes, the people who built the mosque in North Broken Hill came from ‘Afghanistan and NorthWestern India’.6 How, then, did a book published in Bengal find its way to an inland Australian mining town? Captivated by this last enigma, I began looking for clues. First, I turned to the records of the Broken Hill Historical Society. Looking for fragments of Bengali words in archival collections across Australia, I sought glimpses of a traveller who might be able to connect nineteenth-century Calcutta to Broken Hill. As I searched for South Asian characters through a constellation of desert towns and Australian ports once linked by camels, I encountered a vast wealth of nonEnglish-language sources that Australian historians systematically sidestep. A seafarer’s travelogue narrated in Urdu in Lahore continues to circulate today in South Asia and in Australia, while Urdu, Persian and Arabic dream texts from across the Indian Ocean left ample traces in Australian newspapers. One of the most surprising discoveries was that the richest accounts of South Asians were in some of the Aboriginal languages spoken in Australian desert parts. In histories that Aboriginal people told in Wangkangurru, Kuyani, Arabunna and Dhirari about the upheaval, violence and new encounters that occurred in the wake of British colonisation, there appear startlingly detailed accounts of South Asians. Central to the history of encounter between South Asians and Aboriginal people in the era of British colonisation were a number of industries in which non-white labour was central: steam shipping industries, sugar farming, railway construction, pastoral industries, and camel transportation. Camels, in particular, loom large in the history 3 AUSTRALIANAMA of South Asians in Australia. From the 1860s, camel lines became central to long-distance transportation in Australian desert interiors, colonising many of the long-distance Indigenous trade routes that crisscross Aboriginal land. The animals arrived from British Indian ports accompanied by South Asian camel owners and drivers, who came to be known by the umbrella term of ‘Afghans’ in settler nomenclature (Fig. 2). The so-called Afghans were so ubiquitous through Australian deserts that when the two ends of the transcontinental north-south railway met in Central Australia in 1929, settlers rejoiced in the arrival of the ‘Afghan Express’.7 Camels remained central to interior transportation until they were replaced by motor transportation from the 1920s. Today the transcontinental railway is still known as ‘the Ghan’. As a circuitry of camel tracks interlocking with shipping lines and railways threaded together Aboriginal lives and families with those of Indian Ocean travellers, people moving through these networks storied their experiences in their own tongues. Foregrounding these fragments in languages other then English, this book tells a history of South Asian diaspora in Australia. I start by reading the copy of Kasasol Ambia that remains in Broken Hill, and interpret the many South Asian- and Aboriginal-language stories I encountered during my search for the reader who brought the Bengali book to the Australian interior. Entry points into rich imaginative landscapes, these are stories that ask us to take seriously the epistemologies of people colonised by the British Empire. This book challenges the suffocating monolingualism of the field of Australian history.8 I do not argue for the simple inclusion of nonEnglish-language texts into existing Australian national history books, perhaps with updated or extended captions. Instead, I show that nonEnglish-language texts render visible historical storytelling strategies and larger architectures of knowledge that we can use to structure accounts of the past. These have the capacity to radically change the routes readers use to imaginatively travel to the past. Stories in colonised tongues can transform the very grounds from which we view the past, present and future. Colonial Epistemes and Knowledge Relations Underlying Australian historians’ inattention to sources in non-European-languages is an assumption that these texts do not change the 4 THE BOOK OF BOOKS larger thrust of history. This is an idea that can be traced to the interconnected rise of nineteenth-century British imperial historiography and Anglicists’ views in British India that there was nothing to be learned from subject peoples.9 Today, most appearances that nonEnglish-language texts make in Australian history books remain organised around a myth at the foundation of modern Western thought: the claim that the knowledge systems of Europeans are more advanced than the epistemic traditions of the peoples they colonised. The first writers in English to make this claim about the Australian region were those who navigated the seas on the HMS Endeavour to witness the transit of Venus across the southern skies. When this vessel rounded an inhabited coast on 19 April 1770, Captain James Cook wrote in his journal that the British were ‘the first who discover’d this Land’.10 This was a lie. These were lands peopled by many distinct groups, who today are known collectively as the Eora people. By renaming the shore ‘New Holland’, Cook implied the irrelevance of Eora people’s knowledge of coasts they had long cultivated, storied, named, inhabited and built trade networks from. As another correspondent wrote to London, on board the Endeavour was a ‘fine library of natural history’.11 It was the tables and classification systems contained in those books rather than Aboriginal knowledge that mediated how colonists viewed the shore they eventually named Botany Bay. To a growing library of European knowledge, they added not just seeds, leaves and the creatures they shot, but also fragments of Aboriginal people’s stories, which they categorised as ‘customs’.12 As botanist Joseph