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-====== Week 4—Imperialism as close encounter ======
+~~DECKJS~~
-===== Week 4—Imperialism as close encounter =====
+====== Imperialism as close encounter ======
+===== Imperialism as close encounter =====
+Ryan Schram\\
+ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology\\
+ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au\\
+Social Sciences Building 410 (A02)\\
+Week of March 17, 2025 (Week 4)
+Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2025/4
 **Main reading:** Sahlins (1988)
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 **Other reading:** Sahlins (1992); Sahlins (1996); Bashkow (2004); Englund and Leach (2000)
-For Wolf, Trouillot, and other critics of the “primitive isolate,” the most important force in the history of many if not all societies is…
+===== Dancing around colonialism =====
-Did you say colonialism? Yes, absolutely. The world we live in today is in many respects shaped by legacies of European colonial control of societies outside of Europe.
+We’ve been talking a lot about colonialism as a force in history.
-Interestingly enough, colonialism has taken on a new life. It has become a watchword of critique of the contemporary order and its politics. Not so long ago, many different situations in the contemporary world were seen in the lens of “globalization” and “global capitalism” (The anthropology department used to teach an introductory class on globalization, //ANTH 1002: Anthropology and the global//.) Increasingly, people are rethinking these ideas in terms of the legacies of colonialism.
+In many ways, we live in a world defined by the legacies of past European colonial expansion.
-  * What was colonialism? Is colonialism something of the past, or the present?
+But what is the nature of colonialism, and this legacy?
-  * When people talk about a situation, either from the past or in the present, in terms of colonialism, what specifically do they mean to point to or highlight?
-In this week’s readings, we meet Marshall Sahlins. Sahlins accepts Wolf’s critique of anthropology, and also acknowledges that every society is a product of historical forces and events. Yet in saying this, he also problematizes Wolf’s historical approach. For their to a structure of interaction, exploitation, domination, and dependency between two societies, people in those societies have to enter into relations, and that means that they have to have common understanding. They need to share a system of categories that overlaps their respective cultural systems of thought. In the encounter between people from different cultures, each side has to translate the other into familiar terms. Only then can a new system that incorporates both emerge.
+  * Colonialism is an instance of domination of one group by another group.
+  * Colonialism is, for Ryan, “a system of racial governance.”
-So the structures of domination that bring different communities into unequal relationships now are a byproduct of another process in a conjuncture (or intersection) of two cultural systems.
+But we cannot simply define the historical process that establishes a colonial order in terms of the ultimate effects of that order.
-  * What is an example of a contemporary cultural conjuncture? Are there cultural conjunctures in Sydney?
+===== What’s an example of the legacies of colonialism that you can see in your everyday life? =====
-  * Are there kinds of experiences or events that transcend culture, and will have an objective meaning and objective consequences for people who experience them? Are there things that happen in a society’s history which a people cannot see in their own cultural categories?
-  * If colonialism as a structure can only emerge from a series of cultural conjunctures, does that change how we see contemporary situations that inherit the colonial structures of the past?
-Sahlins is bringing back the linguistic analogy. He has heard the critiques of this metaphor. Yes, if we frame people’s collective life in community as an expression of a symbolic grammar, then we assume that this collectivity is fixed and frozen and bounded. Cultures do interact but not in a random way. But, even so, we need the analysis of symbolic categories to understand why people experience historical events the way they do, and hence why these events become meaningful for them.
+Let’s use a Padlet to share our ideas.
-===== References =====
+https://sydney.padlet.org/ryanschram/what-s-an-example-of-the-legacies-of-colonialism-that-you-ca-59n65yibejn6bsd8
+When you get stuck, ask the person sitting next to you what they think.
+===== First contacts, missed connections, mixed signals =====
+When people from different worlds meet, things don’t always go the way you expect.
+  * Joseph Banks, who traveled with James Cook to Australia, records that Indigenous people seemed to be deliberately ignoring the European ships and landing parties. They “scarce lifted their eyes” (Merlan 2018, 19).
