Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference 9780822391630

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un/common cultures

kamal a visweswaran

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Un/common Cultures racism and the rearticulation of cultural difference Duke University Press Durham and London 2010

∫ 2010 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ! Typeset in Carter and Cone Galliard with Magma Compact display type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data and republication acknowledgments appear on the last printed page of this book.

¡ d e d i c at i o n For my mother, Carol Ruth Visweswaran (1938–72) my father, G. Visweswaran my aunt, Judith Ellen Lumbert and my uncles: Pranab Chatterjee Ken Vallis (1929–97) Porfirio Miranda (1932–92)

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¡ We live in the era of the common man. When he takes an uncommon stand, the era is compelled to change. —baba amte, December 1990 (on satyagraha to halt construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam, Gujarat)

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¡ Contents

acknowledgments

ix

introduction Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Di√erence 1 1. Wild West Anthropology and the Disciplining of

Gender 18 2. Race and the Culture of Anthropology

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3. The Interventions of Culture: Claude Lévi-Strauss

and the Internationalization of the Modern Concept of Race 74 4. Is There A Structural Analysis of Racism?

Louis Dumont and the Caste School of Race Relations 103 5. India in South Africa: Counter-genealogies for a Subal-

tern Sociology 131 6. Legacies of Culture, Languages of the State

164

7. Gendered States: Rethinking Culture as a Site of South

Asian Human-Rights Work 189

epilogue The Tra≈c in Social Movements: Narmada, Bhopal, Texas 213 notes 227 bibliography 283 index 319

¡ Acknowledgments

chic ago, circ a 1960 Books, like any form of labor, emerge from personal histories and relationships. I moved in and out of worlds at an early age because multiple worlds were somehow always present in our home. Perhaps the only way I can explain the particular set of personal conjunctures and intellectual orientations this collection of essays represents is by saying a little about the worlds left to me as legacy of my growing years. Hull House, one of the settlement houses set up by Jane Addams in the nineteenth century, was in its last years when my parents arrived in Chicago, in 1960, to become two of its social workers. My mother didn’t have far to travel, as her hometown was only a three-hour drive from the big city. My father had a harder time of it; fresh from India, he hated the cold weather and the food, but liked the people and the work. One of his first assignments was to work with a group of teenage Puerto Rican boys. My father tried to convince them to call him by his nickname, Vishu, but the kids mischievously or defiantly called him ‘‘Pichu’’ instead. Much later he discovered, with some amusement, the meaning of pichu in Puerto Rican Spanish. My father’s mentor was Kenneth Vallis, a big, tall Chicago native who was going to show him the ropes. Ken used to stop by the settlement house every day to drink up the orange juice that my father made with devotion and a bit of desperation. My father had been raised a vegetarian and was just learning to navigate non-vegetarian food and bland American cuisine. He didn’t eat much in those early years, and orange juice must have been a major part of his diet. It wasn’t something you could get easily in South India, oranges being scarce and expensive. Perhaps, too, the texture and color of Minute Maid coming out of a frozen can reminded my father a little of Madras and the freshly pulped mangos that couldn’t be had in the United States. So he was irked when Ken, day after day, consumed all

acknowledgments

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the orange juice. He tried waiting until Ken left for his rounds to make it. He tried hiding it. But Ken was an OJ fiend and always managed to find the juice wherever it was stashed in the fridge. My father finally worked up the nerve to confront Ken, who glowered and picked him up by his shirt collar. Then he laughed and said, ‘‘I wondered when you were going to say something about it.’’ Ken laid o√ the orange juice (for a while), and he and my father became fast friends. Uncle Ken, as we called him, wound up doing lots of things, and for many years was a political consultant on African American issues in Washington, D.C., where he settled with his wife and daughters. When I left for college he counseled me not to believe most of anything I read in the newspapers. Porfirio Miranda, another of my father’s friends, had grown up in Hull House as the son of Mexican immigrants. He later became one of the settlement-house organizers who worked with troubled youth in the area. ‘‘Perry,’’ as he was known, was older and liked to say that he had ‘‘raised’’ my father, had given him a real education. Perry and my father stayed close when both of them eventually moved to California. Uncle Perry lived in Malibu Beach, and we went to visit him there a couple of times. But more often he’d come to see us. Once, in the mid-1970s, Uncle Perry was on TV—he had exposed a scandal concerning the Greater Los Angeles Community Action Agency (glacaa) and had been interviewed on 60 Minutes. Soon after the program aired, glacaa was shut down, and Uncle Perry himself was fired from the Chicano Studies Department at the University of California–Los Angeles (ucla). Although Uncle Perry was convinced that his firing was political, that people in his department were unhappy about his appearance on 60 Minutes, he did admit that he’d had several extensions on his dissertation and had been late in submitting it. Despite Uncle Perry’s woes, there were always parties in the house when he came to visit; he was a gourmet and liked to cook. I usually hung out in the kitchen to help him. When I was ten, and it was long past my bedtime, he taught me how to make ceviche by marinating fish and onion in salt and lemon juice. After he left ucla, Uncle Perry put in several years working for the United States Agency for International Development (usaid) in Egypt and Syria. Pranab Chatterjee was one of my father’s first roommates at the settlement house. He and my father both came from modest Brahmin families, familiar with both aspiration and penury. Pranab, a poet at heart, also liked to cook, and was a little less into revolution than his friends. Weekends, Ken would host parties for the Hull x

House crowd at his mother’s house, on the South Side. There, a fuddled Pranab might be escorted to the tub to sober up; he might emerge hours later reciting poetry, sometimes his own, and sometimes in Bengali. When I was two, Uncle Pranab gave me a book of Salvador Dali paintings, and when I was twelve, he presented me with two slim volumes of his published poems. Having won a prestigious poetry award as a young man, he regretted that he hadn’t pursued a literary career in Bengali. But he went on to write a monograph on Cleveland, titled Local Leadership in Black Communities, which was always on the bookshelf at home, and, more recently, a critique of the social welfare system, titled Repackaging the Welfare State. Over the years, he and I have gone a few rounds on the Chicago School of Sociology, and he usually prevails, having received his doctorate from that institution. When my parents married in 1961, they were an interracial couple and Chicago was still a segregated city. They decided to look for housing in Hyde Park, thinking it would be more open-minded because the University of Chicago was there. (My aunt tells me that this was the time the university was buying up all the land in the area, though the community still had the reputation of being a mixed one.) My parents, however, discovered that Hyde Park was no more open to them than were other parts of the city. They filled out one apartment application after another, and everything would proceed normally until they arrived to see the place; then the landlords would invent excuses, saying that the apartment was no longer available or had just been rented. The tenth time it happened, at a building on Dorchester Street, my mother had had enough. She worked with teenage girls on the South Side; people in the local branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) knew and liked her. At the building on Dorchester Street my mother told the apartment manager that if he didn’t rent them the apartment, she would have the naacp sue him for racial discrimination. They got the apartment.

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acknowledgments

Another map for reading these essays can be located in the pedagogical imperatives to rethink the history of anthropology in light of the critiques of decolonization and the emergence of critical race theory. Chapters 1 and 2 originated in the graduate core course on ‘‘American Anthropological Traditions’’ I taught at the New School for Social Research in 1993 and 1994, and parts of chapters 3 and 6 emerged

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acknowledgments

from discussions in the required ‘‘Introduction to Social Anthropology’’ graduate seminar I co-taught with Charlie Hale at the University of Texas–Austin, in 1999 and 2000. Fellowships at the Chicago Humanities Institute (1996–97) and the Radcli√e Institute for Advanced Study (2001–2002) allowed me to complete several of the essays in the book. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and Ken Wissoker, of Duke University Press, for their critical advice and suggestions. I am particularly indebted to Nahum Chandler for his readings of chapters 4 and 5; his deep knowledge of W. E. B. Du Bois’s work not only directed me to the correspondence between Du Bois and Gunnar Myrdal, but helped me to clarify my argument (even if I haven’t always had the sense to follow his advice). I am also grateful to the late Claude Lévi-Strauss for agreeing to an interview in December 1997, and to (the late) Bernard Cohn, McKim Marriot, and Lloyd and Suzanne Rudolph for sharing with me their thoughts on the New Nations project at the University of Chicago, which I discuss in chapter 6. I thank Michaeline Crichlow for her comments on the introduction, and Raj Patel, Lynn Stephens, Paul Amar, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Bhaskar Sarkar, and Swati Chattopadhyay for helpful feedback on the epilogue, a version of which I presented at the International Subaltern-Popular Conference in Cairo, April 2008.

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xii

introduction

¡ Un/common Cultures Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Di√erence

disciplines and punishment Feed me/Eat me: Anthropology Help me/Hurt me: Sociology —bruce nauman, ‘‘Anthro-Socio,’’ 1992

In a space like the Tate Modern in London, Bruce Nauman’s video installation ‘‘Anthro-Socio’’ plays across several televisions, distributed through di√erent rooms that project color or black-and-white versions of Man’s appeals to feed or eat him, help or hurt him. The e√ect is to imbed the viewer in a structure of address that is at once intimate and ubiquitous, disturbing yet seductive. Nauman forces the viewer to enter the installation as a participant-observer, then literally turns that experience on its head as he confronts the viewer, as an alienated spectator, with upside-down images of the opera singer Rinde Eckert’s revolving head (‘‘Rinde Spinning’’ or ‘‘Rinde Facing Camera’’) sonorously exhorting ‘‘Feed me/Eat me: Anthropology’’ . . . ‘‘Help me/Hurt me: Sociology.’’ The multiply positioned televisions and projection surfaces, all playing the same thing, but in di√erent tonalities, speeds, and chronometric loops, produce an e√ect that is at once poetic, arrhythmic, and cacophonic—as if one is listening to a broken-down choir or a Gregorian dirge. And indeed, it is di≈cult, moving through the space, to distinguish the varied visual and aural forms of enunciation from the overall ‘‘mass e√ect’’ the installation is designed to produce. It seems impossible to imagine even disciplinary knowledge without the intercession of the media form.∞ For Nauman stages a reflection not only on the mass-

un/common cultures

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mediated forms of culture, but also on the mass-mediated explanations of culture that announce themselves as anthropology and sociology. Nauman’s deft use of parody reduces disciplinary organicisms like ‘‘culture’’ or ‘‘society’’ to Durkheimian or Lévi-Straussian functions: feed:eat :: help:hurt. It is as if the disciplines, as a paradoxical success of their mass mediation, had doubled back on themselves, yielding productive and populist displacements of their central concepts. It is with these forms of production and displacement of un/common culture that these essays are concerned. The possibilities for writing any kind of intellectual history have changed dramatically since Foucault first propounded the idea of a ‘‘history of the present,’’ more than thirty years ago, in Discipline and Punish.≤ While psychoanalysis and ethnology have been the touchstone ‘‘counter-sciences’’ of Foucault’s critique of History, his understanding of a kind of ‘‘anthropology’’ as both foundational to the human sciences and disintegrating within it may help us to understand the present moment. For ‘‘anthropology constitutes the fundamental arrangement that governed and controlled the path of philosophic thought . . . but it is disintegrating before our eyes, since we are beginning to recognize and denounce in it, in a critical mode, both the forgetfulness of the opening that made it possible and a stubborn obstacle standing obstinately in the way of an imminent form of thought.’’≥ How then, should we understand the task of writing intellectual history when ‘‘historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge,’’ when ‘‘they increase with every transformation and never cease, in turn, to break with themselves,’’ when ‘‘the great problem presented by such historical analyses is . . . one of transformations that serve as new foundations, the rebuilding of foundations’’?∂ In Un/common Cultures I attempt a ‘‘history of the present that is an attempt to uncover the structure of knowledge at the brink of another structure of transformation.’’ It is an attempt to write through disciplinary historicisms of culture, and thus ‘‘to write of a present aperture which is almost history; less an e√ort to write beyond than to signal a possible becoming.’’∑ Un/common Cultures lies at the cusp of disciplinary breakage and transformation overtaking not just anthropology, but all of the human sciences. Although I engage the disciplines of anthropology and sociology through the practices of close reading, I am not seeking to write a truer disciplinary history of the culture concept. Rather, I understand a history of the present to be self-consciously located in the field of 2

3

introduction

power relations and political struggle. I begin with the social fact and continuing existence of racism, not with its disappearance. I am thus attentive to shifts in the framing of the culture concept as the definitional base of relativism and antidote to racism. I seek to apply the genealogical method to race and culture as analytic objects as they travel though and are lodged against political fields. My attempt is to track points of their emergence as a result of substitutions, transpositions, displacements, and reversals.∏ I examine the ways in which ‘‘culture’’ often substitutes or stands in for race, and seek to track the displacements in fields of knowledge and power that occur when race decenters or dislodges culture. I examine what happens when race is moved to the center of social theory and when culture performs the work of racial di√erence. The tension between these two processes scores this book. My work in this volume is thus more invested in ‘‘anti-positivities’’ than in positivities. I am less concerned with understanding ‘‘culture as a set of ideas,’’ with the work of forming cultural descriptions, than with how ‘‘ideas and descriptions about cultures’’ circulate; that is, with understanding the kinds of racializing work that ideas about culture perform. Culture is increasingly produced as an e√ect of the circulation of its descriptions. Such ‘‘cultural e√ects’’ mark a primary sense in which we might understand the production of un/common cultures. Therefore, our task is not to understand how culture operates, but to understand how explanations of culture function. These are not completely separable tasks; indeed, the latter is always constitutive of the former. Yet it is the former that has been taken as the normative object and work of the discipline. My objective is to understand how culture is staged as a performative or as an ‘‘e√ect’’ wherein disciplinary debates about culture are as much a discursive point of articulation for processes of globalization (like the ‘‘New States’’ theory of cultural modernization, which I describe in chapter 6) as are popular cultural (or populist cultural) notions (about, for example, Islam and human rights, as discussed in chapter 7). This necessitates a strategy for following the points of application through the substitutions, transpositions, displacements, and reversals in debates as varied as the attempts of Indian Dalits to have casteism understood as a form of racism in Durban (see chapter 5) or the use of relativist notions of culture to justify liberal humanrights intervention (see chapter 7). These essays about Elsie Clews Parsons, Alice Fletcher, Franz Boas, W. E. B. Du Bois, B. R. Ambedkar, Cli√ord Geertz, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Dumont, and

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un/common cultures

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M. N. Srinivas enact a genealogical grid for making sense of the flow of ideas about culture in a history of the present. The provocation for most of the essays in this volume emerged from two decades of graduate teaching in which I sought to tie the history of anthropology and the generation of its central concepts to the legacies of American and European imperialism. As I moved race and racism to the center of analysis, ‘‘culture’’ appeared to be less a solution to racism than a synonym for race, in contrapuntal relation with it. In one sense, these essays perform the simple act of asking what we make of the history of the discipline when its central defining concept, culture, is bracketed, and race is foregrounded. Yet an important argument I make in these essays is that the latenineteenth-century consolidation of the culture concept in anthropology was ultimately a recidivist one, producing multiple ‘‘culture e√ects’’ which continue to perform the work of race, circulating at local, national, and transnational levels. A revitalized anthropological analysis lies not in the attempt to hone a better ‘‘culture concept’’ or even in laudable calls for ‘‘public anthropology,’’ but in recognizing that the recidivist nature of culture (or what some have called ‘‘the death’’ of culture) requires a genealogical method that can identify the ways in which racism is rearticulated through the enunciation of cultural di√erence.π In my view, the dislocation and relocation of disciplinary objects such as gender, sexuality, race, culture, caste, and class can best be mapped through forms of what I will call ‘‘a≈liative interdisciplinarity.’’ As Scott Michaelson and David Johnson suggest, such interdisciplinarity would not be possible without ‘‘anthropology’’ in its broadest sense, and yet interdisciplinarity ultimately makes no di√erence to disciplinary thinking, because anthropology exists.∫ These essays on Indian sociology and American and French anthropology, the disciplinary formations that have most shaped my intellectual orientation, were written over the course of the last decade, a time of transition in the economic and political order of things, and in the forms of social theory developed to describe the changing political order, at once both created by and enabling of the emergence of globalization. They aim to dislodge ‘‘culture’’ from its received meanings in disciplinary formations so that the histories of how culture emerges as flashpoints of political mobilization and intellectual debate can be apprehended across time and space. However, my commitment lies not in narrating truer disciplinary histories, but in tracking how analytic objects such as ‘‘culture,’’ 4

5

introduction

‘‘caste,’’ or ‘‘race’’ circulate across and through disciplines, places, and political formations. What interests me is how ‘‘race’’ and theories about it travel, and how gender and sexuality change our understanding of disciplinary objects like ‘‘society’’ or ‘‘culture.’’ Globalization not only produces a shift in what we take to be an analytic object, but also enables the displacement and relocation of apparently stable analytic objects like ‘‘caste’’ or ‘‘race’’ to new contexts. For example, the attempts by India’s Dalits at the 2001 World Conference on Racism to form analytic analogies between distinct forms of oppression to assert that casteism is like racism, or attempts by Palestinians at the same venue to assert that the Israeli state and its occupied territories represent a form of apartheid, illustrate how accounts of race and racism travel, and how the processes of dislocation and transposition have helped to reshape new political alliances and possibilities. Un/common Cultures begins and ends with a critique of feminist universalism, the assumption that gendering cultural analysis inevitably worked toward relativist rather than racist or culturalist stereotypes. The framing chapters address what might be called the ‘‘gender question’’ of culturalism. Although they cannot resolve the question of why gender relations are so frequently the site of culturalist formulations, they do follow the production of racialized ‘‘woman questions’’ in the history of Americanist anthropology, and the way this strain of particularly feminist anthropology is imbedded in feminist legal practice and human rights discourses. While the first essay scrutinizes the imbedding of racialized forms of gender in a relativist notion of culture, the last essay, in a quite di√erent tenor, describes how immigration and legal studies lay claim to this notion of culture, describing circuits of culturalism in interpenetrating levels of juridicality through the roles expert witnesses and anthropologists play in marking cultural practices detrimental to women in human-rights activism. There is no doubt that histories of imperialism are imbedded in the very processes through which intellectual concepts emerged to make sense of society. Thus, while chapter 1 explores how the conquest of the Americas played out through an ‘‘Indian question’’ imbricated in the emergence of cultural relativism, chapters 2, 4, and 5 explore how the ‘‘Negro question’’ plays out in disciplinary discussions of culture. Taken together these essays enact a tracking of displacements between the ‘‘Woman question,’’ the ‘‘Indian question,’’ and the ‘‘Negro question’’ across national and disciplinary fields. These essays thus interrogate the ways in which the modern an-

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thropological notion of culture and an internationalized notion of race were inevitably linked. They describe how race works its way through the national disciplinary traditions of American anthropology, French anthropology, and Indian sociology, as well as international institutions such as unesco or the unhcr. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the role unesco played in the internationalization of the modern concept of race. Chapters 3 through 7 pose India as the site for the working through of debates about race and culture. India is a rhizomatic node for the circulation of debates about culture and culturalist discourses. Whether it is Claude Lévi-Strauss’s travels in India and Pakistan refracted in his melancholic view of cultural loss and decline (chapter 3); Louis Dumont’s use of India to reflect more deeply on the character of Western democracy (chapter 4); Boas’s views on race recycling themselves sixty years later in a debate between Indian sociologists on whether caste should be considered a form of racism (chapter 5); Cli√ord Geertz’s misunderstanding of the Dalit intellectual and statesman B. R. Ambedkar’s work to frame a primordialist explanation of Indian politics (chapter 6); or humanrights reportage fixing culture rather than polity as the source of violence against South Asian women (chapter 7), India is but one circuit through which forms of culturalist explanation flow.

un/common cultures

culture lines: the ‘‘new culturalisms’’

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We are constantly reminded, as a matter of routine scientific and political consensus, that we live in a ‘‘postracial’’ world. Yet, as Paul Gilroy notes in After Empire, with the apparent defeat of racist ideologies in the postwar era, the problem of the twenty-first century is no longer the color line, but the culture line. If the relativist notion of culture seemed to triumph over an absolutist notion of culture at the beginning of the twentieth century, its nature was irresolute by the beginning of the twenty-first century, in some ways as tied to the distribution and legitimation of power as was its nineteenth-century predecessor. As Ashis Nandy observes: ‘‘The concept of cultural relativism, expressed in the popular anthropological view that each culture must be studied in terms of its own categories, is limited because it stops short of insisting that every culture must recognize the way it is construed by other cultures. It is easy to leave other cultures to their own devices in the name of cultural relativism, especially if the

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introduction

visions of the future of these other cultures have already been cannibalized by the world view of one’s own.’’Ω The contemporary use of relativist notions of culture or community as a catch-all explanation for a variety of phenomena that used to be explained by race, biology, or genetics has been remarked on by a wide range of critics. There is by now an unfortunate canon, from intelligence studies to studies of primate mothering, which purportedly proves the influence of nature over nurture. Thus, the growing dissatisfaction with the so-called limits of social-constructivism explanation coincides with a reemergence of biological explanation.∞≠ While it is unsurprising that ethological and sociobiological models of culture correspond to aggressive neoliberalism, there has not been a straightforward shift from sociological to biological signifiers of di√erence.∞∞ Rather it would seem that what I term the ‘‘new culturalism’’ has emerged alongside the resurgence of organic or genetic explanation to both describe and justify racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism. In a sense, the ‘‘new culturalism’’ is not new at all. One can locate its roots in eighteenth-century philosophy or in the nineteenth century’s obsession with civilizational ranking; one can date it to the era of decolonization, or to the end of the Cold War, or to the emergence of globalization.∞≤ Thus, I am less concerned with a purely historicist reading that would attempt to fix its origins to a particular era, than with seeing culturalism as a form of circulation which, while temporally specific, is not unique to any one historical epoch. My objective is to formulate a means of tracking, through political fields and national disciplinarities, the shifting ways in which culture has stood in for race or as a form of negative ideology. The essays in this collection weave across and through di√erent discourses of what produces culture as an analytic object and form of social description: American anthropology, Indian and French sociology, and international institutions like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (unesco) or the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (unhcr). Culturalism, according to Aijaz Ahmad, is simply, ‘‘an ideology which treats culture not only as an integral element in social practices but as the determining element.’’∞≥ Yet, in perhaps the most persuasive account of the new culturalism, or ‘‘neoracism,’’ Etienne Balibar argues that it is tied to the ascendance of postwar international institutions that defined and denounced biological racism, so that ‘‘its

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un/common cultures

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dominant theme is not heredity but the insurmountability of cultural di√erences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others, but only the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of lifestyles and traditions.’’∞∂ This ‘‘racism without races’’ is what PierreAndre Taguie√ calls ‘‘di√erentialist racism’’—the result of a turnabout e√ect that actually absorbs antiracist discourses, such that ‘‘races do not constitute visible biological units because in reality there are no human races.’’∞∑ This di√erentialist racism insists that cultures can neither be composite, shared, nor held in common; it rather articulates uncommon cultures as forms of alterity and incomprehensibility, positing that adverse outcomes arise from such cultural di√erence. Anthropology has been implicated in such di√erentialism, because it has taken its normative work to be the description of cultural di√erence, rather than the mapping of cultural commons or a≈nities. The line demarcating di√erence from commonality in un/common cultures is meant to emphasize that what is uncommon, singular, or distinct about cultures can only be understood in relation to the work of finding a≈nity or of making common cause— what Claude Lévi-Strauss might have meant when he spoke of a ‘‘coalition of cultures.’’ The extent to which globalization (regardless of whether its historic origins are located in the sixteenth century or late twentieth) both produces and is produced by culturalist explanation is far from clear. Yet my understanding of how ideas of culture both frame and instantiate neoliberal economies through processes of circulation differs from world-systems theorists’ insistence on the production of a uniform ‘‘geoculture’’ or even a highly di√erentiated global culture.∞∏ It is also distinct from the idea that globalization produces the professionalized and mediating ‘‘third cultures’’ of large cosmopolitan cities—‘‘practices, bodies of knowledge, conventions and lifestyles which have developed in ways that have become increasingly independent of nation-states.’’∞π Such work, while valuable, tends to focus on culture as a set of positivities and processes, rather than as forms of circulation.∞∫ Culture is thus not something merely acted on by globalization, nor is it primarily a bounded set of social interactions constituting social space. Culture, as it travels through, but also shapes the world system, is about tracking shifting logics of culturalist explanation across and within multiple sites of circulation that destabilize the distinction between life world and analytic system.∞Ω

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un / common globalizations

9

introduction

The last half of the twentieth century can be seen to have ushered in a transition or shift in modes of knowing; that this shift—labeled ‘‘poststructuralism’’ or, in Jamesonian terms, ‘‘postmodernism: the cultural logic of late capitalism’’—was experienced as a crisis by a number of disciplines has already been well-remarked. And yet the decades of the 1980s and 1990s in particular—what some analysts have referred to as the era of ‘‘high globalization’’—seem to have corresponded to a particularly intense period of crisis, not just for anthropology, but for the human sciences in general. Intensified, but also dispersed forms of political struggle produced a plethora of analytic objects that were no longer theoretically recognizable, or whose forms had been emptied of agreed-upon meanings within the human sciences. The primary response of anthropology to this crisis was to reify its understanding of culture, insisting that its understanding of cultural relativism was an antidote to racism, instead of recognizing how both popular and disciplinary explanations of culture or ‘‘culturalism’’ were increasingly deployed to perform the work of racism. This is perhaps clearest when culture enters the courtroom, and forms of culturalism as ‘‘cultural rights’’ come to mark zones of expanding juridicality and shrinking community (see chapter 7). Aside from the critiques of national character studies conducted during the Second World War, or of Oscar Lewis’s ‘‘culture of poverty’’ ethnography (which came most powerfully from a√ected groups outside anthropology), the production of culturalist explanation within anthropology is one the discipline has been slow to confront. This may be in part due to the fact that ‘‘anthropological culturalism had provided humanist and cosmopolitan anti-racism of the post-war period with most of its arguments.’’≤≠ Thus, anthropologists, in particular, have tended to see the modern, relativist notion of culture itself as a corrective not only to racism (see chapter 2), but also to culturalism. This is why what Holmes and Marcus refer to as ‘‘para-ethnography,’’ the production of meta-level cultural explanations by political or other social actors, may be valuable as a diagnostic, but is ultimately unsatisfying.≤∞ It holds that the popular forms of culturalism (or in Taguie√ ’s words, ‘‘di√erentialist racism’’) of a JeanMarie Le Pen can eventually be countered by a truer ethnographic account of culture (the para-ethnographer is to the ethnographer

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what the paramedic is to the doctor, or the paralegal is to the lawyer); it also assumes that anthropology as a discipline is not also a producer of culturalist forms of knowing. Anthropological ‘‘culturalism’’ also tends to insist on culture as the residuum or limit point for understanding communities, rather than as a site of multiple determinations working to produce the ‘‘e√ects’’ of culture or community. The economic processes of globalization often literally fracture communities by producing labor or conflict diasporas. Yet state policies and corporate practices also work to produce the e√ect of an operating community, or ‘‘community effects,’’ which become the points of articulation for immigration panics on the one hand, and mass mobilizations for immigrant rights on the other. Such an understanding of immigration as one where culture or community is situated as e√ects that produce mobilizational sites of contestation and solidarity constitutes another sense in which we might speak of the production of un/common cultures. The essays of this book were produced within and through specific histories of the neoliberal Indian state and neoliberal U.S. state. These forms of neoliberalism are conjunctive, as in 1991, when the culmination of structural adjustment policies in India produced new polarities of labor migration to the United States—highly paid holders of h-1b (non-immigrant) visas on the one hand, and taxi-drivers and domestic workers on the other. At the same time, they are disjunctive, as with neoliberalism in the United States, which tends to produce a racialized state in which racial conflict is muted by pluralist or multiculturalist ideology, while in India, it produces a weakening of secular pluralism and a heightened sense of ethnic or communal conflict. Although there are important di√erences between them, both the Indian and U.S. nation-states produce displacements of contestations over experiences of sexuality, ‘‘caste,’’ and ‘‘race,’’ which in turn yield new transnational relationships as analytics and as forms of identity. Nowhere is a≈rming the existence of common culture more important than in the two poles of multiculturalist failure: the demise of the secular Indian state’s guiding ethos, ‘‘unity in diversity,’’ at the hands of an increasingly virulent Hindu nationalism; and the conservative attack on curricular multiculturalism in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. In the former case, Indian secularists have had to roll back Hindu nationalist changes to textbooks identifying ‘‘foreign’’ populations and have called for the recognition of ‘‘composite’’ culture as a practice of lived a≈nities (reminiscent of 10