Banks wrote, they had not ‘understood a word’ uttered by the Eora people, whom he described as ‘Indians’ who were ‘black but not negroes’.13 While European scientists and anthropologists systematically converted colonised people’s knowledges into artefacts, Western historians played a key role in the invention of progress narratives that ordered not just peoples in a racial hierarchy, but also their knowledges. In 1817, when James Mill published the hugely influential History of British India, he drew on Scottish Enlightenment theories of stadial progress from barbarism to civilisation to order his account of South Asians. Mill’s claim was that there was a single route of progress that all societies must travel, leading to the highest pinnacle of human achievement: Western civilisation. Narrating this drama of progress towards a teleo 5 AUSTRALIANAMA logical destination point, he partitioned South Asian pasts into three successive stages: a golden period of ancient Hindu rule, a dark age of medieval Muslim rule, and the enlightened, civilised rule of modern Britain.14 Significantly, Mill’s History relied exclusively on Europeanlanguage accounts of South Asia. ‘Required reading’ for colonial officials in British India for decades, it set a powerful precedent for subsequent historians’ approaches to texts in the languages of colonised peoples across the British Empire. In the context of competing colonial ideologies in British India, Mill’s History was written as an Anglicist/utilitarian challenge to the orientalist/Romantic viewpoint of Sir William Jones, an East India Company scholar-administrator who founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta in 1784. In Jones’ vision, literacy in South Asian languages was not only imperative for effective strategies of imperial rule, but even further, he saw in the ‘wildness and sweetness’ of Persian poetry a source of inspiration for the revitalisation of European literature itself.15 In the Persian-language training manual that Jones wrote to instruct young East India Company officials, he translated an excerpt from the poetry of Hafez Shirazi (d. 1390). Focusing on the poet’s metaphor for writing itself, Jones rendered a verse as, ‘O Hafiz! when thou composest verses, thou seemest to make a string of pearls.’16 In an infamous translation in which he likened Hafiz’s verse to ‘orient pearls at random strung’, Jones was celebrating the unfamiliar order of things that structured Persian poetry.17 Yet, his reading served to lay the template for a long-influential hegemonic story about the incoherence of Perso-Arabic poetic traditions, as Julie Meisami shows. Ultimately, Mill’s History, stringing together a tale of ancient Hindus, medieval Muslims and enlightened Britons, became the principal text for training colonial officials, replacing the language instruction that eighteenthcentury Britons had been inducted into. Despite differences, what Anglicists and orientalists shared with each other and with the various colonial ideologies across Australasia was their conviction of the superiority of Enlightenment epistemes in producing ‘true’ statements about the world, however imaginative the knowledges of the colonised might be. It is a belief that still profoundly shapes historians’ strategies for narrating the past today. While in Australia the continuing strangulation of non-European-language sto6 THE BOOK OF BOOKS ries is facilitated by the pervasive linguistic Anglocentrism of historians, the problem cannot be entirely attributed to a lack of language competency. This becomes abundantly clear through an examination of the earliest analysis of Kasasol Ambia by a historian writing in English.18 In 1864, Rajendralal Mitra reproduced an excerpt from Kasasol Ambia in an article published in Calcutta in the Journal of the Asiatic Society. The librarian of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Mitra was a historian of early India and trained as an orientalist scholar of Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, French, Greek, and Latin, not to mention English (Fig. 3).19 Tabulating an excerpt of poetry from Kasasol Ambia, Mitra categorised each word as either ‘Bengali (B)’ or ‘Foreign (F)’.20 In classifying words with Sanskrit roots as ‘Bengali’ and words with Persian and Arabic roots as ‘foreign’, Mitra partitioned the poetry into ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ elements, inserting the excerpt of Kasasol Ambia into a progress narrative about ancient Hindus conquered by Muslim ‘foreigners’ that can be traced to Mill’s History. Mitra’s analysis of Kasasol Ambia in 1860s Calcutta has a crucial element in common with Australian historians’ lack of engagement with the book discovered in Broken Hill—all rob the poetry of the ability to perform its purpose: to imaginatively transport people to the past. These readings, though from different contexts and historical moments, all share the problem of using interpretive techniques born of colonial rule, which operate by transforming the knowledges of the colonised into dead, inert artefacts that have no place in an imagined future. Central to these problematic reading strategies is what I describe in this book as a ‘knowledge relation’—a particular relationship between readers and books, scientists and specimens, historians and archives, and scholars and scholarship. Enlightenment knowledge relations were most spectacularly dramatised by Michel Foucault. In a laboratory lit by a ‘glass sun’, in Foucault’s writing, the modern scientist dissects dead specimens on a ‘nickel-plated, rubbery table swathed in white’, classifying and naming things in countless workshops, entering data into textual tables to meticulously tabulate disorder into order.21 By stepping into this knowledge relation to produce modernist truths about Sufi texts, as historian