LAND AND LABOR REGIMES In her essay, “The Price of Un/Freedom,” Tania Murray Li shows how contemporary oil palm plantation labor in Indonesia paradoxically reproduces, often under the rubric of market “freedom,” key features of Dutch colonial labor regimes. Labor regimes are the assemblages that set the conditions of work. They include materials, spaces, schedules, tools, food, conditions of social reproduction, and the rules of reward and punishment. Labor regimes establish the axes of freedom and “unfreedom,” which Li works out in careful ethnographic and historical detail from 1725 to the present. Too much freedom leaves labor overly mobile, and unprotected in terms of the conditions of social reproduction; too little freedom leaves stunted lives of indentured or contract labor, forms resembling slavery. Li shows that the line separating freedom from unfreedom is never straight or easily traced. She documents resurgent forms of contract labor in the contemporary age of free-market Indonesian palm oil production that eerily replicate earlier periods of forced labor. Her work establishes that possessing an excess of market freedom to sell one's labor can be as pernicious and destructive to human flourishing as unfreedom, given the insistent demands of calculating bodily endurance against a daily wage, and the family separations, community failures, and other costs the new “free” labor market seems to entail. Li shows that an effective and humane balance of freedom and unfreedom is a feat only rarely and fleetingly achieved. In most cases, her anthropological history demonstrates, colonial overseers, New Order administrators, and “free-market” employers alike succeed in converting people into landless or otherwise dependent peasants.
R. Alan Covey and Kylie E. Quave interpret an earlier colonial regime, the Spanish rule of the Inca heartland surrounding Cuzco after the conquest of the 1530s. Spain transformed the Inca landscape and economy, introducing new crops, animals, and systems of labor to push flows of wealth to the mining center of Potosí. Transforming the land was accompanied by converting landholding Incas into dependent peasants, reliant on a new colonial anthropology. Under Viceroy Francisco de Toledo this effort assumed its most rationalized form, called the visita general. In it, indigenous residential communities (ayllu) were relocated, carefully counted, and reassigned from sacred lands to Christian Indian towns, a transformation marked by new labor regimes and new tariff duties. But as communal territories were transformed into properties, “excess” lands were sold off, almost exclusively to Spaniards. Covey and Quave examine specific districts a generation after Toledo's intervention and discover that, while the conversion of Inca collectives into Christian towns mostly failed, the Incas’ conversion from cosmopolitans into peasants was an all too tragic success.
VISUAL POLITICS Photographs are documents “of” something but they are also themselves events and actants that take part in producing the very worlds they are supposed to depict. Simeon Koole's essay, “Photography as Event,” engages a set of photographs taken by British soldiers in early twentieth-century Tibet, in a precarious moment when Tibet was being imagined and variously claimed by Chinese, Russian, and British agents, along with a resurgent Dalai Lama and Tibetan nationalism. Koole explores how power lay not just in “taking” photographs, but was resident across the surface of the image. In at least some photographic events, Tibetans played performative parts that led to new possibilities for self-understanding and new imaginaries of their relations to the British, the Chinese, and even to Tibet itself. Tibetans suffered an “excess of history,” Koole contends, in the form of their long-enduring loss of sovereignty to a series of rotating foreign powers. In photographs and photographic events, though, the possible imagined futures of Tibet's relation to foreign others became more opaque, and less determined.
Sujit Sivasundaram attends to the visual politics of empire in the busy port of Colombo, Sri Lanka in around the same period. The British were keenly aware of the import of visual representations of imperial power—thus their employ of the “Visual Instruction Committee” and an entire corps of imperial geographers to establish the desired straight lines of colonial (and linear) governmentality. Sivasundaram shows that imperial photography was especially invested in representations of connectivity and busy, prosperous commerce. He takes us close into the notion of connectivity to see how it was visually composed through particular views of the port, of exchanges at the dock, or from the sea looking ashore. Importantly, the essay teaches, there was always something more than what was intended in any given photograph, an addendum that “leaks out.” Photographs always carry a surfeit that is unaccounted for.
NATIONAL EMOTIONS Emotions and affect play central roles in making and maintaining national and other affiliations, yet we still understand far too little about how they work, how they are variously performed and interpreted, or exactly what they communicate. In the contribution by Lori A. Allen, the role of affect is officially concealed in transnational investigative commissions sent to Palestine, yet it is central to their work. Looking at three different delegations and their records from 1919–2001, Allen discovers a critical disjuncture: while such commissions claim to be seeking facts and grounded legal claims, they end up mostly seeking and registering emotions. These are variously judged as authentic, or not, as the commissions seek to reach diplomatic conclusions or recommendations. Reading affect, then, serves as a technology of rule, because subjects are pressed to offer calibrated performances of proper emotion—not too fanatical, or supra-national, yet also not too subdued or orderly, and devoid of patriotic fervor. The weight placed on Arabs to perform “reasonable political subjects,” measured as much in the currency of affect as in reason, anchored a hierarchic “politics of immediation,” in Allen's wonderful phrase.
Andrew Gilbert considers a different paradox of international intervention, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. What is the nature of a democracy that is imposed from without, and how is it put in place through practices of publicity? Gilbert investigates a compelling contradiction: the building of a democratic state through the violation of popular sovereignty, as embodied in the Office of the High Representative. He moves in close to offer a ground-level ethnographic view of tropes like “security,” “joining Europe,” and most importantly, “the people” as they are variously animated and activated. He calls our attention to the ambivalent status attributed to “the people,” for example, when that abstract denomination is pronounced by unelected non-national officials. Gilbert ultimately arrives at a surprising provocation, seeing such contradictions less as a derailment than as a motor of pragmatic political action.
Biometric measures of race also carried a powerful emotional charge, not only at the end of the nineteenth century but also today, at least in certain parts of the world. Projit Mukharji examines the career of so-called Aryanism in Bengal. Brought to South Asia by British colonial science, it soon acquired its own public life outside the bounds of academe. Through the prism of what Mukharji calls “vernacular anthropology,” upper-class Bengalis (and later Hindu nationalists) invented themselves as “true Aryans.” Yet this raciology spurred countermoves of folkloric or aesthetic non-Aryanism, most forcefully in attempts since the 1950s to culturally link Bengal to the history of ancient Egypt; thus the title, “the Bengali Pharaoh.” Importantly, Mukharji calls our attention to the trajectories of discredited social science models as they continue to thrive in their public and vernacular afterlives.
HISTORY AND SOCIOLOGY: CONDITIONS OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY Like other networks, academic disciplines can be proximate or even contiguous without significant engagement. Extradisciplinarity is without a doubt the most common outcome of academic forays across fields, perhaps increasingly so in an age of ever-narrowing specialization. George Steinmetz's analysis of the histories of interdisciplinarity between History and Sociology as they were constituted in France and Germany is for that reason as timely as it is vital. He shows the historical emergence of the two disciplines as social fields, crosscut by subfields, emplotted in meta-fields, and permeated by national styles and the politics and power dynamics of specific periods and authoritative figures. Working at a wide-angle frame of the long twentieth century, Steinmetz focuses on two especially productive instances of interdisciplinarity in France: first, the interwar Annales school and, second, the constellation of scholars and projects that emerged around Pierre Bourdieu from 1980 forward. Steinmetz explores these flashes of monumental interdisciplinary “flourishing” to see what distinguished them, and to learn why they worked. His grand tour of the twentieth-century continental academy offers crucial lessons for the present, not least for readers and writers of CSSH who already have high stakes wagered at this table.