Robin Kelly’s notion of ‘‘polyculturalism’’), while in the latter case, secular multiculturalists have seen their demands for work across and within diverse intellectual traditions absorbed by calls for ‘‘inclusive curricula,’’ resulting in faith-based representation in primary- and secondary-school curricula. While state forms of multiculturalism have been explored as part of an emerging anthropology of neoliberalism, the extent to which cultural di√erence structures neoliberalism or to which neoliberalism requires certain articulations of culture for its working is not well understood.≤≤

new intellectual formations: affiliative interdisciplinarity

11

introduction

What, then, are the intellectual fields of inquiry that can help map the conjunctures and disjunctures between communities and social movements in India and the United States, between histories of racism and histories of casteism, between the neoliberal Indian state and the ‘‘liberal-democratic’’ U.S. state? Scholarship on caste tends to remain entrenched within area studies, becoming di≈cult to track within African or South Asian diaspora studies, while scholarship on race also tends to be nation-bound, producing a Brazilian racial paradigm, an American or British racial paradigm, even within African diaspora studies. As an example, we might consider W. E. B. Du Bois’s thinking on caste (see chapter 4). Though ‘‘caste’’ is frequently a marker for race as both a descriptive idiom and an analytic device throughout Du Bois’s writings, neither African diaspora studies nor South Asian area studies has sought to understand its presence in Du Bois’s work, falling as it does between the national spaces through which their ordering concepts are framed: race on the one hand, caste on the other. Similarly, we might examine how the Dalit intellectual B. R. Ambedkar’s understanding of ‘‘caste’’ was influenced by his comparative study of slavery, and the ways in which a particular understanding of the history of race and racism in the American South animated Ambedkar’s call for ‘‘The Annihilation of Caste’’ and casteism (see chapter 5).≤≥ Reading the interventions of such thinkers away from their foundational places in black politics on the one hand, and Dalit politics on the other, stages an interpellation of these figures as ‘‘trans-status subjects,’’ opening ways for understanding new forms of solidarity.≤∂ These essays thus map the genealogical dislocation and relocation of disciplinary objects from di√er-

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ent parts of the world: caste used to explain American race relations, or the Dalit movement’s attempt to claim casteism as a form of racism. In chapters 4 and 5 I seek to surface the submerged influence of W. E. B. Du Bois and B. R. Ambedkar on political and disciplinary formations between India and the United States. Though both were contemporaries, one receiving a doctorate at Harvard, the other at Columbia, they did not know each other. Yet the parallels in their lives as intellectuals and the conjunctural intersection of their politics broaches what Nahum Chandler has called, in another context, ‘‘the possible form of an interlocution,’’ potentially transforming our understanding not only of the history of American anthropology and Indian sociology, but also of the relationship between area studies and ethnic studies.≤∑ This means that anthropology (and ethnic studies) must move away from a tendency to frame communities as organic entities and to see cultures primarily as exemplars of (national or racial) di√erence. The historical strength of ethnic studies has been its focus on community, while area studies has typified a proccessual view of a cultural region or area. This collection of essays argues for taking the intersection between area studies and ethnic studies seriously as these two interdisciplinary formations learn to track the displacements and relocations of their central organizing concepts. It asks area studies to revise its formative core idea of an area geography to better conceptualize how processes of globalization are changing our understanding of what constitutes a place or area of the world, particularly in terms of social movements’ sense of shared history across regions.≤∏ It asks ethnic studies to address more centrally the globalizing processes that work to create the e√ect of operating communities, and to engage more deeply with the geographic areas and languages of region that mark not just a pre-history but ongoing history of diasporic migrations in the world. The emergent nexus between ethnic studies and area studies allows for a form of a≈liative interdisciplinarity with the potential to read cultural displacements, transpositions, and reversals between community and the state, and between disciplines. It di√ers from other ways of thinking about interdisciplinarity, which presume either a free borrowing and transfer of methods and ideas across disciplines or a congenial amalgamation of disciplinary traditions.≤π What I am calling ‘‘a≈liative interdisciplinarity’’ identifies tensions between intellectual traditions such as area studies and ethnic studies—the first a product of the Cold War, the second a product of its critique—but 12

13

introduction

allies these traditions in pursuit of a conjunctural analytic that can track the emergence and circulation of culturalist argument through local, regional, and national registers. Doing so enables us to study transnational circuits and regional processes comparatively, where the United States and India are linked circuits for understanding refugee and conflict diaspora flows, state minoritization and racialization strategies, and subaltern forms of resistance and citizenship. For example, although states like the United States or India might share a convergent definition of a ‘‘Muslim problem,’’ in India the demarcation of Muslims lies within an implicit (and often explicit) communalism at the heart of the democratic process of ‘‘reform,’’ while in the United States the racialization of Muslims points to an allegory of reform in the ‘‘democratization’’ projects of the past administration.≤∫ Even as Muslim communities are constituted by the Indian and U.S. states in ways that yield distinct histories, our understanding of the place of Muslims in American racial formations is enhanced by looking at the pre- and post-Partition experiences of South Asian Muslims in the context of overlapping forms of antiterrorism legislation in India and the United States which mark a juridical break with the experiences of other communities of color subjected primarily to the violence of U.S. immigration law. Culturalism flows unevenly through systems of juridicality, representing particular communities as concentration points for the application of state power such that Muslims in the United States are subject to exceptional practices of special registration and extraordinary rendition apart from normative but harsh immigration laws which nevertheless entail (at least the expectation of) due process. Di√erentialist racism, or the complaint of ‘‘uncommon culture,’’ increasingly targets Muslim societies in the resurgence of civilizationalist argumentation, not only in the United States, but throughout Western Europe.≤Ω Yet the problem with culturalist explanations of Islam is not just that they result in stereotypic or flattened representations of culture, but that they are produced by the ruling institutions of society, the government, and elite academic institutions.≥≠ The task of some recent criticism has thus been either to expose the ways in which ‘‘culture talk’’ ‘‘assumes that every culture has an essence that defines it, and then explains politics as a consequence of that essence,’’ to show the deep derivation of culturalist assumptions from political argumentation, or to explain the ways in which Islam becomes both a product and agent of globalization.≥∞ Unsurprisingly, culturalist representations of Islam frequently place the status

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or condition of women at the center of such reform agendas, often as a justification for political intervention.≥≤ Thus, each of the above critiques of culturalist descriptions of Islam—written by a political scientist, a philosopher, a historian, and anthropologist—speak to the need to develop a≈liative strategies for dealing with culturalist arguments as they emerge through di√erent disciplinary and political formations. Such critiques of culturalism also reveal di√erent conjunctural formations of culture as politics, or cultural politics, showing that the task at some moments is to disaggregate the cultural from the political, as in Mahmood Mamdani’s analysis of civilizationist argument, while at others it is to show how they are inextricably linked, as in Akeel Bilgrami’s critique of ‘‘Occidentalism.’’ The emergence of culture as politics, however, need not always signal the hegemonic exercise of power, but can also point to a counter-hegemonic cultural politics of resistance. As I suggest in chapter 7, these are complementary forms of deconstructive and reconstructive analysis; they can work unevenly and at multiple registers; our task is to maintain a productive tension between them. Learning to inhabit this tension can be seen as a method for reading across these essays as well. Some perform essentially deconstructive work on disciplinary formations (chapters 1, 2, 3, and 6); others enact the recombinant or reconstructive work of a≈liative interdisciplinarity to undertake connective ‘‘histories of the present’’ (chapters 4, 5); while the concluding essay engages both strategies (chapter 7).

un/common cultures

toward cultures of the common

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One response to the ‘‘new culturalism,’’ especially in its nationalist guises, has been the attempt to define something like a cosmopolitics that would articulate an ethical, but ultimately non-hegemonic form of universalism—either a rooted or vernacular cosmopolitanism, a plural and discrepant cosmopolitanism, a critical and dialogic cosmopolitanism, or a ‘‘minority cosmopolitanism.’’≥≥ In the persuasive tone of the advocates of minority cosmopolitanism, cosmpolitans today are often the victims of modernity, failed by capitalism’s upward mobility, and bereft of those comforts and customs of national belonging. Refugees, peoples of the diaspora, and migrants and exiles represent the spirit of the cosmopolitan community. Too often, in the West, these peoples are grouped together in a

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vocabulary of victimage and come to be recognized as constituting the ‘problem’ of multiculturalism to which late liberalism extends its generous promise of a pluralist existence. Cultural pluralism recognizes di√erence so long as the general category of the people is still fundamentally understood within a national frame. Such benevolence is often well-intentioned, but it fails to acknowledge the critique of modernity that minority cosmopolitans embody in their history witness to the twentieth century.≥∂

Minority cosmopolitanism thus seems poised as an ethical response to the di√erentialist racism of ‘‘uncommon cultures,’’ but in holding that ‘‘cosmopolitanism is infinite ways of being,’’≥∑ the assumption is that minority cosmopolitans passively embody a critique of modernity, rather than actively shape practices of opposition and critique through something like a ‘‘common culture.’’ Critics have also worried that globalization produces not so much di√ering forms of cosmopolitanism or hybrid and diverse forms of identity, as a homogenization of cultures. Even in Anthony Appiah’s optimistic account, in the global system of cultural exchanges there are, indeed, somewhat asymmetrical processes of homogenization going on, and there are forms of human life disappearing. Neither of these phenomena is particularly new, but their range and speed probably is. Nevertheless, as forms of culture disappear, new forms are created, and they are created locally, which means they have exactly the regional inflections that the cosmopolitan celebrates. The disappearance of old cultural forms is consistent with a rich variety of forms of human life, just because new cultural forms, which di√er from each other, are being created as well.≥∏

15

introduction

Appiah e√ects a benign substitution of cultural forms while noting that some are disappearing under the guise of what Paul Gilroy would call an ‘‘armoured cosmopolitanism.’’≥π In contrast, then, to those who would see cosmopolitanism as opposed to di√erentialist racism, there is a way in which racism can be driven by cosmopolitanism, particularly in its instantiation as a universal ethical form. As I discuss in chapter 7, nowhere is this clearer than in the instance of human rights as a set of apparently cosmopolitan values being leveraged for (neo)imperial projects.≥∫ An adequate response to such universalizing ethics may not be contained within the history of anthropology, either in the kind of salvage ethnography Alice Fletcher,

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Mathilda Stevenson, or Franz Boas undertook (discussed in chapters 1 and 2), or in the self-reflexive structuralism of Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, or Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierachicus (discussed in chapters 3 and 4). Rather, it seems to me that we are, at this moment in history, called to analyze and sometimes a≈rm, less the relativist project of culture than its constructivist and conjunctural capacities to catalyze new forms of political alliance—both hegemonic and resistive. Our task is to understand the ways in which culture appears as a site of debate or contestation—a mark not of cultures under disappearance, but of cultures engaged in definitional and political struggle, as when Indian Dalits insist that the cultural experience of caste oppression approximates what they understand to be the social experience of racism (discussed in chapter 5). An analogical imperative works through distinct cultural experiences of oppression and resistance to translate them into other social idioms so that new forms of political a≈nity can be enacted which enable the possibility of ‘‘cultures in common.’’ In this volume I thus track the ways in which uncommon cultures have been articulated through forms of di√erentialist racism or culturalist explanation. At the same time, I seek to surface the possibilities of culture in common through the enactment of new forms of political alliance. Anthropological or sociological frames often miss the solidarities of lived experience of plural cultures and societies. While some anthropologists have seen culturalism to be constitutive of social movements, particularly as forms of ‘‘identity politics mobilized at the level of the nation-state’’ or as ‘‘the mobilization of cultural di√erences in the service of larger national or transnational politics,’’ in the epilogue I suggest that transnational social movements enact not culturalism, but forms of common culture shaped by making ‘‘common cause.’’≥Ω In closing I lay out other forms of a≈liative and interdisciplinary scholarship that allow a better understanding of the politics of emerging common cultures. While there is a rather substantial literature in economics (and increasingly in anthropology) on ‘‘common pool resources,’’ my contention is that dominant forms of social and political theory have often been inadequate for the task of understanding the emergence of common cultures.∂≠ In part this is because not only does the literature of the social sciences take nationalism to be its primary object, but its central view of culture was itself the product of nationalism. Insofar as political theory has also been called on to do the work of neoliberal economics, and neoliberalism advocates privatization, 16

ostensibly to protect against the ‘‘tragedy of the commons,’’ the forms of anthropological theory produced through globalization often fail to apprehend the emergence of cultures in common. The prospect of a common culture raised in this book is not so much one of a hybridized, cosmopolitan, or universalized relativism, as one that rejects hegemonic versions of culture in favor of a politics of a≈liation or solidarity, sometimes enabled by the appropriation and relocation of conceptual categories emergent from radically di√erent histories of oppression. Leela Gandhi, for one, has seen in the making of such histories, the construction of ‘‘a√ective communities.’’∂∞

introduction 17

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chapter 1

¡ ‘‘Wild West’’ Anthropology and the Disciplining of Gender While we were in Boston in 1879, a lady told me that after studying ethnology for years in books and museums she now wished to visit Indian tribes in their own lodges, living as they lived and observing their daily customs herself—especially the women’s and children’s ways. ‘‘Did you ever camp out?’’ I asked. ‘‘No, never.’’ I found it hard to take her plan seriously. She, a thorough product of city life, was evidently nearing her forties. I could not imagine her leaving all her home comforts to go out to the far frontier and live among the Indians in an Indian lodge. Still, she was so earnest that I reluctantly agreed to take her someday with our group for the trip she wished. But I gave her fair warning: ‘‘You can’t stand such a trip. You’ll have to sleep on the cold ground. The food will be strange to you. You’ll meet storms on the open prairies and be wet to the skin. Burning sun and wind will blister your face and hands. Long days of travelling will exhaust you. You’ll have no privacy night or day. I’m sure you can never endure it.’’ ‘‘Yes I can!’’ she insisted.∞

The image of tender womanhood scourged by the wilderness of the western frontier was perhaps one of the most potent underlying the ideological structure of ‘‘manifest destiny.’’ Stereotypes of the courageous frontier woman notwithstanding, the idea that the West was ‘‘no place for a woman’’ defined the skepticism ‘‘pioneer’’ anthropologists like Alice Fletcher faced from more experienced field companions like Henry Tibbles, as illustrated in his account above. Yet the first generation of women anthropologists contributed much to destabilizing the trope of ‘‘white woman in peril,’’ even as its persistence enabled the popularization of their writing and established their reputations as professionals. If strands of progressivist feminism promulgated by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (wctu) were defined by the mission of ‘‘taming’’ unruly

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frontier masculinity through appeals to Christian notions of domesticity and familial responsibility, early women anthropologists also participated in the ideology of the western frontier by characterizing native cultures as ‘‘wild’’ and ‘‘untamed’’ by civilization—a kind of feminine counterpart to Rooseveltian ‘‘rough-riderism.’’≤ Anthropology has been called ‘‘the welcoming science’’ because of the numbers of women in its early ranks.≥ Yet while the presence of women like Erminnie Platt Smith (1836–86), Alice Fletcher (1838– 1923), Sara Yorke Stevenson (1847–1921), Matilda Cox Stevenson (1849–1915), Zelia Nuttal (1857–1933), Frances Densmore (1867– 1957), and Elsie Clews Parsons (1874–1941) in anthropology has often been remarked, their significance for the emergence of the discipline has been less well understood.∂ Platt Smith, Fletcher, Yorke Stevenson, Parsons, and Densmore were all known as engaging and popular public speakers.∑ Platt Smith’s parlor lectures on geology and on literary and aesthetic topics led to the founding of the Daughters of Aesthetics in Jersey City in 1879, and she served as its president from 1879 to 1886. The New York Times of 29 August 1880, reporting on one of her Iroquois lectures, noted, ‘‘Mrs. Smith is not only a good writer, well-known in literary and scientific circles in New York, Boston, and other cities[,] but also an eloquent speaker . . . and is deeply interested in the results of scientific investigation.’’ Fletcher’s work with the Omaha began in 1879, when she met long-term collaborator Francis La Flesche at a meeting of the Boston Literary Society. After years of philanthropical work, Fletcher began her professional career as an independent lecturer in order to earn money, speaking on such popular topics as ‘‘the lost peoples of America.’’ By 1879 she had received attention as the ‘‘noted lecturess of New York City’’ who ‘‘tells a wonderful story and tells it well’’ with a ‘‘pleasing voice and attractive manner.’’∏ She drew the attention of Frederick Putnam, and by1880 he was inviting her audiences to tour the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. Women, then, were instrumental in bringing anthropology into the public sphere.π The 1880s thus also witnessed marked redefinition of avenues of public participation for women, of which anthropology was but one.∫ The liberal evolutionist Edward Tylor, addressing the Anthropological Society of Washington in 1884, had similarly argued that ‘‘the man of the house, though he can do a great deal, cannot do it all. If his wife sympathizes with his work, and is able to do it, really half the work of investigation seems to me to fall to her, so much is to be

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learned through the women of the tribe, which the men will not readily disclose.’’ Speaking in particular of Matilda Cox Stevenson’s collaboration with her husband, Tylor concluded that it was a lesson ‘‘not to sound the ‘bullroarer,’ and warn the ladies o√ from their proceedings, but rather to avail themselves thankfully of their help.’’Ω Tylor’s advice to the Anthropological Society of Washington was not immediately heeded, however. Thus, in 1885 Cox Stevenson established the Women’s Anthropological Society, with Fletcher and Zelia Nuttal among its first members. The Women’s Anthropological Society concerned itself with social-reform issues such as slum sanitation and the ‘‘Negro problem.’’∞≠ Fletcher served as the society’s vice president in 1885, and as its president from 1893 to 1898. The Anthropological Society of Washington finally admitted women to its membership in 1899, and after that date women seem to have been fully integrated into anthropological organizations, for there is no further mention of the Women’s Anthropological Society.∞∞ Fletcher became president of the Anthropological Society of Washington in 1903, a year after she had been the only woman among the forty founding members of the American Anthropological Association. Despite an early record of exclusion from organizations like the Anthropological Society of Washington, women like Fletcher were also prominent members and o≈cers of the leading scientific organizations of the era, and central to institution building within the discipline.∞≤ Platt Smith, Nuttal, Yorke Stevenson, and Parsons were independently wealthy and able to fund their own work, but they were also major patrons of early anthropological research.∞≥ Although only two of these women possessed doctorates, and none were formally trained as anthropologists in an era still dominated by amateurs, all were prominent women and advanced the professionalization of the discipline in important ways.∞∂ Fletcher, Nuttal, and Yorke Stevenson founded archaeological institutes that still exist today, while Platt Smith, Fletcher, and Cox Stevenson established participant observation as anthropological method contemporaneously with Franz Boas’s and Frank Cushing’s own interventions on the subject.∞∑ In rehearsing such details, I hope to dispel a common set of assumptions about the marginality of this group of women in the discipline. Anthropology as a discipline is properly the child of Progressive Era politics. To the extent that women were empowered by this set of politics as clubwomen or su√ragists, they were also influential in defining what came to be known as the ‘‘reformer’s science.’’ Women for many years afterward were not to have as much say in the 20

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actual founding and funding of anthropological institutions as they had between 1880 and 1920. It is commonly advanced that Franz Boas was responsible for bringing women into anthropology; however, Frederick Putnam also mentored a number of women.∞∏ Yet to reduce the question of women’s participation in the field to either Putnam’s goodwill or Boas’s experience of antisemitism∞π is to lose sight of the transformative e√ects of feminism in the nineteenth century. Equally problematic is the assumption that the early participation of women in the discipline led inevitably to the emergence of gender as an analytical category within anthropology; this is to lose sight of the limitations of feminism at this historical moment. Although Progressive Era women in anthropology formed close professional and personal ties to one another, the structure of male patronage meant that they did not usually advance theoretical perspectives distinct from those of their mentors, with the result that they remained complicit with dominant discourses of civilization.∞∫ Though some feminist scholars understand ‘‘gender’’ to be a latetwentieth-century category of analysis, the terms by which one understands its modern usage were emergent during the Progressive Era. In referring to the ‘‘disciplining of gender,’’ then, I point both to the ways in which gender has been schooled out of the discipline’s telling of its own history, and to the ways gender shaped Progressive Era anthropology. A particular late-nineteenth-century gender politics strongly influenced the production of the central defining feature of a professionalizing anthropology: the relativist notion of culture. I therefore attempt to understand the submergence of gender as central to the disciplinization of anthropology, and as paradoxically coeval with its emergence as a generative (rather than additive) category of analysis within the discipline. I suggest that an account of the emergence of gender as a category of analysis within the discipline has important consequences for how one understands the rise of cultural relativism in anthropology. The emergence of gender as a category of analysis within anthropology is marked by two broad propositions, which, while linked, are not reducible to one another. Gender indicates, first, the cultural construction of sex roles, or the ‘‘social creation of ideas about appropriate roles for men and women,’’ and, second, the ‘‘description of social relations between the sexes,’’ or the marking of asymmetrical power relations between the sexes.∞Ω Gender consciousness, understood as awareness of inequality be-

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tween the sexes, was indicated both by the contradictions that evolutionary theory posed to Victorian society and by nineteenth-century feminism’s engagement with Victorian social anthropology over ‘‘the woman question,’’ which indexed a series of debates about the nature of women’s role in society. During this era, biological sex was seen to determine the social roles of men and women. As Elizabeth Fee has demonstrated, however, the evolutionist debates on the question of matriarchal and matrilineal societies provided a challenge to the notion that men’s and women’s roles were ‘‘natural.’’≤≠ In response to this challenge, progressive evolutionary theory reconfirmed the high status of Victorian society; however, it did so by suggesting that its sex roles were not natural but rather the achievement of civilization. At the same time, as Gail Bederman has shown, the notion of civilization itself was increasingly challenged by various forms of feminist and African American activism, leading to its reconsolidation as the exclusive achievement of white manhood.≤∞ Women could contribute to civilization only as wives and mothers, and civilization could advance only if the doctrine of separate spheres was maintained. But if the elevated status of women had been seen as the e√ect of civilization, some women sought to show that they were also its cause: they were its agents not only as wives and mothers in the domestic sphere, but variously as the reformers of savage peoples or inventors of technology. On the other hand, the prominent feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (inspired by the work of Edward Tylor and John Lubbock) sought to reverse the equation of civilizational advancement with extreme sex di√erentiation by arguing that women and men alike were partners in the racial advancement of civilization.≤≤ Thus, while the revisionist idea that Victorian sex roles emerged with ‘‘civilization’’ pointed to a notion of gender as culturally constructed, it did not necessarily entail a feminist refusal of evolutionary racism. Rather, the racial identity of early women anthropologists could not be separated from their positioning in the field (something they themselves frequently evoked), which alternately gendered them as maternal or masculine (or, more accurately, as brokers of the masculine). White women’s unchallenged racial positioning and their participation in late American settler ideology thus worked against the identification of white women with native women and therefore against an understanding of women’s oppression as being singly or multiply derived from a transcultural patriarchy. Here, the lack of something like ‘‘gender identification’’ qualifies the emergence of ‘‘woman’’ as a universal category.≤≥ For the more 22

civilized a society, the more highly sex di√erentiated it was. ‘‘Primitive’’ societies were thus seen to lack sex di√erentiation altogether, or to possess it in mere rudimentary form, prohibiting the admission of Native American and African American women into the very category of womanhood. As a result, the second proposition of gender— as an analysis of unequal relations between the sexes, shared across cultures—does not fully emerge as an epistemological category in Progressive Era anthropology. Its seeds are found in the work of Victorian women anthropologists, but it is most present in the early writings of Elsie Clews Parsons, which she characterized as ‘‘propaganda by the ethnographic method,’’ but which actually predate her entry into empirical anthropology, around 1915.≤∂

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Nineteenth-century popular anthropology is frequently portrayed as the result of amateur participation, from which natural scientists like Franz Boas sought to distance themselves in order to professionalize the discipline.≤∑ A more careful look at the emergence of the discipline in the late nineteenth century shows that popularization and professionalization were two sides of the same coin, not a case of the former existing as a stage to be superseded by the latter. Ethnological pamphlets produced at the world’s fairs and articles written for the popular press were normative rather than unique, and analysis of the writings of early women anthropologists proves it di≈cult to distinguish the articles that appeared in the American Anthropologist or the Journal of American Folklore from those appearing in more popular fora. I therefore want to explore how the nineteenth-century ‘‘woman question’’ and women’s participation at the fairs might illumine the importance of popular anthropology in ways obscured by conventional disciplinary history, which portrays the participation of Putnam, Boas, and others in the world’s fairs as a necessary evil, rather than as symptomatic of the period.≤∏ For this reason, I also explore the overlapping zones of popular and scientific influence for the production of Progressive Era anthropology. I first examine the gendering of the fieldwork ethic as a means of describing the importance of a particular kind of Wild West ethic to Progressive Era feminism and its relationship to ‘‘evangelical ethnology.’’ I next explore feminist participation in the ‘‘midway ethnology’’ of the world’s fairs. If the world’s fairs earned mass exposure for the su√ragist cause, they also rea≈rmed feminist participation in the imperial subtext of the expositions. The elaboration of the ‘‘woman question’’ in the context of the world’s fairs also set the stage for

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feminist engagement with the ‘‘matrilineal conundrum of evolutionary theory.’’ I conclude with some observations about Elsie Clews Parsons’s break from this milieu, which underscores her contribution to the emergence of gender as an analytical category in the discipline.

un/common cultures

turning the century: the emergence of popul ar ethnography

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During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, newspapers and journals like the Southern Workman or Century magazine provided a mass medium whereby emerging ethnography was popularized by women anthropologists in the context of westward expansion and white settler ideology. Beginning in 1882, the Century ran a series of articles on the ‘‘New Northwest’’ and ‘‘Indian Country,’’ reports on various expositions, and writings of anthropologists such as Frank Cushing, Frederick Putnam, and Alice Fletcher.≤π Sara Yorke Stevenson’s series of five articles on the French Intervention in Mexico also appeared in the Century, in 1897, and was the basis of her book-length memoir, Maximillian in Mexico (1899). Cushing’s three-part Century serial, ‘‘My Adventures in Zuni,’’ and Fletcher’s series of articles under the heading ‘‘Personal Studies of Indian Life,’’ which ran over a period of four years, are arguably some of the first documents that establish participant observation as anthropological method and are contemporaneous with Boas’s own writings on the subject. Indeed, it is perhaps Cushing’s escapades that Boas had in mind when he began his 1887 article ‘‘A Year among the Eskimo’’ with the disclaimer ‘‘If I undertake to describe some of my arctic experiences, I cannot entertain you with exciting adventures, such as shipwrecks and narrow escapes, for such were not my share. My narrative must be that of the daily life of the inhabitants of these ice-bound coasts, the Eskimo.’’≤∫ Boas’s insistence on sticking to descriptions of daily life was not lost on Fletcher, who excelled in the ethnographic particular, even as her first accounts seem sensationalized in retrospect. And yet her narrative of the fieldwork scene that established the grounding of modern ethnographic consciousness is arguably the most classic account of transforming savage images into human ones, working to establish cultural relativism as humanist credo for anthropology.≤Ω Describing her first encounter with Indian ceremonial performance, she wrote,

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As I entered [the tent] I was startled by a sudden, mighty beating of the drum, with such deafening yells and shouts that I feared my ears would burst; but following the dictates of Indian etiquette, I took no notice of this extraordinary welcome, and passed as calmly as I could to the back of the tent, where I sat down in the middle of an unoccupied space, close to the edge of the covering. As I looked about me, I felt a foreignness that grew into a sense of isolation. On each side were lines of silent, motionless figures, their robes so closely wrapped about them that, in the fading light, I could scarcely realize that they were living beings. There was not a touch of color within the tent, except upon the few women who sat near the drum. Their glossy black braids fell in heavy loops upon their red and green tunics, the russet hue of their faces was heightened by touches of vermillion on their cheeks, their ear-ornaments of white shell hung nearly to their waists, and their arms were encircled with shining brass bangles. These glints of brightness only added to the weirdness of the place, and my eyes gladly looked beyond, where, framed by the opening of the tent against the pale primrose of the twilight sky, I saw the contrasting picture of gaily dressed and painted men and women, chatting or laughing, and showing their small, white, teeth.