+  * Crews on the //Beagle// (Darwin’s ship) encountered Indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego. To communicate, they first attempted to use friendly hand gestures, but the Fuegans just imitated these gestures exactly. Soon, both groups were imitating each other, purely for the absurd fun of it (Merlan 2018, 52–53).
+    * In some encounters, a Fuegan would touch or gently slap a visitor, and then present themselves to be touched (or slapped) in the same way.
+    * In other similar encounters, Indigenous people used imitation of arriving Europeans to parody and mock them (Merlan 2018, 54).
+  * Christian missionaries from Sydney who traveled to the eastern islands of the Territory of Papua (today Papua New Guinea) in the late 19th century often encountered, and came to rely upon, returned workers who had acquired Pidgin English on plantations in Queensland years earlier (Schram 2016).
+==== It takes two ====
+  * We know the eventual outcomes of these first encounters—domination, displacement, dispossession—but these words don’t fully explain the processes that leads to these outcomes.
+  * Many colonial situations can be said to be based on “working misunderstandings” (Dorward 1974).
+===== A second look at interactions between Europeans and Native North Americans =====
+Some of the effects of the fur trade noted by Wolf are:
+  * Native societies gained new opportunities for wealth and technology by trading fur (Wolf 1982, 163).
+  * The Iroquois confederation of tribes shifted to the mutual defense of valued hunting grounds to maintain access to fur, and becomes more like a state in the sense of a permanent bureaucracy (Wolf 1982, 165–67).
+  * Large-scale bison hunting by Native societies of the Plains was driven by the opportunity to trade pemmican with fur traders (Wolf 1982, 176–78).
+  * The influx of European wealth in the Pacific Northwest Coast region spurred the elaboration of competitive gift exchange in potlatch feasts to determine the rank of different groups (Wolf 1982, 191–92).
+==== Two ways to read the same facts ====
+  * Evidence of a strategy of aggrandizement by leaders competing for power within their communities.
+  * Evidence of efflorescence of total systems of integration based on norms of reciprocity.
+Aggrandizement and efflorescence are not exclusive of each other. It’s a matter of whether you emphasize the perspective of individual actors (and assume that they are just like everyone else) or emphasize the dynamics of the total social system.
+===== The arrival, departure, and surprise return of Cook/Lono =====
+On the final of his Pacific voyages, James Cook, aboard the HMS //Resolution//, arrived in the islands of Hawaiʻi (or the “Sandwich Islands” for Europeans) in late November and early December of 1788 (Sahlins 1981, 20).
+This coincided with the sacred time of Makahiki((Matariki is a public holiday in New Zealand, and falls on June 20 in 2025.
+)), a period when war is forbidden and normal forms of sacrifice and worship are suspended (Sahlins 1981, 18–19).
+The //Resolution// proceeded to circle the island group in a clockwise direction.
+  * Conicidentally this is the same route followed by a canoe procession bearing an effigy of the god Lono, who presides over Makahiki.
+  * Also, the sails of the //Resolution// look a lot like the ceremonial effigy of Lono.
+The //Resolution// departed in February, after several weeks of quite amicable interactions between the crew and Hawaiians. Then its main mast broke so it had to return suddenly for repairs.
+  * Initially Cook was playing the role of—and embodied—Lono, the god of Makahiki who comes once a year to renew the fertility of the land //and then leaves//.
+  * Now Cook was matter out of place. He did not belong. Lono isn’t supposed to come back right away. What were once friendly and cooperative relationships go downhill fast. Fights. Killings. And then Cook is killed by a crowd on the beach and his body is taken ashore (Sahlins 1981, 23–25).
+==== Did Hawaiians really think that Cook, a human, was really a god, Lono? ====
+Sahlins’s argument has been provocative, and led to a rather typical kind of debate in anthropology:
+  * What were people //really// thinking? (Obeyesekere 1992)
+I am not interested in that question. Seriously, who cares? They all thought different things, just like you and I all think different things.
+People in Hawaiʻi were interacting with outsiders on their own terms. When Cook violated their expectations, they had to change how they interacted with him. They had to put everything back into proper boxes.