Aditya Behl lamented, too many scholars to this day produce ‘yet another object of Indological study analysed 7 AUSTRALIANAMA into its component parts, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, “like a patient etherised on a table”.’22 The result is that Mitra’s tabulation of Kasasol Ambia conveys little about the stories that the poetry itself tells, or about how Sufi discourse worked. Instead it gives us a glimpse of the operating table on which a tale from a British imperial history book met a story from a Bengali history book in 1864, the former enacting a conquest over the latter. Today, Mitra’s analysis offers a useful warning. Firstly, despite extensive language skills, interpreting non-English-language stories on the epistemological grounds born of colonial rule can reduce them to dead artefacts. Secondly, by disciplining the stories that South Asians and Aboriginal people told about the past into the overarching historical narratives taken to be true today, we risk obscuring the pathways that colonised peoples from different parts of the British Empire understood themselves to be travelling through time, concealing the ‘futures past’ that shaped their horizons.23 If Mitra’s reading lays bare the operating tables on which non-English-language history texts die, on what alternative epistemological grounds can we read South Asian- and Aboriginal-language histories circulating across oceans and deserts? Critiques of colonial epistemes are not new in the field of South Asian historiography. Particularly since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, historians have contended with the problem of how else to read texts in South Asian languages without disciplining them into tales of progress, without endlessly reproducing ‘transition narratives’ plotting the movement through time from tradition to modernity.24 In dialogue with Hayden White’s influential critiques of the genre of modernist history writing, many South Asianists have grappled with the question of the ‘truth value’ of South Asian historiographical traditions.25 Most recently, some innovative writers in this voluminous field have highlighted the workings of non-Enlightenment knowledge relations, drawing attention to the ongoing resilience of South Asian epsitemes.26 This book offers a methodological contribution to these debates through a reading of a particular 1895 edition of Kasasol Ambia that remains in an old mosque in arid Australia. I propose that texts belonging to South Asian historiographical traditions are underpinned by, and sometimes theorise, knowledge relations that we can step into today to create true narratives about the past. 8 THE BOOK OF BOOKS Enigmatic Reading In an exhilarating piece about his translation of a sixteenth-century Sufi text, Aditya Behl describes a methodology of ‘reading enigmatically’, reflecting on the process of decoding Mrigavati (The Magic Doe).27 Mrigavati is a Hindavi story about a prince who sees the fleeting apparition in a forest of a woman disguised as a seven-coloured doe. Falling in love, he follows the spectre deeper into the woods. Behl suggests that rather than approaching stories as dead artefacts, a better hermeneutic method is to treat narratives as if they are sentient beings with the capacity to move from the written page and through audiences, imprinting people’s consciousness with images, metaphors and motifs. As he shows, in the context of sixteenth-century Jaunpur, the performance of Mrigavati by seasoned, skilled performers pulled audiences into a highly structured knowledge relation to the text, the spectre of the seven-coloured doe sparking interior journeys in the most attentive listeners. Intriguingly, writing from Philadelphia in 2008, he hints that Mrigavati continues to have the capacity to ‘imprint’ contemporary audiences, casting readers within the knowledge relations theorised by the metaphors in the poetry.28 From the moment that the image of a Bengali book compelled me to travel to interior Australia, the poetry in Kasasol Ambia began scripting me into a knowledge relation that would take me years to understand. Even so, from the very beginning it was clear that succumbing to the text’s strange yet familiar logic was an incredibly productive method of doing historical research. The same question that led me to the various South Asian- and Aboriginal-language stories that I read in this book also illuminated the approach I use to interpret their meaning: Who brought the compendium of eight Bengali books to Broken Hill? The search for that traveller, literate in the difficult language and elusive meanings of the Kasasol Ambia’s poetry, saw me go to Kolkata in 2010 hoping to catch glimpses of readers buying books from the Battala neighbourhood, home to cheap print production. The first page of Kasasol Ambia features the seal of the book’s publisher, Kazi Sofiuddin. In the preface to the volume, the publisher details the addresses where this 1895 edition of the text began its journey to interior Australia, writing that Kasasol Ambia was available for sale at Hanifia Press on ‘Nimogombhir Lane off Chitpur Road’ in the Battala locality. It was 9 AUSTRALIANAMA also sold on ‘no. 1 lane Chandni’ where Sofiuddin’s family had a bookshop. Over the course of my search for these addresses in Kolkata, it became increasingly clear to me not just how best to read Bengali stories, but also how to approach other non-English-language sources. On the way to Kolkata, I stopped briefly in Bangladesh. In Dhaka, at her reading/writing/dining table covered in clear laminex, my greataunt Sanjida Khatun re-taught me the order of Bengali letters, carefully explaining the logic of the alphabet table. While I still knew how to read, I had forgotten the sequence of the letters. A retired professor of Bengali literature and linguistics, my octogenarian great-aunt was thrilled to hear about the book discovered in Broken Hill. She picked up her mobile to make a call. ‘Yes, in Australia,’ she confirmed. ‘Yes, in a desert mosque!’ A fan overhead made the papers on her table dance under glass paperweights, as she said into the phone, ‘We will need a copy of Hilali’s Perso-Arabic Elements in Bengali before she leaves for Kolkata.’ The next day, my great-aunt’s former students Ovee and Jhumur Chowdhury arrived with the requested book. Jhumur was a singer and Ovee, a poet. They insisted we exchange phone numbers in case I should need any more books from Dhaka. A few weeks later, I was in Kolkata and filling in a membership form at the library of Jadavpur University, tightly clutching my Samsad Bengali-English Dictionary under my arm. I had carefully pasted the alphabet table into its inside cover in anticipation of the difficult books I would encounter. The order of the letters, my great-aunt had impressed on me, is key—the relationships between Bengali characters underpins the logic behind the spelling of words and can unlock book indices, library catalogues and dictionaries. Despite all best-laid plans, the library staff confiscated my dictionary at the entrance. With no intended irony, a sign on the bench informed patrons that ‘books are not allowed in the library’. Finding the wooden card catalogue of Bengali books, I stood paralysed for a while, straining to remember the alphabet. Pulling out a drawer of cards marked ‘ব’ for ‘Battala’, I wondered how I would locate the next letter, ‘ট’. Suddenly the answer was glaringly obvious. The façade of the card catalogue itself was an alphabet table; the matrix of Bengali characters is in fact hard to ‘lose’. I ordered the first book with ‘Battala’ in its title, and before long the linguist Sukumar Sen’s history 10 THE BOOK OF BOOKS of the nineteenth-century Bengali book industry arrived in my hands.29 I thumbed through its pages with little hope of understanding the formal prose, enjoying the exhilaration of reading without a dictionary, when suddenly the name ‘Kazi Sofiuddin’ jumped out from the book. Page 109. According to Sen, publisher Kazi Sofiuddin was one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the Battala book industry, and Kasasol Ambia was his magnum opus. Sofiuddin had commissioned poets to translate the Persian stories of the prophets, publishing book after book over many years. When he died after the publication of the fifth book of Kasasol Ambia, his son Kazi Shahabhik continued where Sofiuddin had left off. Surely, reading in the privacy of my apartment accompanied by many dictionaries, I could come to know much more about Kazi Sofiuddin’s Kasasol Ambia, perhaps even catch sight of the readers purchasing copies of it from Nimogombhir Lane in Battala. Hoping to buy a copy of the latest 2008 edition of Sen’s book, I followed a friend’s directions to Lokenath’s Paper House nearby—a bookshop behind the 8B bus station in Jadavpur. There, hearing me order a history book on Battala, a man loitering on the steps cryptically said to me, ‘Robbar Pratidin.’ I ignored him. He kept repeating in Bengali, louder each time, ‘Sunday everyday (Robbar Pratidin), that’s where you need to go,’ obscurely insisting, ‘there you will find whatever it is you are looking for.’ Again, I pretended not to hear him. The bookseller behind the counter was carefully writing down the details of my requested title. Occupying myself with the order of the Bengali alphabet, I wondered if his name was Lokenath, beginning with ‘ল’. Three days later the book arrived at Lokenath’s. I was on an autorickshaw on my way to pick it up when my phone rang. It was Ovee Chowdhury calling from Dhaka. His first book of poetry had just been published in Kolkata. It would take a long time to ship copies across the border to Bangladesh and the first-time author was aching to hold his book sooner. ‘Could you please get some copies from the publisher and bring them to Dhaka on your next visit?’ he asked. I agreed. The books would need to be picked up from an address in Chandni Chowk, beginning with ‘চ’. I scrawled the name on my palm. Changing autos, I set off to collect fifty copies of Ovee’s book.Yes, it was a diversion from my search for nineteenth-century Bengali poetry, but this 11 AUSTRALIANAMA was his first book, after all. Following Ovee’s directions, I caught the metro to the northern part of the city. The stairs out of Chandni Chowk metro station led me up to one of the busiest commercial districts of Kolkata. The address Ovee had given me was for the offices of the daily Bengali newspaper Pratidin. From there a newspaper editor ran a small press publishing Bengali poetry. Ordering me a cup of tea, Ovee’s publisher dispatched an assistant to get the books headed to Dhaka. While I waited, I chatted with Anindya Chatterjee, editor of the weekend magazine issued with the Sunday edition of Pratidin. I was flicking through the latest issue of Robbar, the slim, glossy magazine that Anindya had handed me, when suddenly, ‘Kazi Sofiuddin’ again jumped out from the text. Page 13. According to an article printed the previous Sunday, Kazi Sofiuddin was from the village of Bandpur in the district of Hugli— long a centre of cultural production in Bengal.30 Engaging poets to translate not just Persian and Urdu books into Bengali verse, Sofiuddin had commissioned Bengali translations of the Mahabharata, Ramayana and various other titles that trace a genealogy to Sanskrit literature. The article reproduced an excerpt of a poem Sofiuddin had written over 150 years ago, in which he told readers about his father Kazi Jeleruddin, who followed the bhakti movement, and his grandfather Kazi Amirulla, a judge presiding over twelve districts in Hugli. While Sofiuddin’s forefathers had lived in a village in Hugli, the publishing business