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)

Other reading: Sahlins (1992); Sahlins (1996); Bashkow (2004); Englund and Leach (2000)

Dancing around colonialism

We’ve been talking a lot about colonialism as a force in history.

In many ways, we live in a world defined by the legacies of past European colonial expansion.

But what is the nature of colonialism, and this legacy?

• Colonialism is an instance of domination of one group by another group.
• Colonialism is, for Ryan, “a system of racial governance.”

But we cannot simply define the historical process that establishes a colonial order in terms of the ultimate effects of that order.

What’s an example of the legacies of colonialism that you can see in your everyday life?

Let’s use a Padlet to share our ideas.

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, 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.

Englund, Harri, and James Leach. 2000. “Ethnography and the Meta‐Narratives of Modernity.” Current Anthropology 41 (2): 225–48. https://doi.org/10.1086/ca.2000.41.issue-2.

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.

———. 1992. “The Economics of Develop-Man in the Pacific.” Res 21: 13–25.

———. 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.