As the passage continues, Fletcher’s sense of ‘‘foreignness’’ and ‘‘strangeness’’ precludes any ‘‘starting point of sympathy.’’ Fletcher presents herself as ‘‘distressed’’ and ‘‘distraught,’’ a white woman imperiled as much by the ‘‘wild movements of advancing and retreating forms,’’ ‘‘violently shaken feathers,’’ and ‘‘arms brandishing war clubs’’ as by the accounts of Indian atrocities ‘‘crowding upon her memory.’’

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The whole scene was utterly unlike any I had ever beheld. I was oppressed by its strangeness, and before I could find any starting point of sympathy with my surroundings, there was a slight stir in the vicinity of the drum, and suddenly half a dozen arms rose and fell upon the drum with such force as to make it rebound upon its fastenings; a solitary voice, pitched high and shrill, uttered a few wavering notes, followed on the next drum beat by the whole company of singers, each one apparently striving to outsing all the rest. It was nothing but tumult and din to me; the sharply accented drum set my heart to beating painfully and jarred every nerve. I was distressed and perplexed, my head was ringing, and I was fast becoming mentally distraught, when, as if by magic, a dozen of the silent,

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mysterious figures sprang high into the air, their robes falling into a heap, as with bended arms and knees they leaped toward the center of the tent, each man in full undress, save for the breech-cloth, paint, and feathers. The sudden appearance, the wild movements of the advancing and retreating forms, the outlines of the violently shaken head feathers, the out-stretched arms brandishing the war clubs, and the thud of the bare feet upon the ground, called up before me every picture of savages I had ever seen; while every account of Indian atrocities I had ever heard crowded upon my memory, and gave a horrible interpretation to the scene before me.

As the passage builds to a climax, Fletcher e√ectively plays upon images of Indian savagery and the trope of the ‘‘white woman in peril’’ in order to dismiss them as the result of popular misconceptions conquered by scientific temperament. I would have escaped if I could, but between me and the opening were these terrible creatures, and even if it were possible to elude their grasp, it would only be to fall into the hands of hundreds more outside; those ‘‘treacherous,’’ gaily dressed, and laughing people were ‘‘Indians’’ who even now might be transforming into similar fiends. The ground was cold and solid beneath me, and the tent was pegged tight to it, with no crack to crawl through. My su√ering grew intense in the few moments before I was able to come to myself, and to remember that I was there present by my own deliberate purpose to study this very performance then going on around me.

Here, Fletcher’s reflection on her su√ering and desperation establishes the emotional contrast necessary to enable her to arrive at scientific rationality, transforming her desire for escape into escapade.

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I have since had many a laugh with my red friends over this my first and only fright, caused, as I now know, by the unconscious influence of the popular idea of ‘‘Injuns’’; but it was long after this initiation before my ears were able to hear in Indian music little besides a screaming downward movement that was gashed and torn by the vehemently beaten drum. However, as the weeks wore on, and I observed the pleasure the Indians took in their own singing, I was convinced that there existed something which was eluding my ears. I therefore began to listen below this noise, much as one must listen to the phonograph, ignoring the sound of the machinery in order to catch the registered tones of the voice.≥≠

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Though Fletcher was not the first to reflect on the transformational nature of ‘‘fieldwork,’’ her writing in the Century helped expose anthropology to a larger audience. Significantly, the phrase ‘‘listening below the noise’’ recurred in di√erent forms throughout Fletcher’s lifelong study of Native-American music.≥∞ ‘‘Listening below the noise’’ not only exemplified the credo of an emerging form of cultural relativism and its peculiar gendering, but also provided Fletcher’s solution to the ‘‘Indian problem’’: through patience and proper understanding, Native Americans could be brought to civilization.≥≤

engendering the west in the colonial encounter The first generation of women ethnographers all worked in (or had personal experience of) areas marked by recent and ongoing colonial intervention. Nuttal, Yorke Stevenson, and later Parsons wrote extensively on the impact of Spanish conquest on Mexico. Yorke Stevenson also produced the popularly written Maximillian in Mexico, which o√ered ‘‘a woman’s reminiscences of the French intervention in Mexico between 1862 and 1867.≥≥ Yet, while Yorke Stevenson sympathized with the ‘‘ill-fated’’ intervention and recounted the ‘‘last heroic hours of the Empire’’ by reproducing stereotypes of Mexican banditry, Nuttal argued forcefully against stereotypes of Mexico’s native peoples. In 1897, the same year Yorke Stevenson’s work was serialized in the Century, Nuttal appealed to an audience of folklorists to guard against ‘‘unscrupulous exhibitions’’ by showmen who claimed to feature ‘‘the last living representatives of the Aztec race.’’

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The erroneous idea that the Aztec race was a hideous one and is now extinct, has been widely disseminated, and become deeply rooted in the public mind, where it flourishes with the remarkable persistency that has long been recognized as the special characteristic of scientific errors. Thus, it is not surprising to find in George du Maurier’s last novel, ‘‘The Martian,’’ an individual being spoken of as being, as ‘‘hideous as an Esquimaux or Aztec,’’ and this combination of ideas is likely to linger on indefinitely in European countries although the fraudulency of the showman’s announcement has been exposed by leading anthropologists.≥∂

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But in Nuttal’s view, it was ultimately Spanish-conquest narratives about human sacrifice that were responsible for stereotypes about Aztecs as ‘‘ugly, dwarfish, and bloodthirsty savages, having nothing in common with civilized humanity.’’ She argued that ‘‘to the extent it was practiced, it has long been recognized by students of ancient Mexico that the current accounts, based on the reports of certain Spanish writers, are grossly exaggerated, some say purposely, in order to justify, in the eyes of the civilized world, the cruel extermination of the native civilization.’’≥∑ Unfortunately, Nuttal’s consciousness about the relationship between conquest and ethnic stereotype, along with her criticism of ‘‘unscrupulous exhibitions,’’ is almost singular among early anthropologists.≥∏ Too often their ethnographies were silent about the effects of conquest and westward expansion on the people they studied, and when they did note such e√ects, they were concerned more with the salvage of custom than with the disappearance of its bearers. For example, Cox Stevenson began her monograph on the Sia by noting, ‘‘All that remains of the once populous pueblo of Sia is a small group of houses and a mere handful of people in the midst of one of the most extensive ruins of the Southwest, the living relic of an almost extinct people and a pathetic tale of the ravages of warfare and pestilence. This picture is even more touching than the infant’s cradle or the tiny sandal found buried in the cli√ in the canyon walls. The Sia of today is in much the same condition as that of the ancient cave and cli√-dweller as we restore their villages in the imagination.’’≥π Implied here is a nostalgic evolutionary view of the Sia as near extinct, unchanged relics of a distant past—an example of what Fletcher called the ‘‘fossil bed’’ of human society and its institutions.≥∫ ‘‘Thus the railroad, the merchant, and the cowboy, without this purpose in view, are e√ecting a change which is slowly closing, leaf by leaf, the record of the religious beliefs of the pueblo Indian. With the Sia this record book is being more rapidly closed,’’ leading Cox Stevenson to conclude dispassionately, ‘‘Each shadow on the dial brings nearer to a close the lives of those upon whose minds are graven the traditions, mythology, and folklore as indelibly as are the pictographs and monochromes upon the rocky walls.’’≥Ω The view that the ‘‘past life of the Indian was a closed book’’ was echoed by Alice Fletcher, bringing reform projects designed to ‘‘civilize’’ Native Americans in line with Boasian salvage ethnography.∂≠ Fletcher was, in fact, a key architect of Bureau of Indian A√airs (bia) land distribution policy: when the Omaha Severalty Act was 28

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passed in 1882, she was sent to implement it. Her work for the Omaha reallotment scheme was so meticulous that she was hired to complete a nationwide survey of all reservations and the history of treaties between Indian nations and U.S. government with the aim of helping Indians move toward ‘‘civilization.’’ Fletcher’s early report titled Indian Education and Civilization, prepared in ‘‘Answer to Senate Resolution of February 23, 1885,’’ established her as one of the foremost authorities on Native Americans in the United States, while her participation in the Lake Mohonk Conferences of the Friends of the Indian also resulted in passage of the Dawes Act of 1887, which extended allotment and the breaking up of Indian reservations to other tribes.∂∞ It was thus that she came to do allotment work among the Winnebago from 1887 to 1889, and among the Nez Perce from 1890 to 1893.∂≤ By 1897, Fletcher apparently realized the debilitating, irreversible e√ects of allotment on Native American life, but one would not know that from reading her 1905 coauthored monograph, where she rea≈rms allotment’s benefits for the Omaha, mystifying the colonial processes that had alienated Native Americans from their land and former ways of life by noting only that ‘‘contact with the white race was increasing daily and beginning to press on the people. The environment was changing rapidly, and the changes brought confusion of mind to the people as well as to many in mature life.’’∂≥ Describing the ‘‘great unrest and anxiety’’ that had come to the Omahas through ‘‘force of a power’’ they could not understand, she sympathized, ‘‘The trouble of mind everywhere manifest in the tribe can hardly be pictured, nor can the relief that came to the people when, in 1882, their lands were assured to them by an act of Congress.’’∂∂ Thus not only did Fletcher portray Native Americans as subjects of her own rescue narrative, but she represented an act that would actually reduce their lands as a form of relief, evidence of her inability to break from or criticize U.S. policy on Indians. The identification of early women anthropologists with the U.S. government meant that they were sometimes racially positioned as brokers of Indian masculinity. For example, in Fletcher’s first meeting with the Nez Perce, her companion Jane Gay recounted resistance to Fletcher’s e√orts to propound allotment and the meaning of citizenship: ‘‘A little stir arose among the people, two or three whispered together, and at length one man stood up, a tall broadshouldered fellow with a deep voice, and an air of authority about him. . . . He said, ‘We do not want our land cut up in little pieces, we

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have not told you to do it.’ ’’∂∑ Gay commented, sardonically, ‘‘They could scarcely be blamed for their incredulity; that reasonable human beings, thought worthy of having citizenship thrust upon them, should have no voice what ever in matters which so exclusively concerned themselves, was an idea too di≈cult for the untutored mind to grasp.’’∂∏ But Fletcher carried on, telling the Indians that ‘‘she [had] come to bring them manhood, that they [might] stand up beside the white man in equality before the law.’’∂π In this formulation, white women reformers sought to bestow citizenship on Native American men, but the act of identification that might have envisioned su√rage for white women and Native American women was never made. Other evidence similarly suggests the inseparability of gender from racial positioning, which prevented identification across cultures as ‘‘women.’’ Writing of her e√orts to collect Mide’wiwin mystical knowledge among the Chippewa, Frances Densmore reported pursuing a reluctant woman until she agreed to sing a ‘‘love-charm song’’ in a secluded place where no one could hear her. ‘‘She was a woman of about 60 years of age, and the most dirty and unattractive woman with whom the writer has come in contact. In a thin nasal tone she sang the song. . . . With coy shyness she said the song meant she was as beautiful as the roses.’’∂∫ Densmore’s incredulity that the song’s performance could ever transform the ‘‘dirty and unattractive woman’’ before her suggests that gender as a category of analysis which marked women’s shared oppression across cultures could not emerge when even sympathy of women reformers for their female subjects was lacking. In a later article, Densmore recounted a fieldwork incident that similarly underscored not her gender status but her racial membership: ‘‘The Papago were dancing by the light of a full moon, on Christmas eve in 1920. My sister and I were the only white persons present, and we watched them until midnight. Later I was told that only a few women could sing this drone, which was considered an embellishment to the music. A few weeks later I attended the Morning Star ceremony of the Pawnee. It was said that only one other white person had ever entered the tent during this ceremony.’’∂Ω Although Densmore might have argued, like Tylor or Parsons, that the fact of her being a woman gave her an access to Papago and Pawnee performances that male ethnographers did not have, she was instead at pains to claim status as one of the first whites to have viewed them. 30

The idea that the first women anthropologists, in rea≈rming their racial membership, might be seen either literally or symbolically to occupy male roles is illustrated in an incident wherein Fletcher faced o√ with white ranchers and farmers who saw allotment as a way to increase their own land holdings. Jane Gay, Fletcher’s traveling companion for the Nez Perce allotment party, recorded Fletcher’s first meeting with this interest group in her popular, tongue-in-cheek letters. Her Majesty read her instructions to the delegation and explained that it was her sworn duty to place the Indians upon their best lands and in the localities where they must rapidly become self-supporting and valuable citizens, not so to dispose of them that they must be paupers and a charge upon the white population of the territory. The men are evidently non-plussed, for, as they mounted their horses, the Photographer heard one mutter, ‘‘Why in Thunder did the Government send a woman to do this work? We could’ve got a holt on a man.’’ They ‘‘sound’’ the Surveyor before they ride away and he tells them he does not yet know anything of their prospects, but he rather thinks ‘‘from looks of the Allotting Agent’s eye, that everything will have to be done on the square.’’ The introduction of the square idea has a depressing e√ect, for hitherto they have worked only in rings, but I dare say they really have no faith in anybody being able to square their circle.∑≠

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Here, a situation in which Fletcher’s authority might have been challenged because she was a woman is deflected by her claim to a superior morality as a woman, by the assumption that things would therefore be done ‘‘on the square.’’ However, racial membership and gender positioning could also be transmuted into a womanist frontier machismo, where white women were seen to neutralize not only white men, but Indian men as well. In 1886, newspaper coverage of an incident in which Matilda Cox Stevenson and her husband were held prisoner for intruding on a Hopi Kiva ceremony portrayed Matilda as the hero of the story. Although they were both later rescued by a trader, the newspaper headline crowed, ‘‘cowed by a woman. a craven red devil weakens in the face of a white heroine — exciting adventure in an indian village in arizona.’’∑∞ Cox Stevenson also had legendary fights with Major John Wesley Powell, over (among other things) itemizing expenses. On one occasion, asking reimbursement for informant expenses, she wrote in a

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decidedly provocative manner: ‘‘One man, one night, one dollar.’’ On still another occasion: ‘‘She included a case of Scotch in her expense account, which of course was turned down. She insisted that it was necessary in her work, since nothing else would induce the Indians to give out their more secret information. It was pointed out to her that it was illegal to give whiskey to the Indians. She replied that it was only illegal to sell it to them. The item became a matter of pride and principle to her, and she insisted she would fight it through.’’∑≤ This stands in marked contrast to Cox Stevenson’s description of the devastating e√ects of alcohol on the Zuni Sha’lako festival. In her 1904 monograph she wrote, with little sympathy, of ‘‘lawbreaking’’ Indians: ‘‘Every man in Zuni spends what money he can obtain on whiskey, not only for his own use and that of his friends, but to dispose to the Navahos, who come in large numbers to the dances.’’∑≥ Cox Stevenson reported that in 1879 whiskey was rarely used by the Zunis, ‘‘but with the advance of civilization, intoxicants [were] producing demoralizing e√ects,’’ and though there was a law forbidding the sale of liquor to Indians, it had not been enforced up to 1896. She observed harshly,

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The Navaho is a close trader, but the Zuni is closer. . . . The writer has observed many trades in which the Zunis come out the better. One Navaho, crazy for liquor, trades a fine pony for a gill of liquor. . . . While the younger men of Zuni drink as much as the Navahos, the older men and more clever traders keep their heads clear enough to get the best of the bargain. This trading of liquor goes on in inner rooms, which are supposed, as has been stated, to be for the use of the elect; but the Zunis, being no exception to those who are demoralized by the liquor tra≈c, indulge their love of gain at any cost.∑∂

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Cox Stevenson’s contradictory position on alcohol, her simultaneously arguing its necessity for work with the Indians and against its abuse among the Zuni and Navaho, may also indicate the conflictual gender positionings she and Fletcher occupied: pressure to deal ‘‘like a man’’ on the one hand, and to reform like a woman on the other.∑∑

evangelic al ethnography Victorian ideas of feminine purity enabled nineteenth-century women anthropologists to work independently of men on the fron32

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tier because they were considered morally superior and thus desexualized. As Ann Ardis put it, ‘‘So long as women were assumed to be without sexual appetite, they could be recognized as autonomous moral agents in middle class Victorian culture . . . credited with having minds that were not controlled by their animal passions.’’∑∏ The social work orientation of the Women’s Anthropological Society, for example, was informed by the assumption that ‘‘the highly organized religious nature of woman gives her special adaptation for the study of the sublime di√erentia, by reason of which man alone sins, sacrifices, worships.’’∑π This orientation supports Ardis’s claim that the development of women’s philanthropological organizations and new categories of women’s work did not threaten established male professions or institutions, because in entering the public sphere they were supplementing existing services and ‘‘mothering the public.’’∑∫ The existing photos of Platt Smith, Fletcher, Densmore, and Cox Stevenson show somber-faced, darkly clad, proper Victorian women, often incongruously appearing against scenes of tranquil wilderness. Victorian maternalism was also literally mapped onto Fletcher’s physiognomy, prompting her friends to compare her with Queen Victoria and to address her as ‘‘Her Majesty.’’∑Ω When Fletcher was elected vice-president of Section H (Anthropology) of the aaas, in 1895, her friends in the Association for the Advancement of Woman toasted her by singing ‘‘God Save the Queen.’’∏≠ Historians have suggested that the social-reform influence of Victorian evangelicalism resulted in both the ‘‘feminization of religion’’ and the emergence of ‘‘evangelical ethnology’’ in the late nineteenth century.∏∞ Missionary work attracted women because it combined a gender-specific, Christian way of life with degrees of freedom denied to women in traditional urban spheres. While Victorian ideology stressed domesticity, it paradoxically also encouraged women to move away from the home, for woman’s moral superiority or spirituality, the very qualities that made her custodian of the home, also qualified her as a social and religious reformer.∏≤ Thus, while the ‘‘field’’ afforded some escape from urban gender roles for early women anthropologists, they entered the field enabled by those very gender roles. Whether unmarried or freed from household duties by technological change and increasing aΔuence, women like Jane Addams and her Hull House volunteers redefined the public sphere of latenineteenth-century North America.∏≥ For this reason, it was the settlement house women who were seen to be the heroines of reform

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in the early twentieth century, not the women, like Alice Fletcher or Matilda Cox Stevenson, who had applied themselves to the ‘‘Indian question.’’∏∂ While there is some evidence that Alice Fletcher’s early participation in the clubwomen’s movement led her to anthropology where she ‘‘hope[d] to add to the historical solution of the woman question,’’ she devoted herself to the resolution of the ‘‘Indian question’’ through a form of evangelical ethnology.∏∑ Jane Gay provides a troubling account of how missionization and government work were tied together in Fletcher’s use of local churches to hold informational sessions on allotment: ‘‘She stood looking straight before her a few minutes until there was absolute silence in the room, and then she said, ‘My friends, this is God’s house and what we are to talk about is a serious matter, a√ecting the lives and happiness of all. . . . It is right to ask God’s blessing here in this house, that all we do may please Him.’ ’’∏∏ Yet it is also true that the conversion scenes rendered in the ethnographies written by the discipline’s first women carried parodic undertones when Indian men had to school white women in their chores. One such scene occurred when, as Cox Stevenson acknowledged, her own ineptitude in introducing ‘‘sanitary measures’’ among the Zuni ultimately led to her success.

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Soap was introduced in 1879 in the hope that the Zuni would wash their cotton clothes, and the writer undertook the task of instruction. She selected as a pupil a man who had adopted a woman’s dress and who was known to be the strongest, most active, and most progressive Indian in the tribe; but he was averse to the work, and at first refused to wash. He looked on in silence for a while as the writer worked. Never having had any experience in that work herself, she soon had most of the water from the tub on the floor and was drenched to the skin. The pupil exclaimed: ‘‘You do not understand that which you would teach. You do not understand as much as the missionary’s wife; she keeps the water in the tub, and does not make a river on the floor. Let me take your place.’’∏π

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The Zuni’s reference to the missionary’s wife, and Cox Stevenson’s and Fletcher’s own Christian views, lend support to the idea that their ‘‘evangelical ethnography’’ was enabled by a form of ‘‘Victorian maternalism,’’ even as they were often structurally positioned as males, that is, as whites with power over their subjects.∏∫ Fletcher’s biographer refers to her as ‘‘Mother of the Indians,’’ and although Cox Stevenson often incurred the wrath of the Zuni for intruding 34

Long ago, when the world was new, a little Brown Brother of Mankind strayed away and was forgotten. The animals welcomed the child, leading him far up the mountains, where they hid him in the deep of the canyons and the quiet of the pine forest. There they

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upon ritual performances, they also called her ‘‘Washington Mother,’’ while she, in turn, described them as children.∏Ω After a typical expedition to remove and photograph Zuni sacred objects, Cox Stevenson observed, ‘‘The party was discovered when descending the mountain, and the information was carried to the village, so that upon the return of the writer and her companions there was great excitement. Had the people in general known of the removal of the images of Pa’yatamu their wrath would have known no bounds; but these children of nature are like civilized beings of tender years, and can be controlled through kindness or firmness, as occasion requires, by those for whom they entertain profound respect.’’π≠ She concluded, ‘‘Primitive man must be approached according to his understanding; thus the prime requisite for improving the conditions of the Indian is familiarity with Indian thought and customs. Those possessing superior intelligence and a love for humanity, and only such may lead our Indians from darkness to light.’’π∞ Fletcher, on the other hand, did not immediately see Native Americans as children; rather, in their ‘‘old life’’ they were adults teaching the ways of their vanishing cultures to concerned whites. But as she became more involved in allotment and urged Native Americans to take on white ways, she increasingly perceived them as children.π≤ Thus, ‘‘Fletcher was to pride herself on doing science like a man. But she did her philanthropy with the special claims of a woman, one who had su√ered for, and who knew what was best for her children.’’π≥ The view that Indians were wild children seeking tenderness and understanding was echoed by Frances Densmore in a two-page popular pamphlet she wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century, The Plea of Our Brown Brother. Commissioner of Indian A√airs Francis Leupp, contributing the pamphlet’s preface, averred that the ‘‘Indian problem is, after all, less a race problem than a human problem,’’ the solution to which was sympathy.π∂ In Densmore’s pamphlet, Indian life as the childhood of the white race was portrayed in mythological terms that recalled Rousseau’s ‘‘noble savage’’ and rea≈rmed the inseparability of Native Americans from nature.

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told him strange stories of the winds and the clouds; there too, he learned the history of every beast and bird. Soon he forgot his ancestry and believed that he descended from an animal. When he played at war he cried, ‘‘I am from the bears,’’ or ‘‘I am of the turtles.’’ For this reason he never killed an animal except for necessary food. On the walls of the canyons he drew strange pictures, and when he roamed the prairie he drew pictures on the skins that framed his dwelling. He knew the meaning of his pictures and his magic. He loved the sound of his own singing, though it often sounded like the cry of his wolf-friends. Time passed, and the White Race in the pride of manhood came face to face with its Brown Brother. It saw the pictures and they brought a memory of its own half-forgotten childhood, but when it heard the wild songs, mingled with shrill whistles and pounding drums, it turned aside. Too many centuries had passed since, by the shore of the forgotten sea, it played with bits of broken shell and whispering reed, calling it music. The Mowgli of North America was still a child and with the trustfulness of childhood he welcomed the stranger, calling him Brother. He o√ered him freely of the spoils of the chase, told of his visions, sang his songs and exhibited his magic, but there was no answer of understanding on the face of his Brother, who mocked and cheated him. Then the child grew suddenly to be a man. Wrapping himself in his robe of bu√alo-skin he hid his heart in a grim silence, but under the bu√alo robe he held the poisoned arrow, and beneath the silence lay a deadly treachery. So the Indian became the problem of the New World.π∑

Densmore continues her parable, compressing time and entire histories of conquest and genocide.