had seen him move to Calcutta. In 1855, he wrote, ‘my address is at Chandni Chowk’. I was at that moment discovering his story at the very same address in 2010. The author of the article, which appeared in the Sunday (Robbar) supplement to the daily newspaper Pratidin, was historian Gautam Bhadra, a charismatic teacher well known to generations of students in Kolkata. When I tracked down his phone number, barely audible over a crackling phone line, Gautam Bhadra told me to meet him in the foyer of the National Library of India at 3.00 p.m. the following Tuesday.31 There was no direct bus route from the 8B bus depot in Jadavpur to the National Library, so I caught a bus heading in the direction of Belvedere Estate, Alipore Road—an estate whose grand 30-acre grounds, built during the British colonial era, housed not only the National Library but also what was once Government House. 12 THE BOOK OF BOOKS It was there that Thomas Macaulay, liberal reformer and later popular historian, drafted and delivered his ‘Minute of Education’ in February 1835 to the governor-general of India, marking an Anglicist turning point in British colonial ideology. In his minute, Macaulay vehemently opposed the use of British revenue to train British colonial officials and ‘natives’ alike in South Asian languages. He infamously declared that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’.32 English, he prophesied, was not only ‘likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East’, but its influence would also grow alongside British power across the Indian Ocean, as it was ‘the language of two great European communities which are rising, the one in the south of Africa, the other in Australia.’33 Exposure to English-language books, Macaulay proposed, was central to the project of cultivating ‘a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and intellect.’34 Within three months of Macaulay’s minute, English was made the official language of education funded by colonial resources, displacing an earlier orientalist ideology that had cultivated Persian as the language of British colonial administration. It marked a key moment in the institution of English as a South Asian language, and a shift in colonial ideology that left profound legacies. Explicitly yoking English literacy to a project of cultural assimilation, the education reforms that followed created the infrastructure of schools and universities that inducted generations of the most powerful South Asians into progress narratives mapping routes to Western civilisation. Many years later, trying to find Belvedere Estate, I alighted at a bus stop from where I hoped to walk to the National Library, once known as the colonial library. Hopelessly lost, I tried to read unknown streets for recognisable signs, as 3.00 p.m. came and went. Eventually defeated, I caught another bus to Esplanade metro station, relieved that at least I would be able to find my way back to my apartment. It was weeks before I summoned up the courage to call on Gautam Bhadra again. This time I made it to the National Library by taxi. When I told him the tale of the Broken Hill book, it calmed his irritation at me—at first. ‘That book you found is likely a Bengali translation of the 13 AUSTRALIANAMA Persian and Urdu qissa literary genre,’ he informed me. ‘Have you read the whole book?,’ he asked. I had not. ‘Why not? Why haven’t you read it?’ I did not want to admit that the language was very difficult for me to understand. I kept quiet as his voice grew louder with each question. ‘Is it because you think you know more then the writers of the book?’ Raising one arm in the air, he switched from Bengali to English to ensure that I would understand him, bellowing, ‘Do you even know what a qissa is?’ I did not. ‘You seculars …’ he boomed, his voice echoing across the library foyer, ‘are ruining history!’ I left the National Library with a list of books that he had ordered I read before returning to see him. Recovering under the fan at home, I looked up ‘qissa’ in my many dictionaries. It was a Persian word with an Arabic root that had entered not only Bengali, but many South Asian languages. A word beginning with ‘ক’, the first letter of the alphabet, a qissa, at its simplest, is a ‘story’.35 The story is the deceptively simple common entity that underpins all the non-English-language sources I read in this book. It was whilst navigating the streets and archives of Kolkata, searching for glimpses of the premises where Kasasol Ambia was sold, that I first happened upon a reading strategy that can animate stories embedded within nonEuropean epistemes. As I became aware in Kolkata, stories can, and frequently do, behave according to logics quite apart from Western reason. As the spectre of nineteenth-century publisher Kazi Sofiuddin led me from card catalogues to books to magazines, from library to library to newspaper offices, it was as if sentient Bengali characters were signposting a research pathway ‘beyond the sterile contrasting of “rational” and “irrational”’, as historian Carlo Ginzburg put it.36 Like Kasasol Ambia, all the South Asian- and Aboriginal-language stories I read in this book have encoded within them an order of things—a conceptual grid that we can use to interpret them, a narrative logic according to which they unfold. I do not discipline accounts of South Asians into larger English-language historical narratives of colony, empire and nation. Instead, while drawing on a wide range of archival materials, including settler records in English, I use the storytelling strategies and interpretive keys contained in non-English-language texts to order and organise a history of South Asian diaspora. Ginzburg uses that ‘tricky word, intuition’ to reflect on ‘the instantaneous running through of the thought processes’ in his extraordinary 14 THE BOOK OF BOOKS