Ridhi D'Cruz
Professor Crowfoot
Social Theory/ Anth 304
Take home test # 2
Corrections December 8th, 2010
Question 1 : What techniques did colonists use to craft racial and national identities? Refer to Rose (1999), Biolsi (2007), and Anderson (1991) in your answer. Give examples of a) the techniques and b) how they created identities.
In this essay I will look at how different techniques of governance elucidated in the essays of Biolsi (2007) and Anderson (1991) have been used to guide an individual's collective and personal identity in terms of race and nationality using Rose's (1999) essay to demonstrate the role of governance in identity formation. But I first look at the process of an individual's identity formation as it occurs over multiple levels. At the personal level, identity formation is informed by the individual's need to define one's “self” in order to be distinguishable as unique and separate from the “other”. At the collective level, identity is informed by an individual's need to form affiliations with larger groups as a sign of identifying with the group and other attributes the group is associated with. An individual's identity is significantly influenced by local power relations.
Faced with the challenges of governing areas that had different sociocultural and political contexts from what they had experienced in their home countries, and the vast array of identities that these “foreign” contexts generated, colonists created new racial and national identities to render the populations they were going to rule over visible in easily manageable unidimensional categories. These crafted identities were imposed upon the people through the colonial administration through an array of tools that I will begin to explore in the following paragraphs.
The “territorialization of governmental thought” and “spatialization of the governors gaze” are two technologies that the government uses to create “governable spaces” according to Rose (1999:31-37). Both these technologies render the space to be governed, visible through inscription devices like maps and thus, extend the arm of authority onto the physical space (1999:36). “Governable spaces” are populated by “governable subjects” who are the multiple objectifications of “the governed” (Rose 1999:40-48). The third technique that Rose talks about is “translation”. Translation allows the diffusion of governance from a political center into the nooks and crannies of society. Rose defines technologies or techniques of governance as being “imbued with the aspirations for the shaping of conduct in the hope of certain desired effects and averting certain undesired events” (1999:52). Techniques of governance ensure that governance is enacted in more localized settings like workplaces, schools, hospitals and malls and the process that makes this possible is “translation” of governance through people's practices.
Benedict Anderson (1991) notes that the colonial administration reified the nation state through the three techniques of map-making, census-taking and museum building. Through map-making, regions under colonial rule were made visible in neat, cordoned off grids of “governable space” and claimed to belong to a particular nation state. People were forced to re-imagine their state as a territorially bounded “nationalized” “wedge between” (Anderson 1991:172) other nation states , and develop new vocabulary to assimilate the imposed concept of the nation state and their place within it into their consciousness as he elucidates in the case of Thailand (1991:171-72). Anderson also talks about the colonial imposition of the census on colonized peoples. The census functioned as a means for colonists to fill in the grids of the map with easily manageable ethno-racial categories of “governable subjects”, to populate the nation state they had created through the map (1991:164). Often the categories in the census oversimplified the complex multi-dimensional identities and often neglected and/ or were in conflict with emic identities prior to colonization that took into account factors like religious affiliation, status and rank. The third technique of governance that Anderson reveals, is the museum. Colonists translated their own role of being “guardians” of the colonized people, by stewarding the preservation of the' “traditional culture” of the colonized peoples. Colonists consciously and unconsciously cherry-picked artifacts that did not interfere with the colonial agenda, fossilized these artifacts as representing the collective culture and national identity of the colonized peoples they had created with the map and populated with the census. The level of assimilation of colonially created national identities is evident when this identity is legitimized and sustained by nationalists (Anderson 1991:178-82).
Biolsi (2007) draws our attention to the racial technologies of “stating”, “mixing”, “classifying”, and “spacing” (701) employed by the Euro-Americans to craft two very different racial identities for African Americans and Native Americans. Euro-Americans considered Native Americans to be white skinned and therefore possessing the potential to be civilized (Biolsi 2007:404). The racial technique of “mixing” (Biolsi 2007:404) was employed as a legitimate and even favored method to bring the uncivilized Indian into the fold of a modern, rational, enlightened and civilized society. Mixing refers to inter-marriage between Euro-Americans and Native Americans as a way to reduce the “blood quantum” (proportion of blood) of the Native Americans and simultaneously, the extent of their distinctly Indian identity so that the “wild” man could be tamed and saved (2007:407). On the other hand, the racial techniques used by Euro-Americans on African Americans was spacing. It was taboo for inter-marriages between white and black populations because the entire black population had been stated and classified as inferior to white populations and uncivilized, and unlike Native Americans, African Americans had no potential for becoming civilized (2007:407). Having been employed in schools, railway carriages, workplaces, residential localities, segregation is a form of spacing spanning multiple scales of region.
The above examples demonstrate how racial and national identities were guided by techniques employed by those in power.
Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict
1991 Introduction and Census, Map, Museum. In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Pp. 1-7, 163-185. London: Verso.
Biolsi, Thomas
2007 Race Technologies. In A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics. David Nugent and Joan Vincent, eds. Pp. 400-417. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Rose, Nikolas
1999 Governing. In Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Pp. 15- 60 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999.
Question 2:
Rose (1999: 47-51) argues that governmental policies get translated to local levels. Discuss particular policies and their translation, referring to examples from Adams and Gorton (2006) and Pelican (2009).
In order to explain the local interpretations of governmental policies that Adams and Gorton (2006) and Pelican (2009) talk about in their essays, I will first need to elucidate Rose's definition of “translation” (1999). I then apply Rose's “translation” to the US government's policy on segregation in Adams and Gorton's essay, as an example of a realized or successfully translated form of governance (2006). I then use Pelican's essay to highlight two examples of local translations of the African government's policy on defining and classifying “indigenous people” in a way that was not intended by the policy and policy makers and how this “mistranslation” of sorts, makes the realization of the policy problematic (2009).