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For five centuries there has been a struggle. Spanish adventurers, French priests, English soldiers and American civilization tried to bring the American Mowgli back to man and he defied them. Cheated and deceived, he kept the haughty dignity that is his by right of inheritance; beaten back step by step he flung out his defiance, and bore his defeat with proud stoicism. But a chance has come. Today he returns to his white brother led by something within himself that he does not understand. He no longer teaches his children the weird jungle songs, but he sings them to himself when the night is full of the witchery that the wild creatures know. He comes at last—ignorant of the ethics of clothes,

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with the pitiful childish decorations in his hair, but in his heart the strength of Nature’s noblemen. He comes at last of his own accord to us who do not understand him, and the tragedy of the past, the sadness of the present and the hope of the future are in his plea that his children be given an education and taught the White Man’s Way. He comes:—What shall be his Welcome?π∏

In sum, Densmore, like Cox Stevenson and Fletcher before her, romanticized Native American life in a field of discourse that displaced questions of genocide and survival into talk of ‘‘change’’ and ‘‘passing ways of life.’’ In this discursive field, Native Americans were noble but ‘‘vanishing,’’ a case study of failed assimilation scored by dignity, defiance, and defeat—‘‘the problem of the New World.’’ Densmore’s recourse to the civilizing mission of Kipling’s Jungle Book, along with her description of the ‘‘American Mowgli’’ who emerges from the jungle, functions as a cross-validation of British and American imperialisms even as it obliterates the specific material e√ects of westward expansion and ‘‘manifest destiny.’’

expository feminism, midway ethnology

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By the end of the nineteenth century, in part owing to the contributions of Boas, Cushing, Cox Stevenson, and Fletcher, the model of experientially gained knowledge of other cultures was displacing ‘‘armchair anthropology.’’ Yet ‘‘fieldwork’’ was conducted not only in the ‘‘wilds,’’ but in the showcases of civilization as well. The centuryend expositions and world’s fairs were both major sites for anthropological research and proof of how the West had been tamed for civilization. The Dakota state display at the New Orleans Industrial Exhibition of 1884–85, ‘‘pitches the wigwam of a Sioux war-chief, with wife and child to be stared at by the passing multitude,’’ wrote an essayist for the Century.ππ But as the bia was still reeling from the charges leveled by Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1881), it was to Alice Fletcher that the Committee on Education turned, asking her to prepare an exhibit on Indian education that would demonstrate government e√orts to help Native Americans. In part owing to lack of funds, and to Putnam’s unwillingness to loan objects from the Peabody, Fletcher was able to mount only a display of sixteen photo-

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graphs and two drawings, accompanied by an explanatory pamphlet, Historical Sketch of the Omaha Tribe of Indians in Nebraska. The concluding paragraph of the pamphlet speaks to Fletcher’s view that exhibitions should show ‘‘what has been actually accomplished in bringing a people from barbarism to civilized life,’’ demonstrating that ‘‘civilization is no fanciful theory . . . for here is a tribe which works, is educated, and is self-sustaining, having, within 25 years passed from Indian modes of life to farming upon their lands in severalty, independent of Government support.’’π∫ Fletcher’s emphasis on Native American capacity for civilization, while missionary, stood in marked contrast to the dominant theme of the expositions that sought to emphasize their savagery. Still, Fletcher’s exhibit was one of the most popular at the fair. Julia Ward Howe, as director of the Woman’s Building, drew most of the early press; one commentator noted that ‘‘Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and her zealous assistants have made this Department a pleasing and successful feature of the Exposition,’’ though it is ‘‘of necessity inadequate to present a view of the attainments of women . . . and their share in carrying forward the world’s civilization.’’πΩ Yet Fletcher’s tireless presence at the exhibit, and her celebrated noon talks—‘‘Indian Custom’’ and ‘‘Dark and Bright Sides of Indian Life,’’ for example—drew crowds rivaling Howe’s.∫≠ Fletcher was also present at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair with Nuttal, Cox Stevenson, and Yorke Stevenson. Yorke Stevenson’s role in the University of Pennsylvania’s Middle East expedition led to her being appointed to the Jury of Awards for Ethnology at the exposition. A special act of Congress had been required to permit women to serve on such juries, and after it passed, Yorke Stevenson was elected jury vice-president. The international jury of the world’s fair applauded ‘‘the wisdom of Congress in passing an act which has enabled scientific women to take their place on the highest planes of science, co-equal with men’’ in a resolution passed at its final meeting.∫∞ However, it was Zelia Nuttal who emerged as one of the fair’s sensations, receiving much publicity for the discovery of a codex subsequently named after her, and becoming one of the few women whose own work was cataloged by both the Science and Ethnology Committees.∫≤ By the time of the 1893 World’s Fair, Fletcher hoped that her earlier success in New Orleans and Putnam’s confidence in her abilities would lead him to appoint her as his chief assistant. Instead the position went to Boas. Fletcher’s disappointment was not leav38

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ened by her being named an honorary corresponding member of the Women’s Branch of the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the Columbian Exposition. She wrote fretfully to Putnam, ‘‘I have accepted, but I can’t see anything to do. I don’t believe in trying to disentangle work according to sex, but many do.’’∫≥ However, the Board of Lady Managers for the Woman’s Building exhibit took the task of disentangling work according to sex quite seriously and, in their 1891 statement about the nature of the project, proclaimed, ‘‘The footsteps of women will be traced from prehistoric times to the present, and their intimate connection shown with all that has tended to promote the development of the race, even though they have worked under the most disadvantageous conditions.’’∫∂ To this end, the ‘‘Lady Managers’’ had also planned to place placards through the exposition’s ‘‘White City’’ Building proclaiming which exhibits had been produced by women’s labor.∫∑ Otis Mason, one of Boas’s major rivals, lauded the notion of tracing the footsteps of women through time and was to play a major role in bringing the much-coveted Smithsonian exhibits to the Woman’s Building. With his intervention, the Smithsonian—having intended its full collection to go to the ethnology section of the fair— finally relented and contributed an eighty-case exhibit titled ‘‘Women’s Work in Savagery,’’ which was focused in large part on the material culture of Native Americans. In one exhibit, ‘‘Lady Managers from Colorado were given the landing of the southwest staircase for their ‘Indian Alcove. Against a backdrop of Navaho blankets, a Navaho weaver worked her loom; a reed shuttle flew back and forth in her fingers.’ ’’∫∏ While Fletcher continued to focus her exhibits on the positive e√ects missionization had on Native American capacity for selfsupport, the Woman’s Building exhibit transformed the lantern-slide lectures of evangelical ethnography’s ‘‘teaching by showing’’ into a kind of ‘‘expository feminism.’’ This new ‘‘show-and-tell’’ stage of Victorian feminism was due, in part, to the successes of the first generation of professional and social-reform women. The exhibitions and fairgrounds of the nineteenth century provided avenues for the leisured middle classes to view the hierarchically ranked achievements of women such that the progress from savagery to civilization was confirmed. While some historians suggest that the world’s fairs moved away from a conception of culture as the function of time, and toward a notion of culture as a function of place through the display of ethnological villages, I would argue that the latter actually consoli-

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dated an evolutionist, ‘‘time-centered’’ view of culture that was itself deeply gendered.∫π The board of Lady Managers at the Chicago World’s Fair faced a number of other issues besides questions of arranging and procuring exhibits. It was during the first Congress of Representative Women that its organizers managed, after protracted struggle with the more conservative women’s club movement, to have women’s su√rage placed on the speaker’s agenda. As if in vindication of the su√ragist cause, Susan B. Anthony was heralded as one of the heroines of the fair. The wctu organ, the Union Signal, wrote of the ‘‘electric thrill of sympathy’’ that ‘‘noble women of all lands’’ must have felt with ‘‘these ‘representative’ women of the world who assisted to register an event in history as new as the creation—the consecration of a building, planned and decorated by women, to the arts, industries and literature of women; and greater still to chronicle the first setting of its women by a government, in a great national enterprise, in a position independent of and coordinate with the men of the nation.’’∫∫ African American women who were disenfranchised by a number of the prominent su√ragist organizations of the time, however, waged another battle merely to earn representation at the congress.∫Ω Ida B. Wells coauthored a pamphlet with Frederick Douglass, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, arguing that if African Americans had contributed productively to American civilization but had been denied representation at the exposition, white Americans had ‘‘embraced barbarism and race hate’’ rather than civilization.Ω≠ Though white women organizers initially protested the creation of a separate Woman’s Building and the exclusion of their exhibits from the White City’s display of the achievements of civilization, in the end they were no more inclusive than the male architects of the exposition.Ω∞ Feminists of the 1890s were increasingly a part of the ‘‘nativism’’ that was sweeping American politics. During this period, few attempts were made to show that women, regardless of race or culture, shared something in common as ‘‘women.’’ Rather, the overwhelming tendency of feminists at this time was to point to racial distinctions. Thus Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw were both ‘‘fulminating at the humiliation su√ered by American women, by which they meant native-born white middle-class women, at being ruled by all races and nationalities[, and] . . . many su√ragists argued that only the votes of women would enable white Protestant

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native Americans to outvote new immigrants in the North and blacks in the South.’’Ω≤ The fact that scientists like Fletcher or Nuttal and su√ragists like Julia Ward Howe or Susan B. Anthony emerged as popular symbols of the 1885 and 1893 fairs says something not only about the relationship of feminism to domestic politics, but about the question of colonial empire as well. Nowhere was the question of empire posed more clearly at the fair than in the circuslike atmosphere of the fair’s Midway, a mile-long strip of land between Fifty-ninth and Sixtieth Streets, where native people of the world were placed on display in sordid conditions. The only person who protested the treatment of Native Americans at Chicago was Emma Sickles, a member of Putnam’s sta√, who said what Fletcher probably thought: that the display was used to ‘‘work up sentiment against the Indian by showing that he is either savage or can be educated only by government agencies. . . . Every means was used to keep the self-civilized Indian out of the Fair.’’Ω≥ Sickles was, of course, right, but she lost her job. Wounded Knee was still a recent event, and Indian images of savagery were augmented by Wild Bill’s Congress of Rough Riders, performing just blocks from the fair.Ω∂ The internment of Native Americans in ethnographic villages at the world’s fairs did not end in Chicago. At the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, the main attractions at the fair’s Midway Heights were the Sioux on display who had been involved in the Ghost Dance Movement, and who had escaped massacre by U.S. troops.Ω∑ Robert Rydell reports that the same lodges which had been riddled with gunfire had been transported to the Midway Heights for the Sioux to live in. Present were a young woman and her son who had been shot while asleep in their lodge. The director of publicity claimed, ‘‘This boy, known as ‘Little Wound,’ seems to be no worse physically for his early taste of war, and during the Exposition, showed all the lively and mischievous tendencies of a robust urchin.’’Ω∏ Fletcher was not in Atlanta to witness the cruel display of the Sioux, but at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898 she arranged for several Omaha Indians to sing for the audience of the Congress of Musicians. In the later edited collection of those songs for a popular audience, Fletcher argued, ‘‘Aside from its scientific value, this music possesses a charm and spontaneity that cannot

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fail to please those who would come near to nature. . . . These songs are like the wild flowers that have not yet come under the transforming hand of the gardener.’’Ωπ While Fletcher deployed the same trope of wildness that was increasingly attached to Native Americans to mark their distance from civilization, she did object to the ‘‘glaring crudities’’ of the ‘‘Indian Congress’’ at Omaha, which though immensely popular did not present the ‘‘true story’’ of Indian mental capacity, while her own ‘‘unheralded space of fifteen by forty feet in the Government Building at this same Exposition’’ displayed ‘‘the fine things that the Indian mind was capable of.’’Ω∫ The completion of westward expansion and the acquisition of new territory in the wake of a ‘‘trail of broken treaties’’ were celebrated by the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. As one Century columnist noted, ‘‘The widespread territory of the United States is illustrated by exhibits from such remote corners of the earth as Luzon, Porto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and Alaska. A million dollars has been spent to show the wonderful present in the Philippines.’’ΩΩ It was thus that the Louisiana Purchase Exposition held in St. Louis contained the largest ethnological display ever—nearly 1,200 Filipinos on display in a reservation—and the largest anthropology department of any fair, headed by W. J. McGee.∞≠≠ The presence of the Filipino and Native American villages once again ‘‘underlined the continuities with America’s expansionist past and with the national experience of subduing ‘savage’ populations.’’∞≠∞ The Century columnist concluded that North American Indians, ‘‘as they yet survived,’’ would be ‘‘permanent memorials of the fair, extremes of American life and civilization in close juxtaposition.’’∞≠≤ Fletcher was also present at this fair. Cox Stevenson had been given the responsibility of collecting display specimens, while Nuttal again served in an o≈cial capacity and Frances Densmore also participated.∞≠≥ Densmore, working with the Igorot peoples on the exposition reservation, confided, ‘‘For many years I have been a student of Indian music and expected to find some similarity between the music of the two races, but a few hours among the Filipinos showed that their music belongs to a period of development more primitive than that of the American Indian, and that it lies very near the beginning of musical expression.’’∞≠∂ She concluded her American Anthropologist article on her exposition observations by noting, ‘‘The native music of the Filipinos will soon pass away. Beyond the bamboo paling of the Igorot village were the white tents of the Philippine constabulary, and 42

there at set of sun a band of Filipinos played our own national anthem, while hundreds of Filipinos in khaki saluted the American flag as it was slowly lowered. So the sunset gun is measuring the days until all the Filipino music shall be merged at last in the Star Spangled Banner.’’∞≠∑ If a generation of women contributed to the professionalization of ethnology, ‘‘objective description’’ had not yet been established as its dominant mode; as a result, popular and professional journals alike were media for the expression of imperial sympathies.∞≠∏

the matrilineal conundrum

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In the late nineteenth century, (liberal, contract-theorist) social anthropologists like Johann Bachofen, John McLennan, John Lubbock, Lewis Henry Morgan, Herbert Spencer, and Edward Tylor questioned the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century notion of patriarchy (the rule of the father extended from family to government) as divine and natural, instead arguing that because it was the highest form of social fashioning, patriarchal civilization was the goal of evolution.∞≠π If Bachofen’s theory of an Amazonian matriarchy appeared to establish a women’s golden age, other evolutionists went to considerable e√ort to show that women had in no time or place wielded political power.∞≠∫ Yet the evidence of Native American and South Indian polyandrous and/or matrilineal societies, where rights to property were traced through the female line, was mounting. Fletcher, for example, wrote, ‘‘In most of the tribes of this country descent was traced through the mother,’’ so ‘‘children inherited nothing from their father’’; and, she noted, ‘‘Where father right prevailed, the mother’s heirs were her brothers and sisters and their children.’’ However, ‘‘In the tribes where descent was by the father, where the child belonged to the gens of the father and not to that of its mother, the woman did not, as with the ancient Greeks and Romans, lose her place in her gens and become absorbed in that of her husband. The Indian woman when she married neither changed her name nor relinquished any of her gentile or clan rights.’’∞≠Ω Thus, the evolutionists were forced to reexamine the relations of paternity, patriarchy, and property to one another. John McLennan’s Primitive Marriage (1865), the basis for his later work, The Patriarchal Theory (1885), provided at once an account of how the idea of fatherhood had emerged and an analysis of woman’s position in society.

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If they had lost the sexual freedom of the ‘‘early world,’’ and the power that sometimes accompanied polyandry, they were protected by the progress of ‘‘refinement’’ from the violent sexuality of the primitive male. Polyandry—the earliest form of the marriage ‘‘contract’’—had been a kind of training ground for men, giving them both the ‘‘idea of a wife’’ and ‘‘obligations in matters of sex.’’ The relationships thus established were the ultimate basis for the Roman concept of the permanent consortship of one man and one woman, ‘‘with interests the same in all things civil and religious’’— the idea which ‘‘despite all woman’s rights movements to the contrary,’’ was ‘‘that destined to prevail in the world.’’∞∞≠

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Herbert Spencer concurred with McLennan’s sentiment. In comparing the position of women among savage and civilized nations, he justified limiting political rights of the ‘‘screaming sisterhood’’ by arguing that women’s mental traits were less developed.∞∞∞ Otis Mason’s interest in the Woman’s Building exhibit can now be better understood in the context of the liberal reformulation of evolutionist thought. In his 1884 book, Woman’s Share of Primitive Culture, he, too, rea≈rmed the progress of civilization in the transition from polygamy to monogamy: ‘‘It is said that woman was first the wife of any, then the wife of many, and then one of many wives. . . . Matrimony in all ages is an attempt to secure the identity of the father. So the poor female, always the mother well-known, has had curious ups and downs with regards her spouse. The evolution of the husband then, is the history of matrimony. The motives of this evolution will appear as the various standings of woman in this regard are unfolded.’’∞∞≤ What further distinguished primitive women from Victorian women can be found in his assertion that ‘‘if there is in savagery, any operation in which the women have always ‘trodden . . . alone’ it is in the supreme moment of motherhood.’’∞∞≥ Unlike McLennan, Spencer, and Mason, Lewis Henry Morgan was sympathetic to women’s emancipation; he believed that greater sexual equality and more perfect monogamy were possible, and that the transition to patrilineality had a damaging e√ect on the position of women. (It was from this view that Engels derived the ‘‘world historical defeat of the female sex.’’) Nevertheless, the position Morgan took in his Systems of Consanguinity (1871) and Ancient Society (1878) was disdainful of polyandry and also assumed that women had no productive function in society.∞∞∂ One would therefore be mistaken to conclude that in establishing the nondivine or contingent nature of 44

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patriarchy, these thinkers were somehow ‘‘revolutionary.’’∞∞∑ Though di√ering in emphasis, all of them upheld monogamous marriage and Victorian domesticity as the pinnacle of civilization. It was, rather, the inability of evolutionist thought to successfully contain the contradiction posed by matrilineal societies that provided a revolutionary opening for feminist contestation of the ‘‘woman question.’’ Thus the 1891 statement of the board of directors for the Woman’s Building exhibit at Chicago rea≈rmed that which the evolutionists had such a hard time explaining away: ‘‘It will be shown that women, among all the primitive peoples, were the originators of most of the industrial arts, and that it was not until these became lucrative that they were appropriated by men, and women pushed aside.’’∞∞∏ Here, ‘‘woman’’ in search of a common past emerges as a universal category that transcends cultural di√erence, even as Mason’s notion that women were to be recognized only by their achievement of motherhood was rejected through an appropriation of that which had most commonly been seen as male prerogative: the invention of technology. The theme that ‘‘woman’s work has been taken from her by man, and with each appropriation she has been bereft of importance in the community’’ was echoed by Fletcher and became the flash point of Victorian feminism’s confrontation with evolutionary theory”∞∞π By 1895, the matrilineal conundrum had also worked its way into the Century. ‘‘We are not warranted in supposing the early condition of woman was one of bondage,’’ wrote Helen Watterson. ‘‘In the earliest historical records we find that it was the woman, and not the man, who was head of the family; from her descent was reckoned, from her honors and inheritance came.’’ ‘‘But,’’ she continued, ‘‘as civilization advanced, and refined away the primitive rude strength of the race, woman was seen to weaken more rapidly than man. One day she failed to meet man’s might with equal might. Then was born the ‘woman question.’ ’’∞∞∫ The work of early women anthropologists, and their e√orts to introduce it to the public sphere, thus fomented a nascent critique of civilization. Along with Fletcher’s explications of Native American matrilineal forms, Cox Stevenson’s 1894 and 1904 accounts of childbirth among the Sia and Zuni pueblos show extensive ceremonial elaboration and family support around women’s pregnancy and childbirth—a reinscription of ‘‘primitive’’ motherhood that contested Mason’s evolutionist assertion of blissful maternity as the exclusive achievement of the white race. Erminnie Platt Smith’s early work had furthermore documented social and mythological spheres

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of influence for Iroquois women.∞∞Ω And by 1910 Frances Densmore had also demonstrated that Chippewa women were not denied access to sacred ritual knowledge.∞≤≠ While early women anthropologists pointed to the contradiction between ‘‘primitive’’ but independent women and highly positioned ‘‘dependent’’ women, it must be remembered that, with the exception of Parsons, they were not only unable to break with the conventions of Victorian society, but were to a certain extent enabled by its gender ideology. Indeed, with the exception of Parsons again, the following statements are virtually all these women have to say about the question in a rather large body of work. Cox Stevenson wrote that ‘‘the domestic life of the Zunis might well serve as an example for the civilized world’’;∞≤∞ and Parsons was to proclaim, ‘‘Few women are institutionally as independent as Pueblo Indian women . . . particularly . . . Zuni women [who] marry and divorce more or less at pleasure. They own their houses and their gardens. Their o√spring are reckoned of their clan. Their husbands come to live with them in their family group.’’∞≤≤ Fletcher, too, acknowledged that ‘‘civilization’’ for the Indian woman was not without its drawbacks. ‘‘Their status is one of Independence in many ways, particularly as to property. Once, when our laws respecting married women were being explained to them, an Indian matron exclaimed, ‘I’m glad I’m not a white woman!’ ’’∞≤≥ In a later article, ‘‘The Indian Woman and Her Problems,’’ Fletcher expanded: ‘‘Under the old tribal regime, woman’s industries were essential to the very life of the people, and their value was publicly recognized. While she su√ered many hardships and labored early and late, her work was exalted ceremonially and she had a part in tribal functions. Her influence in the growth and development of tribal government, tribal ceremonies, and tribal power shows that her position had always been one of honor rather than one of slavery and degradation.’’∞≤∂ The central contradictions of Victorian evolutionism can thus be simply stated: if the status of women was seen to be the measure of a civilization, why was it that white women were denied the vote, rights to property, and independence in a range of social activities, when ‘‘primitive’’ Native American women might have rights to property, a say in ritual practice, and considerable social freedom? If ‘‘primitive’’ women were not degraded objects of pity as commonly supposed, what sense could be made of the claims to white women’s unique sex superiority? If the apparent lack of sex di√erentiation in primitive societies resulted in women’s labor, but was a sign of savage 46

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exploitation, why did middle-class Victorian women lack the freedoms of their less evolved sisters? Had white women traded the relative egalitarianism of simpler societies for the highly unequal and su√ocating sex di√erentiation of Civilization? Was Civilization somehow responsible for women’s plight? Native American women thus became a foil against which the progress of white women could be judged, an idealized symbol of what Victorian women did not yet fully enjoy: independence. Yet the question of political rights for Native American women was never raised. Platt Smith and Fletcher, as ‘‘club movement’’ women, advocated women’s independence but stopped short of suffrage. Perhaps for this reason, the question of enfranchising Native American women never arose for Fletcher, who campaigned extensively for Native American citizenship, but a≈rmed its masculine basis even as she sought to deracialize it. Describing a council of the Omaha tribe, she recounted, ‘‘In the speeches that were made, some used the English word ‘citizen,’ some the Indian word meaning ‘white man,’ to represent their present status. I explained to them . . . that one was a race word, and the other indicated a legal privilege irrespective of race. Thus, ‘I feel more like a man for these words of our friend,’ said one huge fellow.’’ Fletcher concluded that the Indian ‘‘must be inducted into his rights of manly estate,’’ but failed to recognize that the allotment of individual properties to men as a basis of enfranchisement under the Dawes Act was radically altering women’s role in transmitting inheritance rights within matrilineal societies.∞≤∑ Parsons and Yorke Stevenson, on the other hand, were active in feminist politics of the period, the former writing several popular feminist tracts and the latter a founder of the Equal Franchise Society of Pennsylvania, but there is no evidence that early women anthropologists thought about the exclusion of other groups of women from the American su√rage movement. ‘‘Only twice through my association with the Pueblo Indians has it occurred to me to be a feminist,’’ wrote Parsons in 1919.∞≤∏ Indeed, it may well have been the somewhat idealized perception of native women’s rights that precluded Parsons and others from acknowledging native women’s lack of rights both as women and as Native Americans outside their communities. In arguing for their own independence, then, early women anthropologists did not argue for an end to the process that subjugated Native American women as women. In fact, the perceived ‘‘independence’’ of Native American women in spite of the allotment system,

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forced removal, and genocide may have worked as an ideological cloaking device in much the same way that white women were not seen to be subjugated as women because they were white. Thus, the ‘‘woman question’’ destabilized but did not sunder the logic of Victorian evolutionism. While women were unequal, they were not inferior. High Victorianism held that women were superior owing to their innate spiritual natures, cloaking their subordination in the glories of maternal duty. Yet it had also become increasingly di≈cult for Victorian evolutionary theory to explain away the results of emerging field-based ethnology, and this gender strain certainly contributed to its demise. The confrontation of Victorian feminism with evolutionism created the conditions necessary for the articulation of ‘‘woman’’ as a universal category across cultures. Yet just at the moment women might have theorized a common history through a notion of shared ‘‘sex,’’ in spite of cultural di√erence, the prevailing evolutionism of the day worked to prohibit gender identification. It thus is di≈cult to o√er easy generalizations about the emergence of gender as an analytical category in anthropology, for the ethnographers who most contributed to its emergence occupied highly contradictory positions. They were clearly enabled by Victorian gender ideology, but the ‘‘evangelical ethnology’’ Fletcher and Cox Stevenson produced was not entirely consistent with its terms and therefore created tensions within Victorian evolutionary thought. Although they viewed their anthropology as a means to civilize the ‘‘Wild West,’’ the ethnology of the first women anthropologists contributed to the analytical conundrum empirical fieldwork posed to nineteenth-century evolutionary theory. By challenging the notion that women’s status was an accurate marker of ‘‘civilization,’’ the ethnographers of Native American matriliny helped establish the importance of cultural relativism. The question of sex di√erentiation—the idea that gender roles were not naturally given but socially constituted—led ultimately to the question of legitimate cultural di√erence. The emergence of gender as a category of analysis, then, enabled and is entailed by the ascendance of cultural relativism. But if evolutionism highlighted the ‘‘woman question,’’ the consolidation by a newly professionalized anthropology of cultural relativism as opposite to evolutionism also obscured the ways in which cultural relativism was inflected by the question of sex di√erence in history: the search for a shared woman’s past. This explains, in part, 48

the submerged but foundational role gender has played in the shaping of the discipline. Although the ethnologists discussed in this essay reproduced evolutionary themes in their work and were all too complicit with whitesettler ideology and imperialist projects, they also argued against racial and gender stereotypes, shaping a fieldwork ethic of cultural relativism that helped to dislodge the evolutionary paradigm. Though they were largely uncritical of the treatment accorded native peoples at the world’s fairs, their work nonetheless enabled feminist challenge of evolutionist patriarchy. Through their writing for nonprofessional journals and their participation in the public sphere of lecture circuits and the world’s fairs, they contributed to anthropology’s role in the reinscription of the woman question.

conclusion: the emergence of gender as a critique of inequality between the sexes

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As we have seen, feminist currents shaped the emergence of anthropology; but so too did anthropology sculpt the form of modern feminism. This juncture is most clearly marked in Parsons’s work. Much has already been written of Parsons’s contribution to the notion that gender is culturally constructed, particularly with respect to her ethnographic writings on women and children after 1915.∞≤π However, the writings which precede her entry into the field supply a missing piece of the story about her contribution to the emergence of gender as a category of analysis and her debts to the Victorian-era women. In her work before 1915, Parsons often emphasized the positive characteristics women shared in common. Such shared positive characteristics also indicated the equivalence Parsons established between women’s acts of resistance to patriarchy across cultures. She once asserted that ‘‘royal ladies of the African west coast and the queens of medieval Europe fought similar battles to establish their independence: All these queens, nuns, and femmes de joie were the celibate or grass widow pioneers of woman’s rights, the ancestresses of the modern emancipated woman.’’∞≤∫ Four years later, in The Old Fashioned Woman, Parsons had formulated ethnographic universals about women’s condition, arguing that di√erences between Western society and other societies were not pronounced where women were concerned. ‘‘ ‘Coming-out’ is a custom

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not peculiar to civilization. Our debutantes are apt to be older, to be sure, than those elsewhere. Instead of a year or two ‘abroad’ or in a ‘finishing school,’ savage girls usually spend but a few weeks or months in a lonely hut or in a bed or in a hammock or cage in a corner of the house or on the roof. But once ‘out,’ a debutante’s life is everywhere much the same. Everywhere at this time particular attention is paid to a girl’s looks.’’∞≤Ω Such anecdotes show Parsons establishing a kind of gender identification across culture, moving to a universal conception of womanhood based on positive shared characteristics. In later work she amplified instead the notion of women’s shared oppression, arguing, ‘‘From the domination of her family [a woman] passes under the domination of her husband, and, perhaps, in addition, of his family.’’∞≥≠ Thus at the same moment Parsons established a form of gender identification that acknowledged the relative high status and autonomy of women in ‘‘primitive’’ cultures, her move to equalize sources of oppression among diverse groups of women posed a break with evolutionist thinking that proposed patriarchy as the form of civilized society. Parsons’s intervention, building on the insights of the Victorian feminists, was to suggest that it was patriarchal social organization that universally oppressed women, not the low placement of nonwhite cultures on an evolutionary grid. Yet if Persons drew on and developed one tendency within Victorian feminism to resituate the meaning of patriarchy, she was also critical of many of its tenets. Social Rule, written in 1916, shows Parsons’s thinking in transition, as she moved away from the category of ‘‘woman’’ itself as a basis of categorization.

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Even the movement we have called feminism has not succeeded by and large in giving women any control over men. It has only changed the distribution of women along the two stated lines of control by men, removing vast numbers of women from the class supported by men to the class working for them. The redistribution of women may be, of course, just an incident of feminism. It may be that this movement is primarily not concerned with the control of one sex by the other at all. The main objective of feminism, in fact, may be defeminization, the declassification of women as women, the recognition of women as human beings or personalities.∞≥∞

Parsons advanced her argument not only by contrasting the ‘‘New Woman’’ to the ‘‘Old Fashioned Woman’’ of the nineteenth century, but by radically redefining the New Woman. 50

The more thoroughly a woman is classified, the more easily is she controlled. The vernacular phrase, the ‘‘New Woman,’’ has the psychological significance so curiously attaching to popular phrases. The New Woman means the woman not yet classified, perhaps not classifiable, the new woman not only to men, but to herself. She is . . . dissatisfied with expressing her own will to power merely through the ancient media, through children, servants, younger women and uxorious men. She wants to be not only a masterless woman, one no longer classified as daughter or wife, she wants a share in the mastery men arrogate.∞≥≤

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Paradoxically, Parsons’s turn to fieldwork actually e√aced the notion of sex inequality that Progressive Era feminism, and her own popular writing before 1915, helped to foreground. Writing for the Scientific Monthly in 1919, she asked, ‘‘Are the women of the community still thought of . . . even in scientific or pseudo-scientific circles, as a separable class? If so, there is nothing for us but to keep on with the categories of feminist and anti-feminist, tiresome though they become.’’∞≥≥ Like Fletcher, Parsons was ultimately wary of ‘‘disentangling work according to sex.’’ Like the Victorian women, Parsons sought to characterize the whole of a society, and understanding relations between the sexes was a means to this end. But while the work of both women reflected a notion of the cultural construction of gender, it was Parsons who developed the proposition that gender was marked by unequal relations of power. In her popular writing before 1915 she argued that recognition of this inequality meant recourse to ‘‘woman’’ as a universal category; in her professional writing after 1915 she argued that recognition of inequality between the sexes meant the decategorization of women. The understanding of cultural di√erence that was imbedded in evolutionist racism prevented Victorian feminists from fully reversing the evolutionary dictum about patriarchy; but in ways not yet fully understood, the impetus for cultural relativism, the quest to portray cultures as meaningful, coherent wholes, actually emerged from the need to understand sexual di√erence. For even as Parsons sought to move away from the notion of women as a sex class, paradoxically once again it was she, of all the anthropologists discussed in this essay, who actually wrote the most specifically on women and children in her quest to portray cultures as integrated wholes. It is this double movement that marks both the emergence of gender and the consolidation of cultural relativism within the discipline.