history of reading clues.37 As he points out, ‘the capacity to leap from the known to the unknown by inference (on the basis of clues)’ was a science densely theorised in Arabic and Persian physiognomy using the vocabulary of Sufi philosophy.38 Suggesting that these were modes of thought that were part of the heritage of late-nineteenth-century Bengal, Ginzburg gestures at the various other interpretive methodologies circulating the Indian Ocean world alongside British colonial knowledges.39 In this book, I take the cue from Ginzburg’s use of nonEuropean reading techniques to construct historical methodologies. What he calls intuition, I approach as ‘subjugated knowledges’—the set of knowledges disqualified from the late eighteenth century by modern European institutions as ‘beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity’.40 Situating colonised people’s texts within architectures of ‘subjugated knowledges’ reveals the epistemological terrains on which past South Asians stood across the Indian Ocean rim. Connecting Histories In following South Asians across a vast ocean and into Australian deserts densely storied by Aboriginal people, this book invites readers to travel across disciplinary boundaries, connecting debates in South Asian historiography and Indigenous history. In doing so, I contribute to a new scholarship on migration that has emerged in the last two decades in ‘a post-9/11 environment of increased surveillance, detention and deportation’.41 These writers have observed that in the era since the attacks of 11 September 2001, working-class South Asians or those of Muslim heritage have been demonised in the US precisely while elite South Asians, particularly those belonging to wealthy business communities, have been held up as ‘model citizens.’ As historian Vivek Bald has pointed out, this binary of the ‘model minority’ versus the ‘undesirable other’ has long structured ‘American Orientalism,’ profoundly shaping histories of South Asian migrants.42 In the Australian context, as the imprisonment and torture of the refugees known as ‘boat people’ in settler discourse have established the Australian nation-state as the architect of one of the most racist border regimes in the contemporary world, histories of South Asian migrants have increasingly been structured around the question: ‘Are 15 AUSTRALIANAMA they Pioneers or Aliens?’43 As historian Hsu-Ming Teo has pointed out, the ‘problem’ is that insisting that past Asian travellers were ‘pioneers’ who helped build the Australian nation inserts non-white migrants into settler narratives celebrating the usurpation of Aboriginal land.44 The deeper architecture of colonial thought that belies this problem becomes apparent if we examine the distinct ‘imaginative geographies’, to use Edward Said’s phrase, which framed British settlers’ accounts of South Asians and Aboriginal peoples—colonised peoples from different parts of Anglo imperial terrain. Settlers’ knowledge production about South Asians was underpinned by the imaginative geography of ‘the orient’ versus ‘the occident’ and the ongoing process of enacting a border between these mutually constituted categories. In addition, imagining a cluster of British colonies at the southwestern rim of the Indian Ocean as part of ‘the occident’ or ‘the West’ relied on the ongoing active production of Aboriginal lands as ‘blank spaces’. By the close of the nineteenth century, Australian governments introduced ‘state-based instruments of surveillance, the census, the passport and the literacy test’ in response to the increasing arrival of non-white populations.45 The drawing of a ‘global colour line’ through the Australian region culminated on 1 January 1901 in the federation of six separate British colonies into Australia, creating a white nation that excluded from citizenship both ‘Asiatics’ and ‘Aborigines’. As tightening race-based border regimes inaugurated the era of ‘White Australia’, the oceanic traffic in camels and drivers from South Asia was brought to a halt, but the camel industry continued to flourish in Australian desert parts. In comparison to the various measures of racial exclusion that South Asians were subjected to in ‘White Australia’, settler persecution of Aboriginal people was far more violent. In the twentieth century, one particularly brutal set of settler regimes that sought to realise the settler fantasies of empty lands was the systematic removal of Aboriginal children from their families, for their intended ‘absorption’ into white working-class Australia. The legacies of the violent rupture of the intimate relationships so central to knowledge transmission—between grandmothers and grandsons, mothers and daughters—profoundly shapes Aboriginal lives today.46 Despite comprising two very different regimes of British rule, what the imaginative geographies of ‘blank space’ and ‘the orient’ shared was 16 THE BOOK OF BOOKS that both were structured by progress narratives destined towards Western civilisation. As historians have shown, by the late nineteenth century, the racial hierarchies of stadial thinking that plotted schemas of movement from savage to civilised, east to west, came to be reconfigured as questions of inclusion/exclusion at the national boundary: Were the ‘Asiatics’ savage or civilised? Could ‘Aborigines’ be inside the nation or should they be outside the nation? Would non-white peoples be part of the future, or should they be relegated to the past? A focus on the knowledge traditions of the colonised offers a productive starting point for generating new research questions. In contributing to a new scholarship that examines ‘migration through larger histories of imperialism and neoliberalism’,47 I argue for a closer focus on the texts, stories and knowledges that moved with people—the narratives which ‘cannot be accommodated within the