Rose highlights the active role of the “governed”, as agents of governance or “political actors of which the state is only one” (1999:17). Those subjectified by governance, in the form of a policy for example, are not passive receptors of the governmental policy, but actively interpret the ethical, rational and practical implications, as well as the intended effects of the policy, through a complex and dynamic process he refers to as “translation”. And “it is through translation processes of various sorts that linkages are assembled between political agencies, public bodies, economic, legal, medical, social and technical authorities, and the aspirations, judgements and ambitions of formally autonomous entities, be these firms, factories, pressure groups, families or individuals”(1999:48). Thus, a subject's interpretations of governance informs and guides the conduct of the subject (1999:49). And it is through subject's conduct, practices, or Foucauldian “techniques of self”, that governance is enacted at the local level (1999:39-41).
I now apply Rose's definition of “translation” to examine the local interpretations of the US governmental policy of segregation in public areas in the Mississippi Delta area. Segregation is a “spacing technique” that the government used to clearly delineate black space from white space (Biolsi 2007:413). Segregation gained legitimacy through the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v Ferguson in 1892. The ruling made clear that all public accommodations had to be “separate but equal” and a strict code of etiquette between whites and blacks emerged as a result. “An all-white school could be maintained as long as a “separate” but “equal” black school existed. A bus or train station had to provide both white and colored waiting rooms. Once on board a bus or train, people were seated in areas that were restricted to each race. Privately owned businesses such as restaurants or theaters could be racially exclusive” (Adams and Gorton 2006:291). Segregation translated so deep into people's practices that it took the remobilization of the legal system through passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to guide people to discontinue their practice of segregation. I should briefly mention here, that not everyone in the US believed in segregation. The 50's and 60's epitomizes nation-wide protests against segregation and other governmental policies. But the point I'm trying to highlight here is that the United States government had to remobilize the legal structure of the state to steer people towards a retranslation of their relationship to the black population.
Adams and Gorton (2006) present a number of examples in their essay that demonstrate how a government policy had the intended effects and was thus, in a sense, realized. I now proceed to Pelican's (2009) essay which presents an interesting mismatch between local translations and the intended effects of a governmental policy in Cameroon, Africa. In his essay, he looks at the difference in the local translations of “indigeneity” of two communities – the Mbororo and the Baka. He also attributes this difference in the “translation” of “indigeneity” between the Grassfielders and the Mbororo, as well as between the Baka and their neighbors, to the inherent problem of trying to label 350 million people from vastly differing historical, social, cultural and political backgrounds with a single definition of “indigeneity” (2009:56).
In 2007 the United Nations outlined “indigenous peoples' rights to self-determination; to land, territories, and natural resources; and to free, prior, and informed consent” in its Declaration of Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) (Pelican 2009:52). The Cameroonian government was one of the few governments in Africa to support this Declaration by incorporating the notion of “indigenous peoples” entailed in UNDRIP into its constitution. But it remained ambiguous as to how Cameroon would implement any of the UN's recommendations to benefit “indigenous people” in the country (2009: 53).
The Mbororo of nothwest Cameroon have been included within the internationally described and nationally accepted category of “indigenous peoples”, which implies that they have an internationally and nationally recognized claim to the land they occupy. But at the local level, their farming neighbors – the Grassfielders, deny the Mbororo the right to “indigeneity”. The main reason for this denial is the fact that the Grassfielders consider their own connection to the land much stronger than the Mbororo's. The Grassfielders qualify their own connection to the land in terms of time. Having occupied the land for a much longer period than the 19th century immigrant Mbororo, Grassfielders consider the Mbororo to be “wanderers” (Pelican 2009:61) and “strangers” (Pelican 2009:57). This is in conflict with the Mbororo's own perception of themselves as “indigenous people” which is in line with the UN's recommendation that has been nationally recognized (Pelican 2009:57).
Pelican (2009) also cites the example of the Baka of southeast Cameroon. Like the Mbororo, internationally and nationally, the Baka are considered as an “indigenous peoples”. But locally, they are perceived as “wanderers” by the locals . And the fact that the Baka are more connected to the forest than to the soil or land, is probably the most significant reason for their local identity as wanderers (2009:61). The economic and political structures of Baka society kick up another interesting facet to the “translation” of their own “indigeneity”. Being an acephalous community, the Baka have difficulty accessing the benefits associated with being an “indigenous” group because of their inherently egalitarian structure that prevents them from being able to legitimately create representatives without compromising an important aspect of their identity and culture in the process (2009:61).
Pelican's (2009) essay highlights the plasticity in the interpretations of who is considered “indigenous” at a local level, and how the local “translation” of this identity can make it difficult for a group to access benefits that policies have tried to lay out for them as in seen in the case of both the Mbororo and Baka communities (2009). And Adams and Gorton's (2006) essay gives examples of the successful “translation” of the US government's policy of segregation. Together demonstrate the plasticity of local translations of national policies.
Bibliography
Adams, Jane and D. Gorton
2006 Confederate Lane: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the Mississippi Delta. American Ethnologist 33(2): 288-309.
Biolsi, Thomas
2007 Race Technologies. In A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics. David Nugent and Joan Vincent, eds. Pp. 400-417. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Pelican, Michaela
2009 Complexities of Indigeneity and Autochthony: An African Example. American Ethnologist 36(1): 52-65.
Rose, Nikolas
1999 Governing. In Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Pp. 15- 60 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999
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