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chapter 2

¡ Race and the Culture of Anthropology

One important and vibrant strand of multiculturalist thought is liberal, pluralist and relativist, strongly reminiscent of the relativism of Boas and his students. It stresses an elementary equality of experience, a non-hierarchical view of civilization. In the face of a bullying celebration of Western civilization and the United States, they stress the importance and validity of other experiences and traditions. In the question of context, this aspect of multiculturalism shares much with the Boasians as well.∞

Despite the settling of curricular ‘‘multiculturalism’’ into a kind of institutional consensus, anthropology had rarely been in the vanguard when it came to debates on racism, multiculturalism, or revising the canon. Yet the failure of the discipline to be in the vanguard of such debate stemmed in part from a belief that it had, all along, been the vanguard of debate. Indeed, hadn’t anthropology stood precisely for the equality and relative value of all cultures, the very issues the ‘‘culture wars’’ seemed to raise? The implication was that if the advocates of multiculturalism knew more about anthropology, the crisis generated by multiculturalism might simply be resolved by requiring students to take courses in the subject.≤ As one anthropologist critical of the political currency of multiculturalism put it, ‘‘At least since the publication of Franz Boas’ Mind of Primitive Man in 1911 (a book that deserves a central place on multiculturalist bibliographies, both for its elaboration of cultural relativism and for its insistent discussion of racial and intercultural issues in the United States), anthropologists have taken some form of cultural relativism as a point of departure.’’≥ My objective here is not to argue with this writer’s understanding of ‘‘multiculturalism.’’ I do think it is a mistake, however, to assume that multiculturalism or cultural studies, because each lays claim to

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the term culture, immediately share something in common with anthropology. My argument is, in fact, the reverse. Multiculturalism and cultural studies have emerged as counterdisciplinary formations which radically foreground race and racial identity, precisely because the modern anthropological notion of culture cannot so do. I recognize that some will find this a perplexing assertion. Wasn’t the point precisely to move away from race and toward culture as a meaningful explanation of human di√erence? For ‘‘Boas, almost single-handedly, developed in America the concept of culture, which like a powerful solvent, would in time expunge race from the literature of social science.’’∂ Paul Rabinow, in more measured tones, has similarly a≈rmed, ‘‘Boas’ arguments against racial hierarchies and racial thinking have thoroughly carried the theoretical day. Today his arguments sound timid and far too generous in their serious engagement with his racist opponents. Of course, racism has hardly disappeared, but it is no longer a scientifically credible position.’’∑ In this essay, I suggest the disturbing possibility that expunging race from social science by assigning it to biology, as Boas and his students did, helped legitimate the scientific study of race, thereby fueling the machine of scientific racism. Part of the problem is that we have allowed Boas’s well-known anti-racist views, his early support for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), his own experience of antisemitism, and the specter of his books being burned in Nazi Germany, to substitute for careful analysis of the limits and contradictions of his thinking.∏ Scholars also point rather too quickly to Boas’s 1906 commencement address at Atlanta University at the invitation of W. E. B. Du Bois as evidence of shared notions of race between the two thinkers.π What, then, are we to make of Boas’s work for the U.S. Immigration Commission between 1908 and 1910, when he argued in a letter to the commission member Jeremiah W. Jenks of Cornell University, ‘‘Broadly speaking, the question before us is that of whether it is better for us to keep an industrially and socially inferior large black population, or whether we should fare better by encouraging the gradual process of lightening up this large body of people by the influx of white blood. Expressing the same question in other words, we might say the question before us is whether conditions can be so regulated that without a proportionate increase in the black population it will be of advantage to accelerate the infusion of white blood among them.’’∫ Boas’s student Melville Herskovits was more reserved about the

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e√ects of miscegenation, which ‘‘raised the larger and more di≈cult question of the way in which our dominantly White culture acts upon the Negro community,’’ but conceded that ‘‘should the current attitude toward so-called ‘race-crossing’ change . . . the introduction of this new stock would change the [Negro] type . . . so that it would no longer be recognizable.’’Ω Given the social and legal proscriptions against miscegenation or intermarriage, Boas and his students were doubtless progressive for the times. Indeed, the idea that a deliberate policy of miscegenation, or ‘‘interracial marriage,’’ could transform a ‘‘mongrel nation’’ into a true ‘‘racial democracy’’ was one to which Boas and his (Columbia University trained) Brazilian colleague, Gilberto Freyre, were quite committed.∞≠ While it is true that Boas’s early work was more influenced by nineteenth-century racial thought, that he was not a complete relativist, and that he was indebted to assimilationist thinking, we should not fail to note that Boas here is equating blood with racial inferiority, a view he is more often remembered for disputing.∞∞ The idea that an ‘‘industrially and socially inferior large black population’’ would disappear with a su≈cient infusion of ‘‘white blood’’ is consonant with the dominant view that color (race), rather than racism, was at issue, that the ‘‘Negro problem’’ might be solved if color di√erence disappeared. In the essay, ‘‘The Problem of the American Negro,’’ written in 1921 for the Yale Review, Boas made explicit how his experience of and solution to antisemitism influenced his thinking on race: ‘‘The Negro problem will not disappear in America until the negro blood has been so diluted that it will no longer be recognized, just as antiSemitism will not disappear until the last vestige of the Jew as Jew has disappeared.’’∞≤ In another essay, ‘‘Are the Jews a Race?,’’ published in 1923, Boas argued that the assimilative tendencies of the Jews meant they were not a race, but he later argued that though assimilation was in part due to environmental factors, ‘‘the constant infiltration of foreign blood must be taken into consideration.’’∞≥ Boas’s position on antisemitism and assimilation during the U.S. Progressive Era also influenced the posture he adopted toward Nazi Germany in the early 1930s. In remarks on antisemitism made before the Jewish Academy of Arts and Sciences in New York in March 1934, he argued that the conception of race had been falsely deployed because its biological meaning was improperly understood.∞∂ In an eleven-page pamphlet, Aryans and Non-Aryans, published later that year, Boas argued that ‘‘the present policies of the German gov54

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ernment are based on the assumption that an ‘Aryan’ has certain biologically determined qualities that are entirely foreign to every ‘Non-Aryan,’ ’’ asserting that ‘‘these beliefs are based on a complete misunderstanding of what constitutes a race and of the way in which we arrive at the concept of a racial type.’’∞∑ Due to intermarriage and miscegenation, Jews resembled their fellow countrymen more than they resembled Jews in other countries.∞∏ A nation was not defined by descent, but by its language and customs, and ‘‘just as Germanized Slavs and French have become German in their culture, as the Frenchified Germans have become French . . . so have the German Jews become German.’’ Thus, the attempt ‘‘by those who are in power in Germany to justify on scientific grounds their attitude toward the Jews is built on a pseudo-science.’’∞π In 1938, at the urging of Boas, the American Anthropological Association passed a resolution denouncing Nazi racism: ‘‘Anthropology provides no scientific basis for discrimination against any people on the ground of racial inferiority, religious a≈liation or linguistic heritage.’’ It charged that anthropological data in many countries was being distorted and conscripted ‘‘to serve the cause of unscientific racialism,’’ but a≈rmed that ‘‘race involves the inheritance of similar physical variations by large groups of mankind.’’∞∫ Two distinct and contradictory positions on race emerge from Boas’s experiece of antisemitism. On the one hand, there is the idea that because race could not be separated from negative value, it should either disappear or be diluted through assimilation or miscegenation, and a common culture evolved. On the other hand, there is the belief that race could be separated from racism or negative value through proper science. Faced with the most egregious appropriation of the race concept under the Nazi regime, Boas continued to argue for its scientific utility; at the same time, he recognized that ‘‘from a purely biological point of view the concept of race unity breaks down,’’ and that racial heredity in the biological sense was losing all meaning.∞Ω Both positions (with some modification) were argued forcefully by Boas’s students Ruth Benedict and Ashley Montagu. There seem to be, then, important currents and contradictions and in Boas’s thinking which have been ignored, and ignoring them has had troubling consequences for the story we tell about what lies at the heart of the modern anthropological notion of culture. Paradoxically, Boas, as George Stocking and others have noted, never provided anthropology with a definition of culture.≤≠ Indeed, some of his biographers remember him more for his ‘‘race theory.’’≤∞

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It was the distinctions Boas made between race, language, and culture that provided the foundation of an Americanist anthropology, with each term tending toward the provenance of a particular subdiscipline. Yet the nature of the distinction Boas made between race and culture has led to problems for the development of the modern anthropological notion of culture. To the extent that Boas (and his students) were able to define culture, they did so through a process of negation. Culture was expressed through the medium of language, but was not reducible to it; more importantly, it was not race. Culture became everything race was not, and race was seen to be what culture was not: given, unchangeable, biology. The historical origins of this process of negation lie in what George Stocking terms the sundering of a nineteenth-century raciocultural paradigm into ‘‘opposing currents of biological and cultural determinism.’’≤≤ As he puts it, the turn-of-the-century concept of race, while often deployed for racist purposes, did have meaning ‘‘as a community of sentiments, modes of thought, an unconscious inheritance from their ancestors’’ not so di√erent from what came to be called ‘‘national character.’’≤≥ Thus, in the period before 1900, race was a catchall term that applied to various human groups whose similarities in appearance, manners, or speech persisted over time and were therefore seen to be hereditary. Though the cohesiveness of such groups might actually be linguistic, religious, or national in nature, ‘‘in fact the same groups that were called races might also be called nations or peoples with little if any change in the degree or character of hereditary a≈nity implied.’’≤∂ In other words, ‘‘ ‘Blood’ —and by extension race—included numerous elements that we would today call cultural; there was not a clear line between cultural and physical elements or between social and biological heredity. The characteristic qualities of civilizations were carried from one generation to another both in and with the blood of their citizens. Those of us today who are sophisticated in the concepts of the behavioral sciences have lost the richly connotative 19th century sense of ‘race’ as accumulated cultural di√erences carried somehow in the blood.’’≤∑ In Boas’s writing on miscegenation, however, blood was understood less as a metaphysical than as a biological essence. If certain forms of blood were to disappear, certain races would disappear as well, a view W. E. B. Du Bois would dispute.≤∏ The challenge, I suggest, is to return to and reframe the ‘‘cultural’’ elements of race that define the historical context of Boas’s thinking, but which he

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himself thought best left behind in the struggle against scientific racism. This is a notion of race already emergent in Du Bois’s thinking of the era, which might productively be read for a Du Boisian legacy in anthropology.≤π Although Boasian anthropology foregrounded racism as one of the most virulent problems of the times, Boas and many of his students never abandoned belief in the value of the scientific study of race, even as they actively sought to replace race with the concept of culture or ethnic group.≤∫ Boas’s strategy will be clear to those who remember his battle against the comparative method and evolutionist attempts to rank the achievements of di√erent races. In his essay ‘‘Human Faculty as Determined by Race,’’ published in 1894, Boas held that in comparing the social status of civilized and primitive man, ‘‘achievement and the aptitude for an achievement have been confounded.’’ Thus, ‘‘no great weight can be attributed to the earlier rise of civilization in the Old World, which is satisfactorily explained as a chance. In short, historical events appear to have been much more potent in leading races to civilization than their faculty, and it follows that achievements of races do not warrant us to assume that one race is more highly gifted than the other.’’≤Ω This passage, arguably the backbone of Boas’s classic work, The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), established the importance of environmental influence rather than heredity. Yet this book did not dispute the existence of race, and it imperfectly questioned the negative evaluations associated with certain races. Indeed, Boas (and his student Herskovits) continued to conduct anatomical and anthropometric studies to scientifically describe racial di√erence.≥≠ Though much has been written of Boas’s ‘‘critique of racial formalism,’’ he adhered to a kind of ‘‘pure types’’ thinking for understanding human populations, an intermediate between nineteenth-century racial typologies and the modern genetic synthesis, which proved an intellectual dead-end.≥∞ Ironically, ‘‘Boas’s critique of racial formalism was successful, but it was more successful and generated a more viable intellectual tradition in the cultural than in the biological realm.’’≥≤ It was therefore left to Boas’s students of culture to consolidate his intervention against nineteenth-century evolutionary racism. As early as 1917, in the essay ‘‘Culture and Race,’’ Robert Lowie had begun to set out the terms of this resolution: ‘‘If culture is a complex of socially acquired traits, it might appear that race could not possibly have any influence on culture, since by racial characteris-

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tics we understand those which are innate by virtue of ancestry.≥≥ Although he held that race did influence culture, his intervention was to define race as biological ancestry or ‘‘hereditary traits,’’ with a view toward understanding the ‘‘organic basis for culture.’’ The problem of separating the organic or biological from the social in understanding human culture was taken up again in Alfred Kroeber’s well-known essay, ‘‘The Superorganic’’ (1917). If Lowie, like Boas, seemed to temporize on the nature of race and the value of racial explanation, Kroeber concluded unequivocally, ‘‘Complete and consistent explanation can be given, for so-called racial di√erences, on a basis of purely civilizational and non-organic causes.’’≥∂ He asserted, ‘‘Most ethnologists . . . are convinced that the overwhelming mass of historical and miscalled racial facts that are now attributed to obscure organic causes . . . will ultimately be viewed by everyone as social and as best intelligible in their social relations.’’≥∑ By 1924, the Boasian resolution of evolutionary racism was clearly stated by Edward Sapir, who distinguished race from language and culture: ‘‘If we can once thoroughly convince ourselves that race, in its only intelligible, that is, biological sense, is supremely indi√erent to the history of languages and cultures, that these are no more directly explainable on the score of race than on the laws of physics and chemistry, we shall have gained a viewpoint that allows a certain interest to such mystic slogans as Slavophilism, Anglo-Saxondom, Teutonism and the Latin genius, but quite refuses to be taken in by any of them.’’≥∏ Some years later, Melville Herskovits, responding to the question ‘‘What is a race?,’’ was less confident than Sapir of the answer, but he also a≈rmed the standard Boasian move: ‘‘I know of no definition of race that is both clear-cut and adequate; and yet the question is fundamental to all discussions of the part the biological basis of society (or race, if you wish to make the two synonymous) is said to play in the formation and maintenance of the bewildering variety of cultures which man has devised.’’≥π In thus assigning race to biology, the Boasians instinctively reacted to the deployment of race as an ideological category, which, in their view, inevitably led to racist judgments about the status of di√erent groups. In order to avoid racist value judgments, the Boasians sought to make race a scientific, biological, and, therefore, value-neutral fact. As Ruth Benedict was to rea≈rm repeatedly in her treatise Race: Science and Politics, published in 1940, ‘‘Race is a scientific field of study’’ which ‘‘tells us many important facts which have nothing to do with 58

the question of the superiority and inferiority of given races. . . . It distinguishes between a group of people who constitute a nation and a group of people who constitute a biological type (race).’’≥∫

benedict’s affirmation of race

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In Race, drawing from the modern synthesis of genetics, Benedict refined the biological definition of race: ‘‘Race is a classification based on traits which are hereditary. Therefore when we talk about race, we are talking about 1) heredity and 2) traits transmitted by heredity which characterize all the members of a related group’’ (9). The di√erence between race and culture, she argues, is that ‘‘culture is the sociological term for learned behavior, behavior which in man is not given at birth . . . but must be learned anew from grown people by each new generation’’ whereas race ‘‘is biologically transmitted’’ (13). Here we can see the appearance of culture and race as antonyms for one another. Culture draws its identity from race, because it constitutes everything race is not: learned behavior. Race draws its identity from culture, because it constitutes everything culture is not: biologically inherited traits. Yet culture and race are also distinct from one another because, ‘‘in world history, those who have helped to build the same culture are not necessarily of one race, and those of the same race have not all participated in one culture. In scientific language, culture is not a function of race’’; rather, ‘‘when we hold culture as the constant, race is a variable’’ (14, 16). For Benedict, the fact of race had to be distinguished from the mystifying values attached to it. Arguing against Ashley Montagu, she held that racism, not race, was the ‘‘modern superstition’’ (97– 98). She further stipulated that ‘‘for a theory of racism, there are two conclusions to be drawn. . . . The first is that, in order to understand race persecution, we do not need to investigate race; we need to investigate persecution. Persecution was an old, old, story before racism was thought of ’’ (146). Similarly, in order to understand race conflict, Benedict held that we need to understand the nature of conflict, not race. ‘‘If civilized men expect to end prejudice—whether religious or racial—they will have to remedy major social abuses in no way connected with religion or race, to the common advantage. Whatever reduces conflict, curtails irresponsible power, and allows people to obtain a de-

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cent livelihood will reduce racial conflict. . . . For the friction is not primarily racial’’ (150). Here, we see clearly the notion that race is adjectival—it modifies particular nouns (persecution, prejudice, conflict)—but in itself is not determinative. Persecution and conflict are not about race, but the result of general processes that direct categories of discrimination against particular groups.≥Ω Benedict continued, ‘‘Race is not in itself the source of the conflict. Conflict arises whenever any group—in this case a race—is forged into a class by discriminations practiced against it; the race then becomes a minority which is denied rights to protection before the law rights to livelihood and to participation in the common life. The social problem does not di√er whether such a group is racially distinguished or whether it is not; in either case, the healthy social objective is to do away with minority discriminations’’ (155). While Benedict seems to understand that social formations arise out of histories of institutional and social discrimination, she cannot answer the question of why it is that race continues to be one of the most prevalent forms of social distinction and discrimination. If race is only epiphenomenal, how does it continue to ground material reality? The Boasian desire to separate race from negative cultural valuation, and therefore from racism, is understandable and, some would still argue, laudable. Yet in separating race from racism (that is, race conflict or persecution), Benedict left no means for anthropologists to understand how racism produces the objective reality of race at any given historical moment. Benedict’s ultimate claim, that di√erence is threatening, and that ‘‘minority discriminations’’ should be done away with, underscores the myth that we can, and should, live in a color-blind society. If Boas once sought through miscegenation to make color disappear, Benedict turned a blind eye to it. Her conclusions thus follow from Boas’s attempts to separate race from value, an analytical move that has not allowed anthropologists to see that race cannot be separated from racism, in short, to see that races are cultural and historical formations, which may also emphasize positive a≈rmations of social identity as acts of survival. Benedict’s Race, written at the height of the Second World War and directed specifically at Nazi racism, represents the clearest expression of the Boasian contribution to the modern culture concept. That Benedict manages to write with humor and aplomb about a contentious subject I think also gives her text appreciable literary qualities.∂≠ Yet in accepting the distinction between race and race prejudice, 60

anthropologists have failed to recognize that the significance attached to even the apparently biological character of race is cultural or ideological in nature.∂∞ Today the fact that race is socially and historically constituted seems almost too commonsensical to note. But if previous generations of anthropologists agreed that ‘‘false premises and bastard science’’ (in Benedict’s terms) were the result of cultural bias which transformed ‘‘race’’ into racism, then it was best to strive for proper science, which would make race the object of biology, not culture. The paradox of the Boasian legacy is that it was the cultural anthropologists among Boas’ students who most strongly a≈rmed the biological existence of race in order to clearly distinguish culture from it. The physical anthropologists among Boas’s students, especially Ashley Montagu, sought to deal with the problem of the negative value assigned to race, by arguing that since the concept of race could never be value free, it could not be scientific.∂≤ Montagu held that di√erences exist, ‘‘but we want a term by which to describe the existence of those di√erences. We do not want a prejudiced term which injects meanings which are not there into the di√erences. We want a term which as nearly mirrors the conditions as a term can, not one which falsifies and obfuscates the issue.’’∂≥

montagu’s repudiation of race

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In ‘‘The Meaninglessness of the Anthropological Conception of Race,’’ a paper read before the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in 1941, Montagu accused his colleagues of taking ‘‘completely for granted the one thing which required to be proven, namely, that the concept of race corresponded with a reality which could actively be measured and verified,’’ and for failing to prove that individuals of any particular group bore ‘‘a certain aggregate of characters which individually and collectively serve to distinguish them from the individuals in all other groups’’ (30). Montagu argued that while anthropologists might cling to the race concept, geneticists had already moved beyond it. Moreover, when anthropologists were confronted by evidence that the concept could not be systematically applied, ‘‘they sought to escape the consequences by calling the term a ‘general’ one’’ (31). Montagu also criticized the method of ‘‘averaging’’ which he implied obscured the fact that variation within a group was as great as variation between

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groups: ‘‘The process of averaging the characters of a given group, knocking the individuals together, giving them a good stirring, and then serving the resulting omelet as a ‘race’ is essentially the anthropological process of race-making. It may be good cooking but it is not science, since it serves to confuse rather than to clarify. When an omelet is done it has a fairly uniform character, though the ingredients which have gone into its making may have been variable. This is what the anthropological conception of ‘race’ is. It is an omelet which corresponds to nothing in nature’’ (31). Unlike Benedict, who sought to incorporate the genetic ‘‘modern synthesis’’ into a definition of race, Montagu concluded that a proper understanding of population genetics actually proved that the concept of race had no validity: ‘‘If it be agreed that the human species is one and that it consists of a group of populations which, more or less, replace each other geographically or ecologically and of which the neighboring ones intergrade or hybridize where ever they are in contact, or are potentially capable of doing so, then it should be obvious that the task of the student interested in the character of these populations must lie in the study of the frequency distribution of the genes which characterize them—and not in the study of entities which are purely imaginary’’ (36). This is the position taken by Frank Livingstone in his paper from 1962, ‘‘On the Non-existence of the Human Races’’—that the frequency of distributions of traits constitutes a cline, not a race.∂∂ This assessment is, in my opinion, the correct one: race has no meaningful biological definition outside of the social assignation of race to biology or the social construction of biology itself.∂∑ Despite the di√erences between Boasians such as Benedict and Montagu, they do agree on two fundamental points: that race historically implied negative valuation, and that race was not a meaningful explanation for human social di√erences. For these reasons, Benedict sought to separate race from racism, to separate race from negative value. Montagu, like Boas in his assimilationist moments, did not think that race could be separated from negative value; race always implied racism. Benedict thought that the social expressions of race conflict or consciousness were epiphenomenal, and really about class relations or economic deprivation. Montagu, as a Jewish scientist who came of age in antisemitic Britain saw the concept of ‘‘race’’ as itself racist, and advocated the abolition of the term.∂∏ Both denied that the social existence of race could be productively analyzed. Both positions represent the two poles of current debate. One the one 62

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hand, it is essence: race exists and can be scientifically documented. On the other hand, it is illusion: race does not exist except as an arbitrary set of social designations masquerading as biological reality and should be banished from our vocabulary altogether. The second position is as dangerous as the first, suggesting that if race is too contentious politically, we must simply refuse to speak of it, thus unwittingly amplifying the significance of culture so that it becomes as essentialist and deterministic as race was once seen to be. My contention is this: while Boasian anthropology was key to the scientific or biological definition of race, after World War II, race dropped o√ the agenda of the cultural anthropologist, in part due to the very success of the Boasian maneuver, which argued that culture, not race, was a more meaningful explanation of significant di√erences between groups of people.∂π During the drafting of the unesco ‘‘Statement on Race’’ (1950), Ashley Montagu, one of the principal drafters, went so far as to say that ‘‘the biological fact of race and the myth of ‘race’ should be distinguished. For all practical purposes ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth’’ (139). Montagu’s formulation caused an uproar, as did his suggestion (first elaborated five years earlier) that the term ethnic group be substituted for the term race: ‘‘National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cultural groups do not necessarily coincide with racial groups: and the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connection with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term ‘race’ is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term ‘race’ altogether and speak of ethnic groups ’’ (ibid.). The last line, drawn from Julian Huxley and A. C. Haddon’s recommendation that ‘‘ethnic group’’ more accurately described human ‘‘subspecies,’’ proved particularly contentious and was dropped from the revised statement on race.∂∫ The first sentence remained unchanged, the second sentence edited to eliminate reference to ethnic group, and an additional sentence inserted between the first two: ‘‘Americans are not a race, nor are Frenchmen, nor are Germans; nor ipso facto is any other national group. Muslims and Jews are no more races than are Roman Catholics and Protestants; nor are people who live in Iceland or Britain or India, or who speak English or any other language, or who are culturally Turkish or Chinese and the like, thereby describable as races.’’∂Ω Montagu’s more controversial assertions notwithstanding, the idea of ‘‘race defined from the biological standpoint’’ remained intact.∑≠ What is striking is not so much the rejection of the idea that race could

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be better termed ethnic group, but that both versions assign race to biology and underscore a definition of race by negation, or contrast to culture: race is not nationality, ethnic group, or language.∑∞ The major di√erence between the two statements was that the revised version left open the possibility that races di√ered in their capacity for emotional response and intellectual achievement.∑≤ Though Montagu might have thought that he had lost the ideological battle over the first unesco statement, subsequent statements rea≈rmed his view that races did not di√er in innate ability. Montagu made less headway among physical anthropologists, though a decade later his criticism of the anthropological conception of race had been strengthened by the notion of cline drawn from population genetics. Between 1962 and 1964, a debate on the existence of race was waged on the pages of Current Anthropology, sparked by the publication of Frank Livingstone’s ‘‘On the Nonexistence of Human Races’’ (1962). C. Loring Brace’s response to Livingstone, ‘‘On the Concept of Race’’ (1964), a≈rmed the essentials of his argument, but charged Livingstone with ignoring the role Montagu (and others) had played in arguing the no-race position. Still, relative agreement within the anthropological community on the meaning of race came only with Sherwood Washburn’s presidential address to the American Anthropological Association in November 1962, in Chicago. As one anthropologist who attended the meetings that year recalled, ‘‘At the end of it, [there was] a standing ovation that went on for minutes and minutes and minutes.’’∑≥ Even today it is di≈cult to remain unmoved by the last stirring passages of that speech, which used the calculus of scientific description to portray the ‘‘costs of discrimination.’’∑∂ Washburn had reluctantly agreed to speak on the subject because of the di≈culty the aaa executive board had in drafting a position on race. After some discussion, it was agreed that the executive board would endorse Washburn’s speech as its position.∑∑ Still, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, Washburn’s argumentation appears a timid compromise against Montagu’s unequivocal clarity. Although Washburn never refuted the existence of race, he did not define it either. He did argue in his presidential address, ‘‘The Study of Race,’’ that since the unit of evolution was the species, ‘‘race isn’t very important biologically’’ (524); but he also emphasized the importance of understanding ‘‘raciation,’’ the creation of racial di√erences through selection, to argue for a concept of race derived from population genetics (525). He speculated that the actual number of 64