stern pages of History’, as Shahid Amin put it.48 For the repeated careless mislabelling of Kasasol Ambia by Australian historians offers us an invaluable clue: insertions of South Asians into the interlocking narratives of Anglo imperialism and nationalism are premised on the erasure of non-European knowledges. While South Asian elites were (unequal) co-producers of orientalist knowledges and racial hierarchies in British India and beyond, Aboriginal people in the Australian context were not incorporated into colonial bureaucracies to a comparable extent.49 Just as the Wiljakali man, Harry, led Europeans to the silver in Broken Hill, Aboriginal people and their knowledges were always central to colonial projects as evidenced by the enigmatic figure of ‘the tracker’ in Australian cultural production.50 Yet, settlers in colonial Australia did not construct the institutional infrastructures for training in colonised languages that were established in South Asia. Nor was the university in colonial Australia central to Anglicist strategies for cultural assimilation, unlike in British India. While the establishment of the first university in the Australian colonies in 1857 was undoubtedly an important moment in the epistemic invasion of Aboriginal lands, it was not until 1966 that the first Aboriginal student graduated with a degree from an Australian university—Charles Perkins, an Arrernte man born in Alice Springs. In the decades that followed, a new generation of Australian history students influenced by the methodologies of ‘history from below’ 17 AUSTRALIANAMA began encountering Aboriginal activists, sometimes in university classrooms, more often within union and land rights movements.51 It is from these encounters that the field of Aboriginal history emerged in the early 1980s. The crucial interventions that writers of Aboriginal history made into Australian historiography were underpinned by the research methodology that Marx called praxis: knowledge produced in the process of settlers and Aboriginal people articulating joint political projects and imagining shared futures. One of the central insights about knowledge-power generated by the first generation of writers in this field was that clear, accessible prose was pivotal to the practice of Aboriginal history. For it is essential that Aboriginal people, now and in the future, are able to access material that is written about their families and pasts—without having a university degree. Another insight from the field of Aboriginal history that I draw upon in this book is that non-Aboriginal historians, always complicit in the ongoing settler occupation of Aboriginal lands, must make visible the dynamics of research encounters between university-based scholars and Aboriginal people, as part of a process of interrogating the conditions of knowledge production. A decade after Aboriginal history was established as a field in Australian universities, the 1992 Mabo judgement in the High Court of Australia inaugurated legal recognition of Aboriginal relationships with land prior to British colonisation, challenging the fiction of ‘blank spaces’. With legal professionals formulating ‘native title’ as a framework for viewing these stakes and claims to country as a kind of property relations, there emerged an entire scholarly apparatus involving historians, linguists and anthropologists for determining precisely which Aboriginal families were the ‘traditional owners’ of which lands. It inaugurated a new era of fraught relationships between many Aboriginal families and university-accredited researchers. Within this context, the Aboriginal English term ‘country’ is a dense place word that has itself become a site of epistemic struggle. As antinuclear activist and Arabunna poet Kevin Buzzacott wrote in 1998 in response to scholarly attempts to define ‘country’, ‘anthropologists and all that mob—they’re trying to tell us who we are, and what we are and what we think. I’m saying, “No you can’t tell us that.” … we know the country.’52 As Deborah Bird Rose pointed out, the ongoing epis18 THE BOOK OF BOOKS temic struggle between university researchers and Aboriginal people is shaped by the reality that ‘anything that is written in Australia today that says anything about Aboriginal people has the potential to end up in court as part of a native title case’.53 The Dhirari, Dieri, Wangkangurru, Kuyani and Arabunna texts that I use in this book are deeply implicated in these complex politics. I speak none of these Aboriginal languages. Nor do Aboriginal knowledges form part of the repertoire of inherited knowledges that I draw on in my reading of South Asian-language texts. Instead, my entry point into reading Aboriginal texts comprised the invaluable political education I received in Aboriginal communities throughout New South Wales during the anti-racism activism so formative to my history education.54 At a practical level, it was through these student activist networks that I began contacting the families of some of the storytellers whose Aboriginal-language narratives I encountered in print form as I trawled archives in search of glimpses of a copy of Kasasol Ambia. So, knowing very little about Aboriginal languages, I wrote to poet and activist Kevin Buzzacott: Could I come and talk to his family about the Arabunna-language stories about South Asians?55 Over the last decades, through engagement with Aboriginal articulations of and political struggles for ‘country’, a body of place-oriented writing has emerged as one of the methodological innovations in the field of Aboriginal history.56 ‘Place-oriented research’, as Deborah Bird Rose describes it, is a call ‘for writing that seeks to do justice, ethically and methodologically, to the richness of time, human endeavour, and the multiplicities of living things whose tracks cross a given place.’57 Using these strategies to narrate encounters between South Asians and Aboriginal peoples throughout this book, I develop techniques for writing histories of migration that refuse to participate in the ongoing discursive erasure of Aboriginal peoples and their geographical imaginations—an erasure that is foundational to settler mentality. I show that travellers who arrived from across the Indian Ocean on Aboriginal geography always stood at the conjuncture of many knowledge traditions; whether those South Asians really saw Aboriginal peoples and histories or not is of course another question. Drawing on the conventions and insights in the field of Aboriginal history, this book adds to the much longer history of Aboriginal encounters with peoples from across the Indian Ocean. 