+===== From chiefdom to kingdom =====
+After Cook’s death, Hawaiian society continues to interact with foriegn societies commercially and politically.
+  * Nobles trade with Europeans to acquire fine textiles and expensive goods (Sahlins 1981, 29–31).
+  * Europeans recognized the chiefs of Hawaiʻi as kings and queens, that is, legitimate sovereign rules of a state.
+Both sides have similar systems of symbolic categories of people: rank. Yet rank is sacred (and hence taboo) in one system and secular in another.
+===== The jackalope: An apparent paradox =====
+  * A **chimera** is an animal with the **body of a lion** and the **head of an eagle**.
+  * A **jackalope** is an animal with the **head of a rabbit** and the **body of a //rabbit//**, but it’s not the same rabbit. :)
+==== Types and tokens ====
+  * A **chair** is a great place to sit. (I am referring to chair in general, as a category or type of thing; that is, an idea.)
+  * This is my favorite **chair** in the whole room. (I am referring to an example of the type, an actual thing that exists.)
+==== Jackalopes in the cultural conjuncture ====
+Trade among Europeans and Hawaiians is a cultural conjuncture and a jackalope situation. Europeans are sources of //mana// but not //**mana** mana//—the //mana// you respect with a taboo—but //mana// you can hold, wear, and display.
+Mana and taboo are themselves altered by their application to new situations.
+===== Sahlins argues that the colonial encounter is mediated by people’s symbolic categories =====
+  * Sahlins examines similar kinds of cross-cultural encounters in history as Comaroff and Comaroff and Wolf do, but argues for another view of them.
+  * Sahlins applies the lingusitic analogy to identify and explain the thinking of people involved in these encounters.
+  * Recall Bashkow’s (2006) ethnography of Orokaiva.
+    * Sahlins would say the same type of classification of new, foreign people, groups, and events is present everywhere on both sides of the encounter.
+  * A structure of cultural domination emerges when this shared system of symbolic classification becomes recentered on the schema of the colonizers at the expense of the colonized.
+    * Schools and religious missionaries, and not the violence of wealthy and powerful people, seem to be crucial to transformation.
+    * Contact with schooling and with missionary Christianity can induce a “humiliation” that exceeds a culture’s symbolic classifications (Sahlins 1992, 24).
+  * In order to acquiesce to a structure of domination, people “must first learn to hate what they have” (Sahlins 1992, 24). The fundamental reality of colonial domination is a domination of people’s minds.
+===== References and further reading =====
 Bashkow, Ira. 2004. “A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries.” //American Anthropologist// 106 (3): 443–58. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2004.106.3.443.
+———. 2006. //The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World//. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
+Dorward, D. C. 1974. “Ethnography and Administration: A Study of Anglo-Tiv ‘Working Misunderstanding’.” //The Journal of African History// 15 (3): 457–77. https://doi.org/10.2307/180671.
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-Sahlins, Marshall. 1988. “Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of ‘The World System’.” //Proceeedings of the British Academy// 74: 1–51. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/74p001.pdf.
+Merlan, Francesca. 2018. //Dynamics of Difference in Australia: Indigenous Past and Present in a Settler Country//. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. http://ezproxy.library.usyd.edu.au/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1780381&site=ehost-live.
+Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1992. //The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Myth-Making in the Pacific//. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
+Sahlins, Marshall. 1981. //Historical metaphors and mythical realities: structure in the early history of the Sandwich Islands kingdom//. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press.
+———. 1988. “Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of ‘The World System’.” //Proceeedings of the British Academy// 74: 1–51. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/74p001.pdf.
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 ———. 1996. “The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology.” //Current Anthropology// 37 (3): 395–428. https://doi.org/10.1086/204503.
+Schram, Ryan. 2016. “‘Tapwaroro Is True’: Indigenous Voice and the Heteroglossia of Methodist Missionary Translation in British New Guinea.” //Journal of Linguistic Anthropology// 26 (3): 259–77. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12138.
+Wolf, Eric R. 1982. //Europe and the People Without History//. Berkeley: University of California Press.