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races was between six and nine, rather than three, but held that unless the criteria for racial classification were clearly specified, the number of races was likely to increase (though Washburn himself did not delineate those criteria). He argued, rather, ‘‘If classification is to have a purpose . . . the concept of race is useful,’’ but useful only insofar as it was concerned with the ‘‘anatomical, genetic, and structural di√erences which were in time past important in the origin of races’’ (527). Useful though it might be, ‘‘race in human thinking is a very minor concept’’ (ibid.), and ‘‘racism is based on a profound misunderstanding of culture, of learning, and of biology of the human species’’ (528). Washburn’s position was thus closer to Benedict’s than to Montagu’s. Consensus on race within the international scientific community had not yet been achieved, however. As if wishing to clarify the confusion between race and racism reflected in the 1950 and 1951 statements, unesco met twice again during the civil-rights era, with the objective of separating the two subjects from each other. The unesco statement of August 1964, which considered ‘‘proposals on the biological aspects of race,’’ covered the same terrain as the earlier statements, but pronounced unequivocally ‘‘the concept of race is purely biological.’’∑∏ The unesco ‘‘Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice’’ of September 1967 held that ‘‘racism grossly falsifies the knowledge of human biology,’’ and defined racism as ‘‘antisocial beliefs and acts which are based on the fallacy that discriminatory intergroup relations are justifiable on biological grounds.’’∑π It then went on to o√er a series of programmatic recommendations for combating race prejudice.∑∫ If Montagu’s role in the drafting of the unesco statements on race produced controversy rather than consensus, his view that ethnic group should replace race seems to have won out, at least among cultural anthropologists.∑Ω Indeed, the modern anthropological concept of culture shows itself to be complicit with what Michael Omi and Howard Winant term, in Racial Formation in the United States, the ethnicity-based paradigm of race relations also emergent in the 1920s. Thus culture came to be seen as interchangeable with ethnic group, and ethnic group or culture came to substitute for race.∏≠ Yet one critic has astutely concluded that ‘‘when the object of anthropological attention is ‘ethnicity’ instead of ‘culture,’ the e√ort to avoid race is even more obviously a failure.’’∏∞ It is precisely because race cannot be avoided that the terms culture and ethnicity are deployed in its stead. But as the dominant view of race is a biological one, when

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this substitution of terms is e√ected, culture and ethnicity are biologized or essentialized. What Paul Gilroy (for another context) terms ethnic absolutism also specifies a kind of ‘‘culturalist racism.’’∏≤ Cultural essentialism, or culturalist explanation—the emphasis on cultural di√erence for determining outcomes to the ‘‘neglect of normative and political aspects of a cultural process’’—is everywhere on the increase (witness the resurgence of ‘‘culture of poverty’’ scenarios as ‘‘inner-city street culture’’ ethnography).∏≥ In this context, Lila Abu-Lughod’s notion of ‘‘writing against culture’’ is an important intervention, for ‘‘despite its anti-essentialist intent . . . the culture concept retains some of the tendencies to freeze di√erence possessed by concepts like race.’’∏∂ But Abu-Lughod does not explain why or how the concept of culture has become essentialized, only that ‘‘the concept of culture operates much like its predecessor—race—even though in its 20th century form it has some important political advantages. Unlike race, and unlike even the 19th century sense of culture as a synonym for civilization, the current concept allows for multiple rather than binary di√erences. This immediately checks the easy move to hierarchizing; the shift to ‘culture’ (lower case ‘c’ with the possibility of a final ‘s’ . . .) has a relativizing e√ect. The most important of culture’s advantages, however, is that it removes di√erence from the realm of the natural and the innate. . . . [C]ulture is learned and can change.’’∏∑ In other words, because Abu-Lughod sees race and culture as antonyms, the former being ‘‘natural and innate’’ and the latter as learned and changeable, she cannot explain how the very distinction between the two terms is implicated in substitution of one term for the other, with the result that culture operates as race. In another context, Verena Stolcke has attempted to understand the rise of anti-immigration sentiment in France as a form of ‘‘cultural fundamentalism,’’ but she is faced with a paradox, for ‘‘the demons of race and eugenics appeared to have been politically if not scientifically exorcised partly by the work done by unesco and other bodies in defense of human equality in cultural diversity in the Boasian tradition after 1945,’’ which leads, in her mind, to racism being discredited politically.∏∏ It is precisely because the ‘‘demons of race and eugenics’’ were not obliterated by the unesco statements on race or work in the ‘‘Boasian tradition’’ that Abu-Lughod and Stolcke can only describe how the concept of culture has become essentialized or fundamentalist, but are unable to tell us why.∏π This may be, in part, as Stolcke suggests, that because everyone ‘‘talks culture’’—that is to say, has 66

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access to the concept of culture—its relativist outlines have increasingly been filled by racist content. But doesn’t that illustrate how culture has come to stand in for race? For without a way of describing the sociohistorical construction of race, culture is asked to do the work of race. This is perhaps what Walter Benn Michaels means by ‘‘race into culture’’: ‘‘Our sense of culture is characteristically meant to displace race, but . . . culture has turned out to be a way of continuing rather than repudiating racial thought.’’∏∫ Thus, when race functions at all, ‘‘it works as a metonym for culture; and it does so only at the price of biologizing what is culture or ideology.’’∏Ω The failure to supply an account of anthropology’s role in propagating a notion of culture that lent itself to essentializing and fundamentalist tendencies signals not only an analytical weakness, but a poverty of vision as well. Benedict’s and Montagu’s works on race were some of the most popular to emerge in the late war years and over the succeeding decades have achieved a level of generalization unchecked by contemporary theorizing on culture. Meanwhile, racism has not abated, but is, rather, increasingly legitimated by both science and law.π≠ We will not vindicate ourselves by claiming that Boas and his students were only ‘‘racialists,’’ that is, that although they believed races existed, they placed no positive or negative valuation on the nature of race.π∞ Given the ever intractable nature of racism, I would argue that racialism (and the Boasian vision of a scientific study of race) is itself a part of the problem, for there is a failure to recognize that the categories of nature, or biology, and culture are themselves culturally constructed, that the distinction between them is central to our notion of (civil) society.π≤ What we assign to the realm of biology has everything to do with the modernity of social classification. Races certainly exist;π≥ they have no biological meaning outside the social significance we attach to biological explanation itself. While such a position does not, in my view, entail a rejection of science, it does require a rethinking of its truth value(s). However, it is important not only to see race as socially constructed, but to describe how it is constructed, that is, to understand the historical conditions under which racial categories are produced and made meaningful. In other words, to say that race has no biological meaning is not to say that race lacks meaning. The point is not so much, as many have argued, that racism often inadequately somatizes itself, or that it resorts to false biology to do so; the point is that racism cannot be separated from race. Were it possible to separate the

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two, the so-called postracial era would give rise to its greatest contradiction: the persistence of racism without race. The Boasian attempt to assign race to biology, without understanding biology itself as a field of sociopolitical meaning, has led to anthropology’s inability to develop a theory of race as culturally and historically constructed: a direct result of how the discipline confronted the nineteenth-century notion of race.π∂ The Boasian notion of culture drew its very identity from assigning race to biology. This is the Boasian legacy . . . and burden.

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the du boisian turn again: race and cultural studies

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The failure of American anthropology to develop an understanding of race as cultural or ideological in more than a negative sense—that is, to see race itself as a productive and generative social category—is linked to the rise of transdisciplinary discussions around cultural studies or multiculturalism that radically foreground race and racial identity as modes of sociality and resistance.π∑ In this sense, the opening assertion to this essay, that Boasian anthropology and multiculturalism are somehow the same or interchangeable, is fundamentally flawed. Not only are both distinct historically, but they are ontologically dissimilar as well. Cultural studies as a discursive formation in the United States has arisen immediately out of the failure of modern concept of culture.π∏ This is precisely why challenges to the anthropological understanding of culture in the form of ‘‘race’’ have come from outside, and explains in part why the discipline has remained particularly hostile to work in ethnic studies and cultural studies.ππ Indeed, scholars in ethnic studies and cultural studies remain skeptical of mainstream anthropological scholarship. These two intellectual formations, spurred by members of groups the least protected by culturalist arguments and consequently the most at risk from the socalled scientific study of ‘‘race,’’ have also actively contributed to the demise of the culture concept, simply by sidelining it. Without a notion of culture as lack—that is, as comprising everything race is not—the modern concept of culture can no longer exist. It is not that anthropologists have lost culture to ethnic studies and cultural studies, as Renato Rosaldo has recently argued;π∫ it is, rather,

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that the modern anthropological concept of culture has lost any descriptive ability with regard to the construction of racial identities. This is also why there is little mainstream scholarship in cultural anthropology on race;πΩ why we don’t usually turn to anthropology for critical race studies or accounts about what it is to function as racialized subjects.∫≠ Therefore, following Omi and Winant, I suggest that cultural anthropologists must learn to see that ‘‘race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to di√erent types of human bodies’’ and to understand racial formations as ‘‘the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.’’∫∞ Du Bois confronted the same nineteeth century as Boas, but he was unwilling to leave behind a culturally constituted notion of race. Like Boas, Du Bois, too, emphasized the significance of ‘‘blood,’’ but for him it was more a metaphysical than biological entity, and he underlined its sociohistorical essence. In ‘‘The Conservation of Races’’ (1897), he argues that race ‘‘is a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life’’ (21). It is thus possible to see, even in Du Bois’s early formulation, that race is less a static category than a fluid one bound up in existential striving, the making of a group.∫≤ Since Du Bois held, in Dusk of Dawn, that ‘‘race is a cultural, sometimes an historical fact’’ (153), his response was not to assign race to biological science as Boas and his students had done, though he was ‘‘casting about to find a way of applying science to the race problem’’ (55). Du Bois was convinced that ‘‘the world was thinking wrong about race’’ (58), and his solution was to pioneer the scientific study of ‘‘the Philadelphia Negro’’ through sociological research. From 1896 to 1914, Du Bois undertook a series of studies, at Atlanta University, on the ‘‘health and physique of American Negroes, economic cooperation and the Negro American family[,] . . . e√orts for social betterment, the college-bred Negro, the Negro common school, the Negro artisan[,] . . . morals and manners among Negroes’’ (65).∫≥ Like Boas, Du Bois also lamented that he had ‘‘too often seen science made the slave of caste and race hate’’ (100), but unlike Boas, did not place his faith in correcting bad science. After an initial endorsement of ‘‘anthropological measurement’’ as part of what he termed ‘‘the study of the Negro problems’’ in 1898, Du Bois saw the

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anthropometrics of race to be suspect.∫∂ Especially after his studies in Germany, he increasingly saw race as a ‘‘matter of culture and cultural history’’ (98).

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The first thing that brought me to my senses in all this racial discussion was the continuous change in the proofs and arguments advanced. . . . I was skeptical about brain weight; surely much depended upon what brains were weighed. I was not sure about physical measurements and social inquiries. For instance, an insurance actuary published in 1890 incontrovertible statistics showing how quickly and certainly the Negro race was dying out in the United States through sheer physical inferiority. I lived to see every assumption of Ho√man’s ‘‘Race Traits and Tendencies’’ contradicted; but even before that, I doubted the statistical method which he had used. (99)

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Similarly, when Boas and Herskovits’s own measurements of brain weights and cephalic indexes determined that the ‘‘American Negro’’ was not a pure type due to an ‘‘influx of blood’’ from whites and Indians, but an ‘‘amalgam’’ which might itself disappear,∫∑ Du Bois opposed their conclusions: ‘‘There was not the slightest idea of the permanent subordination and inequality of my world. Nor again was there any idea of racial amalgamation. I resented the idea that we desired it.’’∫∏ As if in response to Herskovits’s suggestion, in The American Negro, that he would ‘‘not claim the term ‘race’ for the American Negro’’ because there was ‘‘nothing but the most striking type of mixture represented in him’’ (81–82), Du Bois countered, in Dusk of Dawn, with a question of his own: ‘‘What is this group; and how do you di√erentiate it; and how can you call it ‘black’ when you admit it is not black?’’ He replied, ‘‘I recognize it quite easily and with full legal sanction; the black man is a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia’’ (153). Du Bois thus asserted that the experience and category of race is created not by blood, but through the experience of discrimination. Du Bois would also argue that the kinship which defined African Americans was based less on blood (or the ‘‘badge of color’’) than upon the social heritage of slavery. In answering Countee Cullen’s question ‘‘What is Africa to me?,’’ he mused that the mark of his ancestors’ heritage was ‘‘upon (him) in color and hair’’ but these are ‘‘obvious things . . . of little meaning in themselves’’ (117). Of more importance 70

is the fact that since the 15th century these ancestors of mine and their other descendants have had a common history; have su√ered a common disaster and have one long memory. The actual ties of heritage between individuals of this group, vary with the ancestors that they have in common and many others. . . . But the physical bond is least and the badge of color relatively unimportant save as a badge; the real essence of this kinship is its social heritage of slavery; the discrimination and insult; and this heritage binds together not simply the children of Africa, but extends through yellow Asia and into the South Seas. It is this unity that draws me to Africa. (117)

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If we recognize, as did Du Bois, that the experience (and, indeed, the category) of race is produced by racism, and that di√erent forms of racism produce di√ering e√ects of race, I think we productively build from and extend Omi’s and Winant’s project.∫π The Middle Passage, slavery, and the experience of racial terror produce a race of African Americans out of subjects drawn from di√erent cultures;∫∫ genocide, forced removal to reservations, the experience of racial terror make Native Americans, subjects drawn from di√erent linguistic and tribal a≈liations, a race; war relocation camps and legal exclusion, the experience of discrimination make Asian Americans, subjects drawn from di√erent cultural and linguistic backgrounds, a race; the process of forming the southwestern states of the United States through conquest and subjugation, the continued subordination of Puerto Rico constitute Chicanos and Puerto Ricans as races. If Du Bois in Dusk of Dawn ultimately saw ‘‘the concept of race’’ as a ‘‘group of contradictory forces, facts, and tendencies’’ (133), the collective and individual acts of surviving political domination and racial terror also make for positive a≈rmations of social identity, what he also termed ‘‘beauty and health of body,’’ mental clearness and creative genius, ‘‘spiritual goodness and receptivity; social adaptability and constructiveness’’ (141). In this conception of race, racial identities must be seen as ones which change over time because they are coalitional, contingent, and performative. The project of seeing race as being about dynamic production of racial identities links up with forms of nonessentialist work, such as calls for ethnographies of the processes of diasporic identification, just as it a≈rms the work of feminists who argue that the category of woman only operates through the experience of interlocking patriarchal structures.∫Ω That is to say that if women share something in common, it is not the result of a universal bodily matu-

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rational process, but of di√erentially experienced interpolations of race, class, and sexual orientation that may result in shared strategies of survival. The importance of a≈rming a conception of race that is socially dynamic but historically meaningful, and that foregrounds questions of gender or sexuality, must be understood in the current political context to eliminate racial categories from the U.S. census altogether or to add a ‘‘multiracial’’ category, either of which might weaken the demographic claims of minority racial groups. If race has no meaningful biological basis, but is socially constructed and continually shifting, then it cannot be determinative. Yet a Time cover that appeared in 1993, featuring the computer generated image of a multiracial woman as the ‘‘future of America,’’ suggests that Boasian dilution or Herskovitsian amalgamation are being re-envisioned as solutions to the ‘‘race problem’’ in ways few could have predicted. Many forms of reproduction are at stake here (political, social, heterosexual), suggesting that ‘‘deracialization’’ might actually be the sign of a more pernicious racialization: light is right.

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postscript

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There are many now who would put David Schneider’s work to use in understanding everything from the cultural construction of the modern genetic sciences to social analysis of the human genome project. This is extremely worthwhile and important scholarship. My fear, however, is that anthropologists still risk ceding too quickly the realm of biology to natural science. In talking of science as socially constructed, we forget to make Schneider’s first order distinction: that the category of nature (or biology) is itself founded on the cultural distinction between nature and culture. It thus comes as no surprise that the parameters of what counts as ‘‘nature,’’ and therefore as the object of scientific study, have not narrowed, but rather widened immeasurably in the last twenty years, so that we are once again at the question of genes and intelligence. The discovery that genetic disorders were distributed di√erentially across racial and ethnic groups, refueled on old logic with a new question: if such disorders were distributed by race and ethnicity, what about other human traits or characteristics?Ω≠ Intelligence, like race, is seen to have a physical reality which can be measured and quantified; its study implies no value need be attached to the results. Scientific racism results 72

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not only from misunderstanding or misuse of science, as Boas and his students once believed, but from the normative understanding of the proper objects of natural science. Clearly cultural anthropologists did not win the battle against sociobiology by insisting on ‘‘nurture’’ over ‘‘nature.’’ Indeed our very failure to confront the epistemological apparatus (the history of a discipline) that generated those terms may be one reason the pace of sociobiological study has quickened rather than declined. Unfortunately, sociobiology has not proved to be, as Cli√ord Geertz pronounced several years ago, ‘‘a degenerative research program designed to expire in its own confusions.’’Ω∞ Sociobiology and intelligence studies are now part of the dominant paradigm because the modern concept of culture is too weak to o√er substantial resistance. Indeed, its political content was evacuated in its initial refusal to speak of race, and in its later ascendancy within the dominant ethnicity-based paradigm of the social sciences. The modern concept of culture is weak because of its inability to confront the false natureculture split from which its very identity was drawn. To the extent that anthropologists have leaned too heavily on a diseased culture concept, we have all contributed, indirectly, to its demise. However, we need not mourn the passing of the modern concept of culture, for in accounting for its failures, what we create out of its ashes may actually be a strengthened and more politically astute defense of relativism itself.Ω≤ This means moving beyond Cli√ord Geertz’s articulation of an ‘‘anti anti-relativism,’’ which was a highly inadequate defense of the constructivist notion of culture.Ω≥ The task of a politically engaged, critical relativist position is to actively interrogate the history of relativism itself: its fracturing into biological and cultural determinisms; its proliferation of a notion of culture so weak that its normative deployment was increasingly biologized or essentialist, rather than constructivist. The solution is not to replace culture with race, but to keep the two terms in constructivist tension with one another. The historical moment of splitting race from culture cannot be sutured, but we must learn to make a revitalized notion of culture name the conditions of that splitting, so that culture is not substituted for race, and a notion of race as culturally constructed becomes as viable in anthropology as in ethnic and cultural studies.

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chapter 3

¡ The Interventions of Culture Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Internationalization of the Modern Concept of Race

The View from Afar, the title of one of the later collections of essays by Claude Lévi-Strauss, draws its inspiration, the author explains, from the idea in Japanese Noh theater that in order to be a good actor it is necessary to know how to look at oneself the way the audience does: as ‘‘seen from afar.’’ For Lévi-Strauss, this ‘‘summed up the anthropologist’s attitude, looking at his own society, not as a member inside it, but as other observers would see it, looking at it from far o√ in either time or space.’’∞ This statement is consistent with his selfreflexive attitude toward the ‘‘science of man.’’ And yet, the ‘‘view from afar’’ was a recurring theme for Lévi-Strauss, most famously mobilized in his reply to Jean-Paul Sartre in the last chapter of the Savage Mind, and expressed through a quotation from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: ‘‘One needs to look near at hand if one wants to study men; but to study man, one must look from afar; one must first observe di√erences in order to discover attributes.’’≤ Through an examination of Lévi-Strauss’s less studied writings, I will explore how Rousseau’s view came to summarize succinctly the core of LéviStrauss’s philosophical anthropology and his somewhat paradoxical writings on race. I will not be arguing, however, that Lévi-Strauss had a structuralist analysis of race—as I show in the following chapter, that was attempted more directly by his contemporary Louis Dumont—but rather that a fuller understanding of Lévi-Strauss’s writings on race help clarify the essence of his humanist philosophy.≥ Lévi-Strauss first considered ‘‘Structural Anthropology, Volume 3’’ as a title for The View from Afar, which opens, somewhat surprisingly, with an essay called ‘‘Race and Culture,’’ one that has received little attention in the corpus of his work. Significantly, Lévi-Strauss’s first essay on the subject, ‘‘Race and History,’’ is to be found as the last essay of Struc-

tural Anthropology, Volume 2. Though not usually read as such, ‘‘Race and History’’ can be seen as one of Lévi-Strauss’s earliest statements of the philosophical humanism underlying his form of structural analysis, and the first seeds of his argument with Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. But between the last chapter of Structural Anthropology, Volume 2 and the first essay of ‘‘Structural Anthropology, Volume 3,’’ Lévi-Strauss enacted an analytic shift from ‘‘race and history’’ to ‘‘race and culture,’’ and it is also this shift that I seek to understand. For those familiar with Lévi-Strauss’s work, the oddity is not so much that his first essay on race was historical in nature, but rather the subject of race itself—a subject apparently at odds with the rest of his structuralist project. For the more discerning student of LéviStrauss, however, the question is not why he wrote on race at all, but why he didn’t write more on race. Although he was one of the drafters of the 1950 unesco ‘‘Statement on Race,’’ his work on the subject was limited to two essays, also commissioned by unesco, as he has explained more than once, apparently to indicate that left to his own devices he would not have written about race at all.∂ The irony is that one of the most trenchant critics of the e√ects of modern racism on so-called primitive peoples—and one who had himself su√ered its e√ects during the Second World War—never developed an analysis of racism that went beyond the nineteenth-century salvage anthropology of Franz Boas.

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Any discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s ‘‘Race and History’’ must first explore his understanding of history. Lévi-Strauss’s emphasis upon the historical character of ‘‘race’’ is unsurprising once we remember not only his indebtedness to Boas’s views on the subject, but also the influence on him of the Annales school of historiography.∑ In 1929, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, as founders of the Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale, had argued against the ‘‘fragmentation proliferate among historians, as among investigators concerned with the present: historians of antiquity, medievalists and ‘modernists’; researchers engaged in the description of societies designated as ‘civilized’ (to use an old term which is constantly being modified), or those attracted, on the other hand, to societies which we have, for lack of a better appellation, to qualify as ‘primitive’ or exotic.’’∏ In seeking to make ‘‘primitive societies’’ the object of history, Febvre and Bloch

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made it clear that the distinction posed by evolutionist thought, between civilized societies with history and ‘‘primitive’’ societies possessed only of culture, was invalid—a point Lévi-Strauss would elaborate on in response to Sartre,π but which he first indexed in ‘‘Race and History.’’ Moreover, it was the intellectual interaction between these heretofore separate branches of history (‘‘civilized’’ and ‘‘primitive’’) that would provide genuine ‘‘insights into culture.’’ Because LéviStrauss never considered the study of history and culture to be separate endeavors, it is understandable that the first volume of Structural Anthropology actually opens with the essay ‘‘History and Anthropology,’’ in which he a≈rms the importance of structural history to his project, with a nod toward Lucien Febvre’s understanding of ‘‘psychological attitudes and logical structures,’’ which could only be grasped indirectly, even as the historical particularism of Boas provided the empirical framework for his views on historical time.∫ First published as a pamphlet for unesco in 1952, ‘‘Race et histoire,’’ according to one of Lévi-Strauss’s biographers, provoked violent reactions.Ω The essayist Roger Callois rejected the esteem which Lévi-Strauss held for primitive society, arguing instead for the proven superiority of the West. Lévi-Strauss responded, in turn, with an article published in the journal managed by Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Temps Modernes.∞≠ The controversy may have been unique to the French intellectual sphere; in the United States, certainly, much of the fire on the subject had already been drawn by Franz Boas, who Lévi-Strauss considered to be a ‘‘master-builder,’’ if not ‘‘founder,’’ of anthropology.∞∞ In later interviews Lévi-Strauss acknowledged Boas’s considerable influence on his work and credited Boas with originating the modern critique of racism. ‘‘Boas is responsible for certain basic ideas. For example, he is the one who proved, in his work on physical anthropology, that the cephalic index, considered by anthropologists as an invariable trait that could be utilized to define the races, was a function of environmental influences. By studying successive generations of immigrants to the United States, he established that anatomical di√erences once clearly visible between ethnic groups gradually diminished. Likewise concerning the differential growth rates of children. The criticism of racism begins with Boas.’’∞≤ ‘‘Race and History’’ is not an easy essay to summarize, though of all the unesco essays published during the 1950s, it is arguably the only one still read today. One of Lévi-Strauss’s interviewers, Didier Eribon, has called it a ‘‘classic antiracist document,’’ and Lévi-Strauss himself 76

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has testified to its staying power, noting wryly that ‘‘not a year goes by without Lycée students coming to see me [about the essay] or telephoning and saying, We have a report to do and we don’t understand a thing!’’∞≥ Lévi-Strauss’s essay is a profoundly postwar document, shaped by the 1950 and 1951 unesco statements on race as well as by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948. In its tone and sweep, however, ‘‘Race and History’’ seems more turn of the century than midcentury in its attempt to harness the evolutionary, archaeological, linguistic, and mythological data of a Boasian four-field anthropology to a critique of modern racism. Its dense and imbedded argumentation, too, seems heavily indebted to Boas’s ‘‘Human Faculty as Determined by Race’’ (1894), the work that would form the backbone of his classic The Mind of Primitive Man (and which is prominently cited in Lévi-Strauss’s bibliography to ‘‘Race and History’’). Boas and Lévi-Strauss could be said to share a belief in ‘‘the psychic unity of mankind’’; thus, both held that chance was behind the advance of some civilizations and not others. Yet Lévi-Strauss would depart from Boasian historicism by o√ering a quintessentially philosophical account of the time of societies, producing a critique of humanism itself as an adequate philosophy of history. While both Boas and Lévi-Strauss sought to reconcile cultural relativism with a theory of progress, and therefore, in a sense, posed the same questions of race and history, they provided radically di√erent answers to those questions.∞∂ ‘‘Race and History,’’ like much of the social science of the time, did not dispute the biological reality of race. Though Ashley Montagu’s ‘‘The Meaninglessness of the Anthropological Conception of Race’’ had sparked debate at the time Lévi-Strauss was writing his dissertation in New York, as we saw in the previous chapter, the prevailing consensus of the scientific community formulating the unesco statements on race was that race was a biological entity amenable to scientific study. Like Boas, whose central argument was that ‘‘achievement and the aptitude for achievement had been confounded,’’ LéviStrauss held that race in the ‘‘purely biological sense’’ should not be confused with the social and psychological products of civilization.∞∑ But in asserting that there were many more human cultures than human races, Lévi-Strauss argued that the nature of cultural diversity must be investigated ‘‘even at the risk of allowing the racial prejudices whose biological foundation has so lately been destroyed to develop again on new grounds.’’∞∏ Rephrasing Boas’s question in ‘‘Human

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Faculty as Determined by Race,’’ Lévi-Strauss asked, ‘‘If there are no innate racial aptitudes, how can we explain the fact that the white man’s civilization has made the tremendous advances with which we are familiar while the civilizations of the coloured peoples have lagged behind, some of them having come only half way down the road, and others being still thousands or tens of thousands of years behind the times?’’∞π While Boas argued that the main di√erence between the civilizations of the Old World and the New World was purely a matter of time, and that ‘‘historical events appear to have been much more potent in leading races to civilization than their faculty,’’ Lévi-Strauss emphasized the importance of the neolithic and industrial revolutions for human society.∞∫ He noted that if humanity had remained stationary for nine-tenths or more of its history, ‘‘the reason was not that paleolithic man was less intelligent or less gifted than his neolithic successor, but simply that, in human history, the combination took a long time to come about; it might have occurred much earlier or much later. There is no more significance in this than there is in the number of spins a gambler has to wait before a given combination is produced; it might happen at the first spin, the thousandth, the millionth, or never.’’∞Ω Moreover,

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if we were to treat certain societies as ‘‘stages’’ in the development of certain others, we should be forced to admit that, while something was happening in the latter, nothing—or very little—was going on in the former. In fact, we are inclined to talk of ‘‘peoples with no history’’ (sometimes implying that they are the happiest). This ellipsis means that their history is and will always be unknown to us, not that they actually have no history. . . . In actual fact, there are no peoples still in their childhood; all are adult, even those who have not kept a diary of their childhood and adolescence.≤≠

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Lévi-Strauss insisted that human societies made varying use of their past times, ‘‘that some were dashing on while others were loitering along the road,’’ suggesting two types of history: ‘‘a progressive acquisitive type’’ and another ‘‘equally active and calling for the utilization of much talent, but lacking the gift of synthesis which is the hallmark of the first.’’≤∞ One can recognize in these statements the basis of Lévi-Strauss’s later distinction between ‘‘cold’’ and ‘‘hot’’ societies;≤≤ in ‘‘Race and History’’ he similarly distinguished between ‘‘static’’ and ‘‘moving’’ cultures. But in his view, such societies existed not in an evolutionary continuum, which would imply an increasing 78