19 AUSTRALIANAMA Australia in the Indian Ocean Arriving each year with sailing craft propelled by monsoon winds, stories about the prophets of Islam travelled to the Australian mainland long before European colonisers did. With Aboriginal seafarers threading the northern coasts of Australia into vast trading networks, stories, goods and words from across the Indian Ocean today remain embedded in Aboriginal geographies throughout Australia. Today, in northeastern Australia, rupiah remains the word for ‘money’ in Aboriginal languages spoken around Arnhem Land. That a word in Yolngu-Matha languages can be traced to the ‘rupiah’ in circulation in the islands of Indonesia, to South Asia where the ‘rupiya’ was introduced as currency during the rule of Afghan sovereign Sher Shah Suri (d. 1545) hints at the larger histories of ongoing connections across an ocean densely storied in non-European languages.58 The Indian Ocean is increasingly imagined as a ‘liquid continent’ in English-language scholarship. With fiction writers such as Amitav Ghosh illuminating the human dramas that have long unfolded here, a body of lyrical writing has been produced by a growing number of humanities scholars who have imaged the Indian Ocean as ‘a theoretical terrain, a geographical space and a historical network of human connectedness’.59 This recent focus in English-language public spheres on non-white mobility across this region has flourished precisely as the ‘Five Eyes’ intergovernmental surveillance alliance between the US, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia has transformed the Indian Ocean into ‘the new cartography of imperial power’.60 In narrating histories of the Australia–South Asia axis of oceanic circulation, my intervention into Indian Ocean studies puts debates about knowledgepower into direct conversation with a burgeoning field. Following the establishment of Botany Bay, the Indian Ocean began to be mapped from Australian colonial settlements as a terrain of competing European empires. Sketching the region from British India to the Australian colonies in 1845, Thomas Mitchell, the surveyor general of the British colony of New South Wales, mapped this slice of the Indian Ocean as ‘The Indian Archipelago’ (Fig. 4). A phrase at the time describing the chain of over 12,000 islands under Dutch imperial control, Mitchell’s reimagining of the ‘Indian Archipelago’ was a strategic 20 THE BOOK OF BOOKS statement about the role of the Australian colonies in British imperial penetration into Dutch territory.61 With Australia long operating as a strategic base for Anglo empires in the Indian Ocean region, today there are over fifteen joint Australia–US military bases on Australian soil and waters.62 Following the dissolution of the USSR, the gaze of imperial surveillance has shifted away from Russia and towards ‘Muslim-majority’ countries. Today, intelligence infrastructure in Australia is key to imperial surveillance of the Indian Ocean world, driving covert US drone strikes in South Asia and elsewhere.63 Alongside Australian government support for US-led military operations in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Pakistan, a global Islamophobia industry has produced ‘Islam versus the West’ as a new binary replacing the Cold War dichotomy in the English-speaking world. These were the larger geopolitics that played out so grotesquely night after night in a hospital ward in South Western Sydney, in the encounter between my mother and the returned soldier from Afghanistan, making visible the paradoxes of liberal multiculturalism. Keeping in view the infrastructure of successive Anglo imperial regimes that have imaged this vast water body, I treat the Indian Ocean as a site of epistemic struggle. Seeking an out from the progress narratives oriented to ‘Destination: West’ that failed both those women imprisoned at Liverpool Hospital in spring 2008, I approach the Indian Ocean as something akin to an immense reservoir of knowledges. As Said wrote many years ago, ‘perhaps the most important task of all is to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples’ from a ‘nonrepressive and nonmanipulative’ perspective64—an undertaking that has only grown in urgency as war after war has been launched across the realm of the Indian Ocean. However, as Said warned, such a task would require us to ‘rethink the whole complex problem of knowledge and power’.65 I demonstrate that the stories long circulating the Indian Ocean according to the logics of non-Enlightenment philosophies offer us powerful tools with which to rethink precisely this problem. After all, as a certain song about Radha’s search for Krishna’s flute suggested during the terrible Sydney spring of 2008, at the junctures where colonial modernist narratives fail us, stories belonging to other epistemes can help make sense of the world. 21 AUSTRALIANAMA History and Subjectivity With triumphant tales of the superiority of Western civilisation long buttressing Anglo imperial aggression and colonia...
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