Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-cfpbc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-20T04:15:13.465Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Introduction — Imagined laboratories: Colonial and national racialisations in Island Southeast Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2018

Warwick Anderson  and
Ricardo Roque
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Introduction
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , October 2018 , pp. 358 - 371
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This special issue brings together papers originally presented at the panel ‘Colonial and National Racializations in Southeast Asia’ as part of the 7th EuroSEAS meeting in Lisbon, in July 2013. We are grateful to James Dunk for extensive research assistance. The Australian Research Council provided research support (FL110100243).

References

1 Delfin, Frederick C., ‘The population history of the Philippines: A genetic overview’, Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 63, 4 (2015): 471Google Scholar.

2 Tumonggor, Meryanne K., Karafet, Tatiana M., Hallmark, Brian, Lansing, J. Stephen, Sudoyo, Herawati, Hammer, Michael F. and Cox, Murray P., ‘The Indonesian Archipelago: An ancient genetic highway linking Asia and the Pacific’, Journal of Human Genetics 58, 3 (2013): 165CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

3 Trocki, Carl A., ‘Political structures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, ed. Tarling, Nicholas, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 107Google Scholar.

4 The relevance of ‘race’ as ‘ethnic’ marker in the post-colonial history of Indonesia is treated dismissively in the entry for ‘Race’ in Cribb, Robert and Kahin, Audrey, Historical Dictionary of Indonesia (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2004), pp. 362–4Google Scholar.

5 See, for example, Stoler, Ann Laura, ‘Rethinking colonial categories’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 13, 1 (1989): 134–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Making empire respectable: The politics of race and sexual morality in 20th-century colonial cultures’, American Ethnologist 16, 4 (1989): 634–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and ‘Sexual affronts and racial frontiers: European identities and the cultural politics of exclusion in colonial Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, 3 (1992): 514–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Anderson, Warwick, Colonial pathologies: Race, hygiene, and American tropical medicine in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Stoler, Ann L., Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 8Google Scholar. See also Taylor, Jean Gelman, The social world of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983)Google Scholar; and Gouda, Frances, Dutch culture overseas: Colonial practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900–1942 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Kramer, Paul A., The blood of government: Race, empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 2–3Google Scholar. See also Anderson, Warwick, ‘Racial conceptions in the global south’, Isis 105 (2014): 782–92CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

8 ‘The underlying racial basis of anti-colonial movements’, Paul Kratoska and Ben Batson summarise, ‘produced a heightened awareness of ethnic identities’.  ‘Nationalism and modernist reform’, in Tarling, The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol. 2, p. 313.

9 See Edwards, Penny, Cambodge: The cultivation of a nation, 1860–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

10 Milner, Anthony, The invention of politics in colonial Malaya: Contesting nationalism and the expansion of the public sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Vickers, Adrian, ‘“Malay identity”: Modernity, invented tradition, and forms of knowledge’, Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 31, 1 (1997): 173–211Google Scholar; Reid, Anthony, ‘Understanding Melayu (Malay) as a source of diverse modern identities’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 32, 3 (2001): 295–313CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Milner, Anthony, ‘Afterword: A history of Malay ethnicity’, in Contesting Malayness: Malay identity across boundaries, ed. Barnard, Timothy P. (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2004), pp. 241–57Google Scholar; Elson, Robert E., ‘“Constructing the nation”: Ethnicity, race, modernity, and citizenship in early Indonesian thought’, Asian Ethnicity 6 (2005): 145–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kahn, Joel S., Other Malays: Nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the modern Malay World (Singapore: NUS Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

11 Jonsson, Hjorleifur, Mien relations: Mountain people and state control in Thailand (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Scott, James C., The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)Google ScholarPubMed; Roque, Ricardo, ‘Mountains and black races: Anthropology's heterotopias in colonial East Timor’, Journal of Pacific History 47, 3 (2012): 263–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the essays recently collected in Tappe, Oliver, ed., ‘Frictions and fictions: Intercultural encounters and frontier imaginaries in upland Southeast Asia’, special issue, Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 16, 4 (2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 For example, Anderson, Colonial pathologies; Kramer, The blood of government. Recent collections include Douglas, Bronwen and Ballard, Chris, eds., ‘Race, place and civilization: Colonial encounters and governance in Greater Oceania’, special issue, Journal of Pacific History 47, 3 (2012)Google Scholar; and Skott, Christina, ed., ‘Europe and the Malay world’, special issue, Indonesia and the Malay World 42, 123 (2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Douglas, Bronwen and Ballard, Chris, eds., Foreign bodies: Oceania and the science of race, 1750–1880 (Canberra: ANU ePress, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An earlier sociological analysis is Hirschman, Charles, ‘The making of race in colonial Malaya: Political economy and racial ideology’, Sociological Forum 1, 2 (1986): 330–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Roque, Ricardo, Headhunting and colonialism: Anthropology and the circulation of human skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Howes, Hilary, The race question in Oceania: A.B. Meyer and Otto Finsch between metropolitan theory and field experience, 1865–1914 (Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang, 2013)Google Scholar; Manickam, Sandra Khor, Taming the wild: Aborigines and racial knowledge in colonial Malaya (Singapore: NUS Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Firpo, Christina Elizabeth, The uprooted: Race, children, and imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sysling, Fenneke, Racial science and human diversity in colonial Indonesia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

14 See Kiong-Tong, Chee, Identity and ethnic relations in Southeast Asia: Racializing Chineseness (New York: Springer, 2010)Google Scholar.

