This volume examines three interrelated aspects of the history of British India: race, the disciplining institution, and attempts by the colonized to imagine states of freedom. They deal with sites as diverse as the prison, the family, the classroom, the playing field and children's literature. The essays confront the ideological, social and political ramifications of the fact that even as metropolitan prisons and schools shifted their attention from the body to the confined 'soul', colonial disciplinary institutions ensured that race was firmly attached to the body and its habits. They also engage the historiography that has sought to underline the challenges of reconciling Michel Foucault and Edward Said. They ask whether the liberating possibilities of the racialized-and-embodied 'native' self were confined to inversions and rearrangements of given normative hierarchies, or if we can occasionally glimpse radical departures and alternative configurations of power.
Exploring the fundamental question of how a new discipline comes into being, this groundbreaking book tells the story of the emergence of native ethnology in Imperial Japan, a “one nation” social science devoted to the study of the Japanese people. Roughly corresponding to folklore studies or ethnography in the West, this social science was developed outside the academy over the first half of the twentieth century by a diverse group of intellectuals, local dignitaries, and hobbyists. Alan Christy traces the paths of the distinctive individuals who founded minzokugaku, how theory and practice developed, and how many previously unknown figures contributed to the growth of the discipline. Despite its humble beginnings, native ethnology today is a fixture in Japanese intellectual life, offering arguments and evidence about the popular, as opposed to elite, foundations of Japanese culture. Speaking directly to fundamental questions in anthropology, this authoritative and engaging book will become a standard not only for the field of native ethnology but also as a major work in broader modern Japanese cultural and intellectual history.
After the conquest of Mexico, colonial authorities attempted to enforce Christian beliefs among indigenous peoples—a project they envisioned as spiritual warfare. The Invisible War assesses this immense but dislocated project by examining all known efforts in Central Mexico to obliterate native devotions of Mesoamerican origin between the 1530s and the late eighteenth century. The author's innovative interpretation of these efforts is punctuated by three events: the creation of an Inquisition tribunal in Mexico in 1571; the native rebellion of Tehuantepec in 1660; and the emergence of eerily modern strategies for isolating idolaters, teaching Spanish to natives, and obtaining medical proof of sorcery from the 1720s onwards. Rather than depicting native devotions solely from the viewpoint of their colonial codifiers, this book rescues indigenous perspectives on their own beliefs. This is achieved by an analysis of previously unknown or rare ritual texts that circulated in secrecy in Nahua and Zapotec communities through an astute appropriation of European literacy. Tavárez contends that native responses gave rise to a colonial archipelago of faith in which local cosmologies merged insights from Mesoamerican and European beliefs. In the end, idolatry eradication inspired distinct reactions: while Nahua responses focused on epistemological dissent against Christianity, Zapotec strategies privileged confrontations in defense of native cosmologies.
"A powerful and arresting portrayal of the lives of members of a contemporary American Indian community. . . . [It] challenges both psychiatric and anthropological understandings while providing what is arguably the finest cultural account of depression currently available."—Byron J. Good, co-editor of Pain as Human Experience
This book examines interactions between Britain and India through the analytical framework of the production and circulation of knowledge throughout the long eighteenth century. Disciplined Subjects is one of the first works to analyse the imperial school curriculum, and the ways in which it shaped and influenced Indian subjectivity. The author focuses on the endeavours of the colonial government, missionaries and native stakeholders in determining the physical, material and intellectual content of institutional learning in India. Further, the volume compares the changes in pedagogical practices, and textbooks in schools in Britain and colonial Bengal, and its subsequent repercussions on the psyche and identity of the learners. Drawing on a host of primary sources in the UK and India, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern history, education, sociology and South Asian studies.
This groundbreaking multidisciplinary book presents significant essays on historical indigenous violence in Latin America from Tierra del Fuego to central Mexico. The collection explores those uniquely human motivations and environmental variables that have led to the native peoples of Latin America engaging in warfare and ritual violence since antiquity. Based on an American Anthropological Association symposium, this book collects twelve contributions from sixteen authors, all of whom are scholars at the forefront of their fields of study. All of the chapters advance our knowledge of the causes, extent, and consequences of indigenous violenceÑincluding ritualized violenceÑin Latin America. Each major historical/cultural group in Latin America is addressed by at least one contributor. Incorporating the results of dozens of years of research, this volume documents evidence of warfare, violent conflict, and human sacrifice from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, including incidents that occurred before European contact. Together the chapters present a convincing argument that warfare and ritual violence have been woven into the fabric of life in Latin America since remote antiquity. For the first time, expert subject-area work on indigenous violenceÑarchaeological, osteological, ethnographic, historical, and forensicÑhas been assembled in one volume. Much of this work has heretofore been dispersed across various countries and languages. With its collection into one English-language volume, all future writersÑregardless of their discipline or point of viewÑwill have a source to consult for further research. CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction Richard J. Chacon and RubŽn G. Mendoza 1.ÊÊStatus Rivalry and Warfare in the Development and Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization Matt OÕMansky and Arthur A. Demarest 2.ÊÊAztec Militarism and Blood Sacrifice: The Archaeology and Ideology of Ritual Violence RubŽn G. Mendoza 3.ÊÊTerritorial Expansion and Primary State Formation in Oaxaca, Mexico Charles S. Spencer 4.ÊÊImages of Violence in Mesoamerican Mural Art Donald McVicker 5.ÊÊCircum-Caribbean Chiefly Warfare Elsa M. Redmond 6.ÊÊConflict and Conquest in Pre-Hispanic Andean South America: Archaeological Evidence from Northern Coastal Peru John W. Verano 7.ÊÊThe Inti Raymi Festival among the Cotacachi and Otavalo of Highland Ecuador: Blood for the Earth Richard J. Chacon, Yamilette Chacon, and Angel Guandinango 8.ÊÊUpper Amazonian Warfare Stephen Beckerman and James Yost 9.ÊÊComplexity and Causality in Tupinamb‡ Warfare William BalŽe 10.ÊÊHunter-GatherersÕ Aboriginal Warfare in Western Chaco Marcela Mendoza 11.ÊÊThe Struggle for Social Life in Fuego-Patagonia Alfredo Prieto and Rodrigo C‡rdenas 12.ÊÊEthical Considerations and Conclusions Regarding Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence in Latin America Richard J. Chacon and RubŽn G. Mendoza References About the Contributors Index
Aileen Moreton-Robinson and the contributors to this important volume deploy incisive critique and analytical acumen to propose new directions for critical Indigenous studies in the First World. Leading scholars offer thought-provoking essays on the central epistemological, theoretical, political, and pedagogical questions and debates that constitute the discipline of Indigenous studies, including a brief history of the discipline.