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rank of mental or moral progress, but in stratiographic discontinuity. ‘‘Static societies’’ were not so much resistant to change as they were structured to absorb it in a nonlinear manner. ‘‘All innovations, instead of being added to previous innovations tending in the same direction, would be absorbed into a sort of undulating tide which, once in motion, could never be canalized in a permanent direction.’’≤≥ Yet the distinction between static cultures and moving cultures could also be seen as arising from a di√erence in position. It is at this point, in ‘‘Race and History,’’ that Lévi-Strauss’s figure of the traveler first emerges, riding the metaphor of the train: ‘‘We know . . . that it is possible to accumulate far more information about a train moving parallel to our own at approximately the same speed (by looking at the faces of the travelers, counting them, etc.) than about a train which we are passing or which is passing us at a high speed, or which is gone in a flash because it is traveling in a di√erent direction. In the extreme case, it passes so quickly that we have only a confused impression of it, from which even the indications of speed are lacking’’ (237). In the same manner, cultures ‘‘appear to us to be in more active development when moving in the same direction as our own, and stationary when they are following another line’’ (ibid.). LéviStrauss concluded, ‘‘Whenever we are inclined to describe a human culture as stagnant or stationary, we should therefore ask ourselves whether its apparent immobility may not result from our ignorance of its true interests, whether conscious or unconscious, and whether, as its criteria are di√erent from our own, the culture in question may not su√er the same illusion with respect to us. In other words, we may well seem to one another to be quite uninteresting, simply because we are dissimilar’’ (ibid.). For Lévi-Strauss, the division of societies according to di√erent time-scales posed a challenge to understanding their very essence. For this reason, perhaps, he held that it was diversity itself that constituted inequality: ‘‘One could not claim to have formulated a convincing denial of the inequality of the human races, so long as we fail to consider the problem of the inequality—or diversity—of human cultures, which is in fact—however unjustifiably—closely associated with it in the public mind’’ (ibid.). Lévi-Strauss’s introduction of the ‘‘problem of diversity’’ can be seen as a product of the tension in his work between the ‘‘human condition’’ and the need to understand cultural specificity.≤∂ But the ‘‘problem of diversity’’ can also be read as an ingenious refiguring of Rousseau’s natural man in a postwar era that saw the scientific project

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of the unesco statements on race to be part of the same philosophical and humanist project as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As Lévi-Strauss put it in ‘‘Race and History,’’

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The preamble to unesco’s second ‘‘Statement on the Race Problem’’ very rightly observes that the thing which convinces the men in the street that there are separate races is ‘‘the immediate evidence of his senses when he sees an African, a European, an Asiatic and an American Indian together.’’ Likewise, the strength and the weakness of the great declarations of human rights has always been that, in proclaiming an ideal, they too often forget that man grows to man’s estate surrounded, not by humanity in the abstract, but by a traditional culture, where even the most revolutionary changes leave whole sectors quite unaltered. (226)

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Though Lévi-Strauss suggested that ‘‘such declarations can themselves be accounted for by the situation existing at a particular moment in time, and in a particular space’’ (ibid.)—an oblique reference, perhaps, to the Nazism that prompted the declaration of human rights—his concern here is not with historical context. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss himself suggests that the problem of diversity is a timeless one, one intrinsic to human nature. Thus, ‘‘modern man has launched out on countless lines of philosophical and sociological speculation in a vain attempt to achieve a compromise between these contradictory poles, and to account for the diversity of cultures, while still seeking, at the same time, to eradicate what still shocks and o√ends him in that diversity’’ (ibid.). The problem of diversity, in other words, is that humanity cannot really comprehend it, and in its attempt to universalize itself, seeks to turn unlike into like, thus homogenizing and eventually eliminating other cultures. This suspicion of other cultures is what Lévi-Strauss termed the ‘‘ethnocentric attitude,’’ and could be found among ‘‘primitive’’ societies who imagined themselves the ‘‘true people,’’ both in antiquity, when everything not Greco-Roman was held to be ‘‘barbarian,’’ and in modernity, when everything not Western was deemed ‘‘savage.’’ According to Lévi-Strauss, ‘‘This attitude of mind which excludes savages from human kind is precisely the attitude most strikingly characteristic of those savages. We know, in fact, that the very concept of humanity as covering all forms of the human species, irrespective of race or civilization came into being very late in history, and is by no means widespread’’ (225). This double-movement marking

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the exclusion of certain types of thought as characteristic of history’s universalizing impulse in many ways anticipates Lévi-Strauss’s reply to Sartre’s misapprehension of historical knowledge. The diversity of social forms, which the anthropologist grasps as deployed in space, presents the appearance of a discontinuous system. So, thanks to the temporal dimension, history seems to restore to us, not separate states, but the passage from one state to another in a continuous form. And as we believe that we apprehend the trend of our personal history as a continuous change, historical knowledge seems to do more than describe beings to us from the outside, or at best give us intermittent flashes of insight into internalities, each of which are so on their own account while remaining external to each other: it appears to re-establish our connection, outside ourselves with the very essence of change.≤∑

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Lévi-Strauss’s description of cultural change also contained the seeds to the solution of the ‘‘problem of diversity.’’ For those cultures that had achieved cumulative forms of history, an alliance or coalition was both necessary and desirable. Yet, as Lévi-Strauss noted in ‘‘Race and History,’’ no society was intrinsically cumulative in nature: ‘‘Cumulative history is not the prerogative of certain races or cultures, marking them o√ from the rest. It is the result of their conduct rather than their nature ’’ (252). Thus, ‘‘a culture’s chance of uniting the complex body of interventions of all sorts which we describe as a civilization depends upon the number and diversity of the other cultures with which it is working out, generally involuntarily, a common strategy’’ (251). For Lévi-Strauss, ‘‘world civilization’’ could represent no more than ‘‘a world-wide coalition of cultures, each of which would preserve its own originality’’ (254). It is easy to see how many of Lévi-Strauss’s readers could read into the idea of a ‘‘world coalition of cultures’’ an optimism about which Lévi-Strauss was more tentative. For, indeed, he maintained that while ‘‘the greater the diversity between the cultures . . . the more fruitful the coalition,’’ the inevitable result would be uniformity, bringing about he death of cultural diversity (255). The remedy existed in broadening the coalition, either by increasing internal diversity (capitalism being an instance of increasing internal di√erentiation) or by admitting new partners (as through colonialism and imperialism). Thus, ‘‘exploitation is possible only within a coalition; there is contact and interchange between the major and the minor

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parties’’ (256). This is the closest Lévi-Strauss comes to analyzing the relationship of inequality to race, but in the end he reduces the source of conflict to a human universal, the principle of identity and di√erence: ‘‘Humanity is forever involved in two conflicting currents, the one tending toward unification, and the other towards the maintenance or restoration of diversity’’ (257). Indeed, the conclusion of Lévi-Strauss’s essay does appear to represent a compromise with the contradiction he described as fundamental both to human nature and to changing human society. He called on international institutions to preserve diversity: ‘‘It is not enough to nurture local traditions and to save the past for a short while longer. It is diversity itself which must be saved, not the outward and visible form in which each period has clothed that diversity, and which can never be preserved beyond the period which gave it birth. . . . We can see the diversity of human cultures behind us, around us, and before us. The only demand that we can justly make . . . is that all the forms this diversity may take may be so many contributions to the fullness of all the others’’ (258). It was Lévi-Strauss’s turn toward a humanist celebration of diversity that exposed his inability to yoke an analysis of the principle of identity and di√erence to an understanding of modern racism, and that prompted his turn toward biology in ‘‘Race and Culture.’’ Yet, in holding, in ‘‘Race and History,’’ that ‘‘no culture is capable of a true judgment of any other, since no culture can lay aside its own limitations’’ (240), Lévi-Strauss suggested that Western valuations of other cultures were relative and that its humanism was open to critique. In further cautioning that ‘‘acceptance of the Western way of life, or certain aspects of it, is by no means as spontaneous as westerners would like to believe’’ (241), and that ‘‘Western culture’s claim to superiority is not founded upon free acceptance’’ but on ‘‘inequality of force’’ (242), Lévi-Strauss seemed to be working the same groove of argument established by Boas. ‘‘Race and History’’ engages the question of temporality by questioning the West’s understanding of its own historicity. Where Boas’s historical particularism sought an empirical basis for adjudicating the claims of cultural progress, Lévi-Strauss’s critique of the construction of historical time would lead to a critique of humanism itself. It is this theoretical project that Lévi-Strauss’s second essay on race develops. To understand fully the ways in which ‘‘Race and Culture’’ both breaks from and extends the philosophical critique of humanism that ‘‘Race and History’’ inaugurates, some atten82

tion to Lévi-Strauss’s writings during the twenty-year period between these two essays is necessary.

race and culture: a philosophic al reprise?

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The View from Afar (1985), the English translation of Le regard éloigné, opens with ‘‘Race and Culture,’’ a lecture delivered in 1971 at the behest of unesco on the occasion of the International Year of Action to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination. Lévi-Strauss himself admitted that the lecture ‘‘caused an uproar’’ and a ‘‘lively scandal,’’ and it led other observers to wonder whether he hadn’t completely reversed his position on race.≤∏ On 25 March 1971, Le Monde called the lecture, originally given for a unesco-sponsored colloquium, ‘‘heretical,’’ judging that ‘‘le public ne laisse pas d’être un peu surpris,’’ while the Chicago Daily News ran a Paris datelined story with the header ‘‘Hippies Feel ‘Race’ Bias, Says Scholar.’’≤π LéviStrauss attributed his invitation to the unesco conference to the success of ‘‘Race and History’’ and the expectation that he would serve up the same ‘‘basic truths.’’ In his view, the contrariness he expressed in ‘‘Race and Culture’’ was in response to having overstated the conclusion to ‘‘Race and History,’’ twenty years earlier, ‘‘in order to serve the international institutions’’; his own ‘‘disgust’’ at his former obligingness convinced him that in order to be useful to unesco, he would have to speak in ‘‘complete frankness.’’≤∫ In some ways, it is easy to sympathize with the critics of LéviStrauss’s second essay: its conclusion is pessimistic, and rather than a nod to the celebratory coalition of cultures is a warning couched in the guise of cultural counsel: ‘‘Humanity . . . if not resigned to becoming the sterile consumer of the values that it managed to create in the past, is capable of giving birth to bastard works, to gross and puerile inventions, and must learn once again that all true creation implies a certain deafness to the appeal of other values, even going so far as to reject them if not denying them altogether. For one cannot fully enjoy the other, identify with him, and yet at the same time remain di√erent.’’≤Ω But the uproar wasn’t simply about the essay’s less-than-optimistic conclusions. The preface to The View from Afar contains an extended summary of five ‘‘sins’’ that ‘‘Race and Culture’’ committed, in the eyes of the international community. First, Lévi-Strauss attempted to

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reconcile the data of population genetics with campaigns against racism, which drew the charge of ‘‘putting the fox in the sheepfold.’’ Second, he distinguished ‘‘racism [as] a doctrine that claims to see the mental and moral characteristics of a group of individuals . . . as the necessary e√ect of a common genetic heritage’’ from ‘‘attitudes that are normal, even legitimate, and . . . unavoidable.’’≥≠ Third, he warned against the celebration of cultures such that ‘‘each would lose any attraction it could have for the others and its own reason for existing.’’≥∞ Fourth, he cautioned unesco against reveling in ‘‘highflown’’ words and received arguments if it wanted to change humanity.≥≤ And fifth, he cautioned unesco against hiding behind ‘‘contradictory assertions.’’≥≥ The first two issues are what lie at the heart of Lévi-Strauss’s essay; let me treat them in reverse order. When Lévi-Strauss attempted to distinguish racism as a doctrine from ‘‘normal, even legitimate attitudes,’’ he actually opened up a critique of his first essay. As he was to argue in the preface to ‘‘Race and Culture,’’

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Nothing so much compromises the struggle against racism, or weakens it from the inside . . . as the undiscriminating use of the word racism, by confusing a false, but explicit theory with common inclinations and attitudes from which it would be illusory to imagine that humanity can one day free itself or even that it will care to do so. This verbal bombast is comparable to the one that, at the time of the Falklands conflict, led many politicians and journalists to speak in terms of a struggle against a vestige of colonialism, about what was, in fact, simply a squabble like those which occur about the regrouping of land among peasants.≥∂

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The di≈culties of Lévi-Strauss’s philosophical understanding of race for comprehending contemporary political events are evident here, though it is perhaps in attempting to distinguish that understanding from an explicit, politicized use of doctrine to legitimize social inequality that Lévi-Strauss comes closest to recognizing his own theory’s limits. In other words, if Lévi-Strauss’s philosophical understanding of race could account for modern racism, why would he feel obliged to define racism as a ‘‘false, but explicit theory’’ different from ‘‘common inclinations and attitudes’’? This position makes it all but impossible for Lévi-Strauss to comprehend how racist beliefs do not always depend on negative ideology, but often lie imbedded in common inclinations and attitudes. If ‘‘Race and History’’ substituted a set of dispositions (the ‘‘ethno84

by itself, the diversity of cultures would pose no problem beyond the objective fact of its existence. Nothing really prevents di√erent cultures from co-existing and maintaining comparatively peaceful relations, which, as proved by historical experience, can have di√erent foundations. Sometimes each culture calls itself the only genuine and worthwhile culture; it ignores the others and even denies that they are cultures. Most of the peoples that we term ‘‘primitive’’ give them-

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centric attitude’’) for a definition of race and, by extension, racism, ‘‘Race and Culture’’ o√ered a definition of racism without a corresponding analysis of it. Lévi-Strauss himself seemed conscious of this problem, which he attempted to address by o√ering ever more specific definitions of racism. In an interview with Didier Eribon in 1991, for example, Lévi-Strauss pontificated, ‘‘What is racism? A specific doctrine, which can be summed up in four points. One, there is a correlation between genetic heritage on the one hand and intellectual aptitudes and moral inclinations on the other. Two, this heritage, on which these aptitudes and moral inclinations depend, is shared by all members of certain human groups. Three, these groups, called ‘races,’ can be evaluated as a function of the quality of their genetic heritage. Four, these di√erences authorize so-called superior ‘races’ to command and exploit the others, and to eventually destroy them.’’≥∑ When Eribon asked Lévi-Strauss to clarify whether the hostility of one culture toward another is racism, he responded, ‘‘Active hostility, yes. Nothing gives one culture the right to destroy or even oppress another. This negation of the other inevitably takes its support from transcendent reasons: either racism or its equivalent. But that cultures, all the while respecting each other, can feel greater or less a≈nity with certain others is a factual situation that has always existed. It is the normal course of human conduct. By condemning it as racist, one runs the risk of playing into the enemy hand, for many naive people will say, if that’s racism, then I’m racist.’’≥∏ We can see here the problem with reducing racism to set of attitudes, rather than emphasizing material practices or institutions. Yet, in Lévi-Strauss’s attempts to clarify his understanding of what constitutes racism, he seems to understand the problematic implications of his analysis of how racial distinctions emerge. Although he assumes racial distinctions are constituted by human nature—by humanity’s need to di√erentiate itself from others—he can neither explain why cultures should co-exist peacefully nor what leads some groups to insist on the extermination of others. Thus,

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selves a name that signifies ‘‘The True Ones,’’ ‘‘The Good Ones,’’ ‘‘The Excellent Ones,’’ or even quite simply, ‘‘The Human Beings,’’ and apply to other peoples a name that denies their humanity—for example, ‘‘earth monkeys’’ or ‘‘louse eggs.’’ Hostility and sometimes even warfare may have prevailed between cultures, but the aims were chiefly to avenge wrongs, to capture victims for sacrifices, and to steal women or property—customs that may be morally repugnant to us, but that seldom or never went so far as to wipe out or subjugate a whole culture as such because one did not accept the other’s existence.≥π

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We can see here how the distinction between racism and negative cultural beliefs toward others results from the tension in LéviStrauss’s work between what is unique and culturally specific in ‘‘primitive’’ societies and what they illustrate of universal human nature. Yet it is clearly the failure of Lévi-Strauss’s extension of how ‘‘primitive’’ societies constitute cultural di√erence to explain fascist final solutions that leads him to define racism as a negative ideology based on biological or genetic di√erence. It is precisely because LéviStrauss reached the limit of his own philosophical argument—its inability to define racism and the violence and destruction unleashed by it—that he sought out biology. Since Lévi-Strauss had no analysis of racism, he turned to the prevailing definition of the times: one that understood racism as false, negative valuation given to biological di√erence. ‘‘Race and Culture’’ thus did not advance Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of racism; at the same time, it shifted the grounds of his relativist commitments to rather unsteady biological terrain—the same terrain paradoxically mapped by the unesco statements on race.≥∫ Where ‘‘Race and History’’ produced an ingenious, if inadequate, philosophy of race, ‘‘Race and Culture’’ reprised the Boasian resolution: to see culture as socially constructed and race as a biological entity. Thus Lévi-Strauss asks: Does anthropology feel that it can on its own explain the diversity of cultures? Can it succeed in doing so without citing factors that elude its own rationality—without, moreover, making too hasty a judgment about their ultimate nature, which is beyond anthropology’s province to declare biological?≥Ω While Lévi-Strauss in some sense wants to bracket the notion of race—he notes in ‘‘Race and Culture’’ that ‘‘we know what a culture is, but not what a race is; and we probably do not need to know in order to attempt to answer the question raised by the title of this 86

chapter’’ (6)—he also wants to preserve its potential utility. His main intervention in this regard is to pose what he terms a reversal between the relationship of race and culture. Throughout the nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth century, scholars wondered whether and in what way race influences culture. After establishing that the problem stated in this way cannot be solved, we now realize that the reverse situation exists: the cultural forms adopted in various places by human beings, their ways of life in the past or in the present, determine to a very great extent the rhythm of their biological evolution and its direction. Far from having to ask whether culture is or is not a function of race, we are discovering that race—or what is generally meant by this term—is one function among others of culture. (13–14)

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The preceding sentence echoes Ruth Benedict’s formulation in Race: Science and Politics. Lévi-Strauss continues, ‘‘We no longer use racial characteristics to explain great di√erences we thought we could discern among cultures when viewing them on too broad a basis; but these same racial traits (which we can no longer view as such when using a finer scale of observation), combined with cultural phenomena of which they are less the cause than the result, supply precise information on comparatively recent periods. Furthermore . . . this information can be confirmed by archeological, linguistic and ethnographic data’’ (16). In ‘‘Race and Culture,’’ Lévi-Strauss limits himself to the genetic studies of isolated populations in Africa and South America, explaining that ‘‘so long as we replace the point of view of ‘cultural macroevolution,’ with that of ‘genetic micro-evolution,’’ collaboration becomes possible once again between the study of races and the collaboration of cultures’’ (ibid.). Yet the collaboration between the study of races and that of cultures also reproduced a troubling analogy between cultural and biological evolution, whereby ‘‘cultural barriers are almost of the same nature as biological barriers’’ (ibid.), ‘‘genetic recombination plays a part comparable to that of cultural recombination’’ (17), and ‘‘organic evolution and cultural evolution are not only analogous but complementary’’ (18).∂≠ Lévi-Strauss insisted that once the ‘‘old demons of racist ideology’’ were driven out, and were proven to have no scientific basis, the road was clear for a ‘‘positive collaboration between geneticists and anthropologists to investigate how and in what way the distribution maps of biological and cultural phenomena shed light on one another’’ (19).

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Though Lévi-Strauss largely concentrates on arguing for a correct interpretation of the relationship of organic to cultural evolution, toward the end of the essay he suggests an argument for racism, using the lifeboat analogy of Malthusian economics.

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Are we so sure that the racist form of intolerance results chiefly from the wrong ideas of this or that group of people about the dependence of cultural evolution upon on organic evolution? Might not these ideas be simply ideological camouflage for more concrete oppositions based on a desire to subjugate other groups and maintain a position of power? Such was certainly the case in the past. But even granting that these relationships of force are diminishing, might not racial di√erences continue to serve as a pretext for the increasing di≈culty of living together, as unconsciously felt by Humanity in the grips of population explosion? And of a humanity that—like those flour worms that, with the toxins they secrete, poison one another at a distance long before their density exceeds the available food supply in their sack—is beginning to despise itself because of its secret prescience that it is growing too large for each of its members freely to enjoy the essential goods—free space, pure water, unpolluted air? Racial prejudices have reached their greatest intensity when directed toward human groups that have been limited by other groups to inadequate territory and to an insu≈cient allowance of natural goods so as to reduce their dignity in their own eyes and in those of their powerful neighbors. (19–20)

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It is di≈cult, here, to disentangle what part is human biology (the group or population) that is adapting to limited environmental circumstances, and what part is human nature, whereby all groups faced with a similar set of circumstances will respond similarly. And when Lévi-Strauss later announces that ‘‘what not long ago was called the problem of the races eludes the domain of philosophical speculation and moral homilies with which we were too frequently satisfied,’’ he appears to discount his own arguments in ‘‘Race and History’’ by privileging population genetics.∂∞ In truth, Lévi-Strauss seems to be saying that the problem lies not with the use of the model of organic evolution to understand race, but with human nature, ‘‘the desire to subjugate other groups and maintain a position of power.’’ Thus, the passage above, while using the language of population ecology, actually reprises the terms of argument found in ‘‘Race and History.’’ In Lévi-Strauss’s own view, ‘‘Race and Culture’’ was merely an elaboration of the themes initially laid out in ‘‘Race and History.’’∂≤ 88

And, sure enough, ‘‘Race and Culture’’ revisited the problem of diversity, reintroduced the metaphor of the train traveler for explaining di√erences in historical time, and reexamined the question of di√ering notions of humanity. As if to underscore the philosophical position of his earlier essay, Lévi-Strauss gestured in ‘‘Race and Culture’’ even more strongly to his understanding of the historical constitutedness of Western civilization. He saw humanism as an unacknowledged reflection of its own historical and cultural specificity, suggesting that di√erent forms of humanism exist, some grounded in indigenous cultures, and some in Buddhist philosophy. Thus, ‘‘indigenous philosophy may even contain the idea that human beings, animals, and plants share a common stock of life, so that any human abuse of any species is tantamount to lowering the life expectancies of human beings themselves. All these beliefs may be naive, yet they are highly e√ective testimonies to a wisely conceived humanism, which does not center on man, but gives him a reasonable place within nature, rather than letting him make himself its master and plunderer, without regard for even the most obvious needs and interests of later generations’’ (13). In ‘‘Race and Culture’’ Lévi-Strauss thus extends the critique of Western civilization he began in Tristes tropiques.

While one might argue that Lévi-Strauss attempts to resolve the tension between universality and cultural specificity in ‘‘Race and History’’ by shifting the terrain of argument to population genetics in ‘‘Race and Culture,’’ it is an uneasy resolution at best, and one that is at odds with the philosophical humanism that resonates throughout his work. Indeed, it is Lévi-Strauss’s elaboration of ‘‘indigenous’’ or ‘‘Far Eastern’’ alternatives to the Western humanistic tradition that 89

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By isolating man from the rest of creation and defining too narrowly, the boundaries separating him from other living beings, the Western humanism inherited from Antiquity and the Renaissance has deprived him of a bulwark; and, as the experiences of the 19th and 20th centuries have proved, has allowed him to be exposed and defenseless to attacks stirred up within the stronghold itself. This humanism has allowed ever closer segments of humanity to be cast outside arbitrary frontiers to which it was all the easier to deny the same dignity as the rest of humanity, since man had forgotten that he is worthy of respect more as a living being than as lord and master of creation—a primary insight that should have induced him to show his respect for all living beings. Far Eastern Buddhism has wonderful teachings along these lines. (21–22)

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is the thread tying ‘‘Race and Culture’’ to ‘‘Race and History.’’ LéviStrauss’s attempt to link the emphasis on harmony between man and nature within indigenous and Eastern philosophies to a critique of Western humanism can be seen more clearly in his writing on Rousseau and in his essay ‘‘The Three Humanisms’’ (1956).

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jean-jacques rousseau and the three humanisms

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In Lévi-Strauss’s writing on race, one can see the seeds of an irresolvable tension or contradiction between universalism and specificity for which hope or optimism, and later a kind of biological realism, is the only antidote. Yet Lévi-Strauss’s thinking on race is heavily indebted to Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality.∂≥ In ‘‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Founder of the Sciences of Man’’—an essay written in 1962 for the 225th anniversary of Rousseau’s birth and published at the same time as The Savage Mind—Lévi-Strauss returned to Rousseau’s notion of the ‘‘view from afar.’’ Proclaiming that Rousseau had not just anticipated ethnology, but had in fact founded it by posing man in his relation to nature and culture as the subject of ethnology, Lévi-Strauss again echoed the philosopher’s famous words: ‘‘When one wants to study men one must look around oneself; but to study man, one must first learn to look into the distance; one must first see di√erences in order to discover characteristics’’ (35). For Lévi-Strauss, ‘‘the methodological rule which Rousseau assigns to ethnology and which marks its advent also makes it possible to overcome what, at first glance, one would take for a double paradox: that Rousseau could have simultaneously advocated the study of the most remote men, while mostly giving himself to the study of that particular man who seems the closest—himself; and secondly that, throughout his work, the systematic will to identify with the other goes hand in hand with an obstinate refusal to identify with the self ’’ (ibid.). With perhaps a hint of self-irony, Lévi-Strauss held that these two contradictions had to be resolved in every ethnological career. Lévi-Strauss credits Rousseau with having been the first to develop an alternate self-reflexive philosophy to the cogito ’s ‘‘I think therefore I am,’’ anticipating the relationship between self and other formulated in the famous maxim ‘‘I is another.’’

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This faculty—Rousseau did not neglect to repeat—is compassion, deriving from the identification with another who is not only a parent, a relative, a compatriot, but any man whatsoever, seeing only that he is a man, and much more: any living being, seeing that it is living. Thus man begins by experiencing himself as identical to all his fellows. And he will never forget this primitive experience, despite demographic expansion, which plays in Rousseau’s anthropological thought the role of a contingent event, one which could not have happened but which we must admit did happen since society is. This demographic expansion will have forced him to diversify his ways of life, adapting himself to the di√erent environments through which his increased numbers forced him to spread. It will also have forced him to know how to di√erentiate himself, but only inasmuch as a laborious apprenticeship instructed him to discern the others, that is, animals, by species, humanity from animality, my self from other selves. The total apprehension of men and animals as sensitive beings (in which identification consists) precedes the awareness of oppositions—oppositions first between common characteristics, and only later between human and nonhuman. (38)

Lévi-Strauss claims that Rousseau’s discovery in Confessions is, first, the identification with others, and, second, the refusal to identify with oneself. Thus, ‘‘these two attitudes complement each other, and the latter even forms the basis of the former: in truth, I am not ‘me’ but the weakest, the most humble of ‘others’ ’’ (39). In reading Rousseau’s Confessions, Lévi-Strauss anticipates the work of his own memoirs, Tristes tropiques, and asks, ‘‘What does the ethnologist write but confessions?’’

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In his own name first (as I have shown), since it is the driving force of his vocation and his work; and, through this very work, in the name of his society which, through the ethnologist, its emissary, chooses for itself other societies, other civilizations, precisely among those which appear to it the weakest and most humble. Society does this in order to verify how ‘‘inacceptable’’ it is itself. It recognizes that it is not at all a privileged form, but only one of these other societies which have succeeded each other throughout the millennia, or whose precarious diversity still attests that—in his collective being also—man must recognize himself as a ‘‘he’’ before daring to lay claim to also being a ‘‘me.’’ (ibid.)