15 Anderson, Warwick, ‘Traveling white’, in Re-orienting whiteness, ed. Ellinghaus, Kat, Carey, Jane and Boucher, Leigh (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 66Google Scholar.

16 For example, Saraswati, L. Ayu, Seeing beauty, sensing race in transnational Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Gelpke, J.H.F. Sollewijn, ‘On the origin of the name Papua’, Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 149, 2 (1993): 318–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Douglas, Bronwen, Science, voyages, and encounters in Oceania, 1511–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the history of early classifications of Oceanic peoples, including French Dumont d'Urville's famous Melanesia/Polynesia/Micronesia divide, see Thomas, Nicholas, ‘The force of ethnology: Origins and significance of the Melanesia/Polynesia division’, Current Anthropology 30, 1 (1989): 27–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Buschmann, Rainer F., Anthropology's global histories: The ethnographic frontier in German New Guinea, 1870–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 4–6Google Scholar.

19 On this historical uncertainty on geographical naming, leading also to the designation ‘Indonesia’, see Jones, Russell, ‘Earl, Logan, and “Indonesia”’, Archipel 6, 6 (1973): 93–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Spate, Oskar H.K., The Spanish Lake (Canberra: ANU Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and Buschmann, Rainer F., Iberian visions of the Pacific Ocean, 1507–1899 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014)Google Scholar.

21 For critical studies of the notion of ‘island laboratories’, see MacLeod, Roy and Rehbock, Philip F., eds., Darwin's laboratory: Evolutionary theory and natural history in the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Edmond, Rod and Smith, Vanessa, eds., Islands in history and representation (New York: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar; Anderson, Warwick, ‘Racial hybridity, physical anthropology, and human biology in the colonial laboratories of the United States’, Current Anthropology 53, S5 (2012): S95-S207CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sivasundaram, Sujit, Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the bounds of an Indian Ocean colony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Wallace, Alfred Russel, The Malay Archipelago: The land of the orang-utan, and the bird of paradise. A narrative of travel, with studies of man and nature (London: Macmillan, 1869), p. 1Google Scholar.

23 See Camerini, Jane R., ‘Evolution, biogeography, and maps: An early history of Wallace's Line’, Isis 84 (1993): 700–727Google ScholarPubMed; Vetter, Jeremy, ‘Wallace's other line: Human biogeography and field practice in the eastern colonial tropics’, Journal of the History of Biology 39, 1 (2006): 89–123CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roque, Headhunting and colonialism, pp. 153–9.

24 Chris Ballard, ‘“Oceanic negroes”: Early British anthropology of Papuans, 1820–1869’, in Douglas and Ballard, Foreign bodies, pp. 157–201. On the Oceanic phase of anthropology see Urry, James, ‘Making sense of diversity and complexity: The ethnological context and consequences of the Torres Strait Expedition and the Oceanic phase in British anthropology, 1890–1935’, in Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition, ed. Herle, Anita and Rouse, Sandra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 201–33Google Scholar; and Buschmann, Anthropology's global histories, pp. 154–70.

25 Young, Robert J.C., Colonial desire: Hybridity in theory, culture, and race (New York: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar. See also Blanckaert, Claude, ‘Of monstrous métis? Hybridity, fear of miscegenation, and patriotism from Buffon to Paul Broca’, in The color of liberty: Histories of race in France, ed. Peabody, Sue and Stovall, Tyler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 42–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See Douglas, Bronwen, ‘Confronting “hybrids” in Oceania: Field experience, materiality and the science of race in France’, Revue d'Histoire des Sciences Humaines 27 (2015): 27–63Google Scholar.

26 For early Iberian discourses on ‘purity of blood’ and mixing in Asia, see Torres, Max S. Hering, Martinez, M. Elena and Nirenberg, David, eds., Race and blood in the Iberian world (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012)Google Scholar.

27 Anderson, Warwick, ‘Hybridity, race, and science: The voyage of the Zaca, 1934–35’, Isis 103 (2012): 229–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anderson, ‘Racial hybridity, physical anthropology, and human biology’.

28 Anderson, Warwick, ‘Leprosy and citizenship’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 6 (1998): 707–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 See also Anderson, Colonial pathologies; and Reyes, Raquel A.G., Love, passion, and patriotism: Sexuality and the Philippine Propaganda Movement, 1882–1892 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

30 Smail, John R.W., ‘On the possibility of an autonomous history of Southeast Asia’, Journal of Southeast Asian History 2, 2 (1961): 101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in Marxism and the interpretation of cultures, ed. Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 271–313CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 These issues are discussed more extensively in Stoler, Ann Laura, Along the archival grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. See also Anderson, Warwick, ‘On the beach in the Marquesas: Weedy historicities and prosthetic futures’, in Pacific futures: Past and present, ed. Anderson, Warwick, Johnson, Miranda and Brookes, Barbara (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

33 Anderson, Warwick and Pols, Hans, ‘Scientific patriotism: Medical science and national self-fashioning in Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, 1 (2012): 93–113CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The critical study of the Chinese nationalist invocation of Peking Man is exemplary: see Sautman, Barry, ‘Peking Man and the politics of paleoanthropological nationalism in China’, Journal of Asian Studies 60, 1 (2001): 95–124CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cheng, Yinghong, ‘“Is Peking Man still our ancestor?”: Genetics, anthropology, and the politics of racial nationalism in China’, Journal of Asian Studies 76, 3 (2017): 575–602CrossRefGoogle Scholar.