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Lévi-Strauss’s ingenious intervention in this essay is to read Rousseau against the grain of the egoism of the Cartesian legacy (a legacy he would claim distorted Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason):∂∂ ‘‘Never better than after the last four centuries could a Western man understand that, while assuming the right to impose a radical separation of humanity and animality, while granting to one all that he denied the other, he initiated a vicious circle. The one boundary, constantly pushed back, would be used to separate men from other men and to claim—to the profit of ever smaller minorities—the privilege of a humanism, corrupted at birth by taking self-interest as its principle and its notion’’ (41). The notion of a corrupt, selfinterested humanism, is central to Lévi-Strauss’s thinking on racism, and is a point to which I will return. Here I want to underscore LéviStrauss’s understanding not only that Rousseau’s notion of identification constitutes ‘‘the real principle of the human sciences and the only possible basis for ethics,’’ but that the principle of identification is the only thing ‘‘uniting beings whom the interests of politicians and philosophers are everywhere else bent on rendering incompatible: me and the other, my societies and other societies, nature and culture, the sensitive and the rational, humanity and life’’ (43). The closing words to the essay on Rousseau thus reveal the core of Lévi-Strauss’s philosophical anthropology, and indeed the key to his version of structuralism: one less animated by the principle of binary oppositions, than by an understanding of the philosophical principle of identity and di√erence, on which are founded the most fundamental, but not mutually incompatible, oppositions between self and other, between one’s own society and those of others. Lévi-Strauss’s tone was hopeful in 1962, as it had been in 1952, and in a way that is not reflected in the closing words to ‘‘Race and Culture.’’ Lévi-Strauss’s reliance on a humanistic understanding of the relationship between identity and di√erence certainly prevented him from developing an analysis of racism as a structured and structuring principle of inequality. And yet Lévi-Strauss was not naive about the history of humanistic thought; indeed, he developed a critique of humanism which, while not as far-ranging as Foucault’s, may well have preceded it.∂∑ In an earlier article, ‘‘The Three Humanisms,’’ published for the French magazine Demain in 1956, Lévi-Strauss marshaled a reading of Rousseau to articulate his contribution to a distinctly democratic humanism.∂∏ In ‘‘The Three Humanisms,’’ a complex and compact essay, several uses of the term humanism emerge. Lévi-Strauss begins by asserting 92

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that ethnology is not a new science, but the most ancient, the general form of what we designate as humanism. And yet the emergence of classical antiquity as a distant past of Renaissance Europe also led to the simultaneous emergence of two forms of humanism in the recognition that ‘‘no civilization can define itself if it does not have at its disposal some other civilization for comparison. The Renaissance rediscovered in ancient literature forgotten notions and methods. But more important still, it realized the means of putting its own culture in perspective—by confronting contemporary concepts with those of other times and places’’ (272). Interestingly, Lévi-Strauss would identify the study of classics and the study of other societies as sharing a common intellectual method: the technique of dépaysement, or estrangement. Thus, ‘‘the only di√erence between classical culture and ethnographic culture resides in the dimensions of the known world in their respective epochs. At the beginning of the Renaissance, to Western man, the human universe was circumscribed by the limits of the Mediterranean basin . . . but it was already known that no fraction of humanity could aspire to understand itself without reference to all other human beings’’ (ibid.). Lévi-Strauss argues that the conception of humanism broadens with the onset of geographical exploration in the eighteenth century and the nineteenth. He asserts, furthermore, that the incorporation of the study of the civilizations of India and China into universities as ‘‘nonclassical philology’’ suggested an inability to recognize that ‘‘it was the same humanistic movement, only encroaching on new territory’’ (ibid.). To the classical humanism of the early Renaissance and to the ‘‘nonclassical’’ humanistic study of Asian civilizations, LéviStrauss added the study of ‘‘disregarded or so-called primitive civilizations,’’ which represented ‘‘humanism traveling through its third stage’’ (273). Yet while such classical and nonclassical humanisms kept the languages and literatures of these civilizations as their object, the ‘‘new civilizations’’ of ethnology posed a challenge to humanism in its third movement, ‘‘hence the need of ethnology to provide humanism with new tools of investigation’’ (ibid.) For Lévi-Strauss, ethnology surpassed traditional forms of humanism by bringing together ‘‘procedures characteristic of all spheres of knowledge: including both the human sciences and natural sciences’’ (ibid.). Lévi-Strauss’s deft handling of temporality is worth noting: he does not accord historical primacy to classical humanism, except as it emerges as the first phase of the West’s own historical consciousness. Indeed, the most ancient form of humanism is to be found in the

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ethnological study of the so-called new civilizations—their ‘‘newness’’ clearly being seen as a function of their recognition by the West. Moreover, Lévi-Strauss reserved his strongest criticisms for classical humanism, which was limited not only by its object but by its beneficiaries, the privileged classes, while ‘‘exotic humanism’’ (one might say, ‘‘Orientalism’’) found itself tied to the industrial and commercial interests which supported it. The aristocratic humanism of the former and the bourgeois humanism of the latter were ‘‘created from privileged civilizations for the privileged classes,’’ and Lévi-Strauss felt they would be superseded by a ‘‘democratic humanism.’’ This humanism would seek ‘‘its inspiration in the midst of the most humble and despised societies,’’ proclaiming that ‘‘nothing human can be strange to man’’ and calling for ‘‘the reconciliation of man and nature in a generalized humanism’’ (274). It was in the attempt to elucidate and draw on a humanism located within the Rousseauian tradition that Lévi-Strauss found his clearest reply to his critics for generating an objectivist science, one that did not take into account the words and feelings of its subjects by reducing them to abstract principles of thought. ‘‘How was it possible,’’ Sartre would ask contemptuously of Lévi-Strauss, ‘‘to study men like ants?’’ Certainly, Lévi-Strauss’s tendency to romanticize ‘‘the reconciliation of man and nature’’ also led him at times to articulate a dispassionate, even antiseptic, view of other societies as laboratories, or ‘‘experiments.’’ This was clear in Lévi-Strauss’s inaugural address to the College de France, delivered, in 1960, as he accepted a chair in social anthropology on the heels of his success with Tristes tropiques. In this address, ‘‘The Scope of Anthropology,’’ he claimed, ‘‘In anthropology experimentation precedes both observation and hypothesis. One of the peculiarities of the small societies we study is that each constitutes a ready-made experiment because of its relative simplicity and the limited number of variables required to explain its functioning. On the other hand, these societies are alive and we have neither the time nor the means to do something about them. By comparison with the natural sciences, we enjoy an advantage and su√er from a handicap: We find our experiments already set up but we cannot control them’’ (15). Yet the anthropologist’s ‘‘experiment,’’ as it was constituted by field research, was also, according to Lévi-Strauss, the nurse and mother of doubt, ‘‘the philosophical attitude par excellence.’’ And anthropological doubt did not only consist of knowing that one knew nothing, ‘‘but of resolutely exposing what one thought one knew . . . to 94

bu√etings and denials directed at one’s most cherished ideas and habits best able to rebut them. Contrary to appearances . . . it is by its more strictly philosophical method that ethnology is distinguished from philosophy’’ (26). In further distinguishing sociology from ethnology, Lévi-Strauss also noted (perhaps in a nod to his colleague Louis Dumont’s vexations), ‘‘The sociologist objectifies for fear of being misled. The ethnologist does not experience this fear since the distant society he studies is nothing to him, and since he is not compelled in advance to extract all its nuances, all its details, and even its values; in a word, all that in which the observer of his own society risks being implicated’’ (ibid.). In the end, the overriding paradox of Lévi-Strauss’s work is that his dispassionate view of society was also nurtured by an intensely passionate humanism. At the close of his inaugural speech to the College de France, LéviStrauss devoted his final words to those ‘‘savages whose obscure tenacity still o√ers us a means of assigning to human facts their true dimensions.’’ Men and women who, as I speak, thousands of miles from here, on some savannah ravaged by brush fire or in some forest dripping with rain, are returning to camp to share a meager pittance and evoke their gods together. These Indians of the tropics, and others like them throughout the world who have taught me their humble knowledge. . . . soon, alas, [are] destined to extinction through the impact of the illnesses and—to them more horrible still—the modes of life we have brought them. To them I have incurred a debt which I can never repay even if, in the place in which you have put me, I could justify the tenderness I feel for them, and the gratitude I owe them, by continuing to be as I was among them, and as, among you, I would never want to cease from being; their pupil, and their witness. (32)

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But alongside the impassioned words of homage to a dying peoples came an equally passionate defense of anthropology from the charge of colonialism. ‘‘Our investigations are sometimes said to be sequels of colonialism. The two are certainly linked, but nothing could be more false than to hold anthropology as the last manifestation of the colonial frame of mind, a shameful ideology which would o√er colonialism a chance of survival’’ (31). Though Lévi-Strauss, in ‘‘The Three Humanisms,’’ did not explicitly make the linkage between Renaissance humanism and colonialism, his inaugural address seeks implicitly to a≈rm Rousseau’s tradition of Renaissance human-

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ism, seemingly ‘‘atoning’’ for the aristocratic and bourgeois corruptions of Renaissance thought. What we call the Renaissance truly marked the birth of colonialism and anthropology. Between the two, confronting each other from the time of their common origin, an equivocal dialogue has been pursued for four centuries. If colonialism had not existed, the rise of anthropology might have been less delayed. But anthropology might not have been moved to implicate all mankind (and it has now become its role to do so) in each of its particular case studies. Our science reached its maturity the day that Western man began to understand that he would never understand himself as long as there would be on the surface of the earth a single race or a single people whom he would treat as an object. Only then was anthropology able to a≈rm itself as an enterprise renewing the Renaissance and atoning for it, in order to extend humanism to the measure of humanity. (32)

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confessions: ‘‘a world on the wane’’

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When Tristes tropiques appeared in French, in 1955, it was an instant sensation and catapulted Lévi-Strauss to international fame. The English translation of Tristes tropiques did not appear until 1961, but it was clearly produced as part of the same analytic project as The Savage Mind, the essays on Rousseau, and ‘‘The Three Humanisms.’’∂π Indeed, the self-reflexive and philosophical themes that mark these works were first introduced in ‘‘Race and History.’’ Part elegy, part disquisition, Tristes tropiques hovers between witnessing a ‘‘primitive’’ world on the wane and acknowledging membership in a civilization that has led to that world’s demise. The signs of Lévi-Strauss’s engagement with Rousseau first emerged in the pages of Tristes tropiques, where he tells of going to the ‘‘ends of the earth to look for what Rousseau called ‘the almost imperceptible stages of man’s beginnings’ . . . in search of a state which . . . ‘no longer exists, perhaps may never have existed, and probably will never exist’ ’’ (357). And it was in those sad tropics that Lévi-Strauss found Rousseau’s ‘‘noble savage.’’ I thought that I had come upon that state in a society then nearing its end. It would have been pointless for me to wonder whether or not it was a vestigial version of what Rousseau had in mind; whether traditional or degenerate, it brought me into contact with one of the

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most indigent of all conceivable forms of social and political organization. I had no need to go into its past history to discover what had maintained it at its rudimentary level—or what, as was more likely, had brought it thus far down. I had merely to focus my attention of the experiment in sociology which was being carried on under my nose. But that ‘‘experiment’’ eluded me. I had been looking for a society reduced to its simplest expression. The society of the Nambikwara had been reduced to the point at which I found nothing but human beings. (358)

Tristes tropiques extends Rousseau’s philosophical journey to a practice of reflection about travel, time, and cultural di√erence. The figure of the philosopher is also accompanied by his companion, the traveler. And while the figure of the traveler first appears in Lévi-Strauss’s writing in ‘‘Race and History,’’ the theory of travel and the theme of cultural diversity and communication is expanded on in Tristes tropiques, where Lévi-Strauss recounts a unesco-sponsored trip to Lahore that launches him on the themes of decay and decrepitude.

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I wished I had lived in the days of real journeys, when it was still possible to see the full splendour of a spectacle that had not yet been blighted, polluted and spoilt; I wished that I had not trodden the ground as myself, but as Bernier, Travernier or Manucci did. . . . Once embarked upon, this guessing game can continue indefinitely. When was the best time to see India? At what period would the study of the Brazilian savages have a√orded purest satisfaction, and revealed them in their least adulterated state? Would it have been better to arrive in Rio in the eighteenth century with Bougainville, or in the sixteenth with Ley and Thevet? For every five years I move back in time, I am able to save a custom, gain a ceremony or share in another belief. But I know the texts too well not to realize that, by going back a century, I am at the same time forgoing data and lines of inquiry which would o√er intellectual enrichment. And so I am caught within a circle from which there is no escape: the less human societies were able to communicate with each other and therefore to corrupt each other through contact, the less their respective emissaries were able to perceive the wealth and significance of their diversity. In short, I have only two possibilities: either I can be like some traveler of the olden days, who was faced with a stupendous spectacle, all, or almost all, of which eluded him, or worse still, filled him with scorn and disgust; or I can be a modern traveler, chasing after the vestiges of a vanished reality. I lose on both counts, and more

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seriously than may first appear, for, while I complain of being able to glimpse more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveler, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see. I am subject to a double infirmity: all that I perceive o√ends me, and I constantly reproach myself for not seeing as much as I should. (33–34)

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As a witness to the ravages of racism and colonialism, Lévi-Strauss finds himself subject to an infirmity of vision. Yet it is the memory and forgetting of the passage of time between worlds that establishes the seductive temporality of Tristes tropiques. Lévi-Strauss’s peculiarly stratiographic view of history, which had first found expression in ‘‘Race and History,’’ is evident in Tristes tropiques.

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Between these two cli√s, which preserve the distance between my gaze and its object, time, the destroyer, has begun to pile up rubble. Sharp edges have been blunted and whole sections have collapsed: periods and places collide, are juxtaposed or are inverted, like strata displaced by the tremors on the crust of an aging planet. Some insignificant detail belonging to the distant past may now stand out like a peak, while whole layers of my past have disappeared without a trace. Events without any apparent connection, and originating from incongruous periods and places, slide one over the other and suddenly crystallize into a sort of edifice which seems to have been conceived by an architect wiser than my personal history. ‘Every man,’ wrote Chateaubriand, ‘carries within him a world which is composed of all that he has seen and loved, and to which he constantly returns, even when he is traveling through, and seems to be living in, some di√erent world.’ Henceforth it will be possible to bridge the gap between the two worlds. Time, in an unexpected way, has extended its isthmus between life and myself; twenty years of forgetfulness were required before I could establish communion with my earlier experience, which I had sought the world over without understanding its significance or appreciating its essence. (34)

Tristes tropiques was, after all, written as a memoir, and we can perhaps forgive Lévi-Strauss’s tendency to romanticize the figure of the traveler who brought within his wake colonialism and economic exploitation. Yet the traces of mourning which continued to wend their 98

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way through Lévi-Strauss’s writing also left it vulnerable as a philosophy of race and racism. One is tempted to suggest that Lévi-Strauss’s own experience of racism was displaced onto a philosophical journey: the figure of the old-world traveler mediating new worlds of di√erence and dépaysement. What, exactly, was the isthmus of forgetting Levi Strauss sought to traverse? In Tristes tropiques Lévi-Strauss spoke matter-of-factly about the ‘‘race laws’’ that prevented him from teaching in the Lycée, and disdainfully of an ‘‘over-rated’’ philosophy teacher named Gustave Rodrigues, ‘‘who committed suicide in 1940 when the Germans entered Paris’’ (42). His most moving pronouncements on his experiences with the Vichy regime are to be found in the opening pages to Tristes tropiques. When he sought passage from France to New York in 1941, the o≈cial in charge was reluctant to take on board the former first-class passenger, whom he still regarded as ‘‘a minor ambassador of French culture.’’ Lévi-Strauss observed dryly that the o≈cial’s scruples might have been misplaced, as he had spent the previous two years traveling in cattle trucks and sleeping in sheep folds, in short, as ‘‘potential fodder for the concentration camp’’(11). Once admitted passage on the ship to Martinique, Lévi-Strauss encountered a departure scene he described as a ‘‘deportation of convicts’’ with rows of helmeted gardes mobiles equipped with sten guns cordoning o√ the Jewish passengers and interrupting leave-takings with jostling and insults’’ (ibid.). Of the war itself, and the politics of the Vichy regime, Lévi-Strauss would say (like many of his compatriots) that France had experienced a ‘‘drole de guerre,’’ but that ‘‘no superlative could do justice to the war as it had been experienced by the o≈cers stationed in Martinique’’ (15). He concluded, ‘‘It was rather as if the Vichy authorities, in allowing us to leave for Martinique, had sent them a cargo of scapegoats on whom these gentlemen could relieve their feelings’’ (16). Lévi-Strauss surely understood that the irony of his own dépaysement at the hands of the Vichy regime would mark his ‘‘confessions’’ in the same way Rousseau’s Confessions demarcated for Lévi-Strauss, a new method for humanism. Yet even as Lévi-Strauss recorded the e√ects of racism on primitive peoples, he was never able to push his own understanding of racism beyond a generalized theory of human nature. His analysis of race essentially left all of the di≈cult questions about racism—how it worked and how it emerged—unasked. Perhaps not incidentally, some of the first English editions of Tristes tropiques omitted four chapters—‘‘The Magic Carpet,’’ ‘‘Crowds,’’

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‘‘Markets,’’ and ‘‘Taxila’’—which summarized Lévi-Strauss’s travels through and reflections on South Asia, including Delhi, Agra, Karachi, Lahore, Taxila, Peshawar, Calcutta, Dacca, the Chittagong Hill tracts, and Burma.∂∫ In these chapters, Lévi-Strauss sets up South Asia as a di√erent kind of mirror for the West: ‘‘In their material aspects at least, Europe and Asia would seem to represent the reverse sides of each other; one has always been successful, whereas the other has always been a loser; it is as if they were engaged on a common enterprise, but one had drained away all the advantages, leaving the other to glean only poverty and wretchedness. . . . [S]outhern Asia is always the martyred continent’’ (135). These parts of the text are punctured with barely contained (but predictable) forms of exasperation, even as the South America chapters are practiced with the narrative of discovery, loss, and elegy. It is in the South Asia chapters that Lévi-Strauss struggles for rhetorical control over the questions he could not ask of racism and its consequences. In Kali Ghat, in Calcutta, ‘‘on the banks of a stagnant pond and in an atmosphere redolent with that mixture of physical deformity and fierce commercial exploitation in which the popular religious life of India is conducted,’’ Lévi-Strauss is led to a ‘‘Rest-House’’ for Hindu pilgrims and is struck by a memory he did not have, but cannot escape: ‘‘As soon as the human cargo has got up and been dispatched to its devotions, during which it begs for the healing of its ulcers, cankers, scabs and running sores, the whole building is washed out by means of hoses so that the stalls are clean and fresh for the next batch of pilgrims. Nowhere, perhaps, except in concentration camps, have humans been so completely identified with butcher’s meat’’ (129). It is di≈cult to express the rhetorical shock of this passage—the only one in the book, and perhaps in the entire body of his work—about a subject on which Levis-Strauss only ever glancingly remarked.∂Ω The displacement of a horror which Lévi-Strauss might have experienced onto an encounter with a di√erent culture casts an entirely di√erent light on dépaysement as a form of self-reflexivity. And yet Lévi–Strauss also asserted that ‘‘the Hindus, our IndoEuropean brothers, seemed to reflect an exotic image of ourselves; they have evolved in another climate and in contact with di√erent civilizations, but their private temptations also come to the surface again in European society’’ (454). This is in marked contrast to how Lévi-Strauss describes ‘‘the presence of Islam which troubled’’ him (452). Lévi-Strauss felt the need to see beyond Islam to ‘‘the India of

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Buddha before Mohammed,’’ because as a European, ‘‘Mohammed intervenes with uncouth clumsiness, between our thought and Indian doctrines that are very close to it, in such a way as to prevent East and West from joining hands, as they might have done in harmonious collaboration’’ (466). Lévi-Strauss develops a ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ thesis with a twist: claiming that Islam, by coming between Buddhism and Christianity, ‘‘Islamized us at a time when the West, by taking part in the crusades, was involved in opposing it and therefore came to resemble it, instead of undergoing—had Islam never come into being—a slow process of osmosis with Buddhism which would have Christianized us still further’’ (467). This process, Lévi-Strauss says, is the source of internal tensions for the West. I am only too well aware of the reasons for the uneasiness I felt on coming into contact with Islam: I rediscovered in Islam the world I myself had come from; Islam is the West of the East. Or to be more precise, I had to have experience of Islam in order to appreciate the danger which today threatens French thought. I cannot easily forgive Islam for showing me our own image, and for forcing me to realize to what extent France is beginning to resemble a Moslem country. Behind the screen of a legal and formalist rationalism, we build similar pictures of the world and society in which all di≈culties can be solved by a cunning application of logic, and we do not realize that the universe is no longer made up of the entities about which we are talking. (462)

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But again the consequences of racism that follow from colonialism are restated as a ‘‘paradox’’ of France’s Muslim ‘‘dependent populations,’’ for in spite of likeness, ‘‘the cultural steamrolling to which they and we are prone has too many features in common for us not to be antagonistic to each other—on the international level’’ (463). Whereas Lévi-Strauss finds that similarity leads to antagonistic di√erence between the Muslim world and a ‘‘Christianized’’ West, he suggests that the di√erences between India and the East could ‘‘teach us a lesson’’ about the dangers of population pressure and the emergence of a ‘‘finite world’’ (154). Describing the origins of the caste system as an attempt to solve the population problem by endeavoring to ‘‘di√erentiate between human groups so as to enable them to live side by side,’’ Lévi-Strauss says it is a pity that ‘‘this great experiment failed,’’

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that, in the course of history the various castes did not succeed in reaching a state in which they could remain equal because they were di√erent—equal in the sense that there would have been no common measure between them—and that a harmful element of homogeneity was introduced which made comparison possible, and consequently led to the creation of a hierarchy. Men can coexist on condition that they recognize each other as being all equally though di√erently human, but they can also co-exist by denying each other a comparable degree of humanity, and thus establishing a system of subordination. (153–54)

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For Lévi-Strauss, Asia contained the ‘‘vision of our own future which it was already experiencing,’’ while the ‘‘America of the Indians’’ represented a Rousseauian ‘‘era when the human species was in proportion to the world it occupied, and when there was still a valid relationship between the enjoyment of freedom and the symbols denoting it’’ (154). Lévi-Strauss, like his colleague Louis Dumont at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, saw in the Indian caste system a self-reflexive lesson for the principle of freedom, but he took from it a negative Malthusian lesson, one of ‘‘failure.’’ Dumont, on the other hand, saw the caste system quite di√erently, as one with positive lessons for the practice of freedom, if not equality.

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chapter 4

¡ Is There a Structuralist Analysis of Racism? Louis Dumont and the Caste School of Race Relations

Louis Dumont’s opening comments to his essays on ideology invoke what Claude Lévi-Strauss called the ‘‘view from afar’’: ‘‘The anthropological perspective or comparative approach has an inestimable advantage: it allows us to see modern culture in its unity. As long as we remain within this culture we seem condemned, both by its richness and its particular form, to cut it up into pieces according to the layout of our disciplines and specializations, and then to place ourselves in one or another of the resulting compartments. Acquiring an external vantage point, setting our culture in perspective—and perhaps that alone—allows for a global view, which will not be an arbitrary one.’’∞ But by the 1960s, when an anthropological structuralism was ascendant, Lévi-Strauss paradoxically found little reason to depart from the Boasian position on race founded in an empiricist critique of the comparative method. The Boasian argument against evolutionary racism, coupled with a form of ethnographic particularism, was part of what established the modern anthropological paradigm of cultural relativism. This paradigm, and in particular, Boas’s insistence that culture trumped race, was so constitutive of postwar internationalism that the unesco statements on race would not have been possible without it. The question of why structuralism resurfaces at the height of the anticolonial era, when the yoke of racial domination was challenged by claims to national self-determination, has itself never been adequately addressed (although I turn to a version of the question in chapter 6). However, if there was a structuralist attempt to address racism, it can be found not in Lévi-Strauss’s work, but in the writing of Louis Dumont. In Dumont’s work, we find the attempt to apply the linguistic structuralism of parts and wholes to the analysis of holisms, the ideological forms that establish di√erent types of society.

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No one who has read Louis Dumont’s profound, but disturbing account of the Indian caste system can forget that he raises the fundamental question of a comparative and therefore universal sociology. Yet Dumont is uninterested in whether certain forms of social phenomena are universal. He is, rather, more concerned with the principles of sociological engagement—a first-order assertion that our values are but particular instances of a universal. In order to understand the truth of another social system, he argued, we must first understand the principles of our own. In some ways ahead of his time, Dumont, like Lévi-Strauss, was one of the first to articulate a radical self-reflexive anthropology, and this is what he meant when he asserted that ‘‘social anthropology is comparative at heart even when it is not explicitly so.’’≤ First published in French, in 1966, with the English translation arriving in the Anglophone academy four years later, Homo Hierarchicus was met with instant protest and controversy, and was the subject of two review symposiums, one in Contributions to Indian Sociology, the other in the Journal of Asian Studies.≥ In these critiques, Dumont, who claimed to have isolated the principle of equality that characterized Western society from the principle of hierarchy that distinguished the social systems of Asia, was frequently taken to task for being less ethnographer than Indologist for his reliance on classical Hindu texts, rather than on observed sociological reality to make his argument.∂ While much of the criticism of Homo Hierarchicus was sound and has stood the test of time, so, too, has the text itself. It not only continues to be read and debated, but is clearly a major site of engagement for South Asia specialists, as a second spate of critiques reveals.∑ Though many derided the text for its ‘‘intellectualism’’ or ‘‘idealism,’’ few acknowledged the fact that Dumont’s argument was largely a philosophical and self-reflexive one, or credited his attempt to say something about the question of inequality in modern democratic society.∏ Rarer still was the reviewer who took account of Dumont’s adaptation of Max Weber’s earlier comparative sociology. In many ways, Weber’s Religion of India is clearly the inspiration for Homo Hierarchicus—Dumont reviewed the English translation of the Religion of India in 1962—which can be read as Dumont’s attempt to systematize and build on Weber’s understanding of the relationship of caste to Hinduism.π Thus, to the extent that Dumont’s project was flawed by a certain ideational emphasis, so, too, was Weber’s earlier notion of ideal type (though no anthropologist criticizes Weber’s 104

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism or his Religion of India with nearly the same fervor). Indeed, the astute reader of Dumont’s work knows that Homo Hierarchicus was all along part of Dumont’s larger comparative project and must be read alongside the later collection of essays From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology, which Dumont lightheartedly called ‘‘Homo Aequalis.’’∫ Sustained attention to Dumont’s early essay ‘‘Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification’: Reflections of a Social Anthropologist’’ (1960) is not only overdue, but illuminates something invaluable about the limits of structural analysis confronted with the phenomena of racism and fascism. Although ‘‘Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification’ ’’ preceded the publication of Homo Hierarchicus by six years and laid the groundwork for much of Dumont’s later work, most readers, unless they were South Asianists, would not have known of the essay until it was republished as an appendix to the first (1970) and second revised (1980) English editions of Homo Hierarchicus. Therefore, I will first touch on the major elements of Dumont’s argument in Homo Hierarchicus, then move to a discussion of W. E. B. Du Bois’s thinking on race as caste, and the emergence of the ‘‘caste school of race relations’’ in sociology. Finally, I will review Dumont’s dispute with this school, the so-called social stratificationists, and his central claims about racism in ‘‘Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification.’ ’’

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on louis dumont

The analysis of ideology is quite central to Dumont’s project in Homo Hierarchicus, where he attempts a structural analysis of the whole as an empirical object (the caste system) and holism (as ideology). He asserts, ‘‘Any concrete, localized, whole, when actually observed, is found to be decisively oriented by its ideology,’’ which he takes to be a ‘‘system of ideas and values’’ (36–37). But it is only in relation to a totality that the ‘‘ideology takes on its true social significance’’ (38). Thus, ‘‘the whole should not be seen by starting from the notion of element, in terms of which it would be known through the number and nature of the constituent elements, but by starting from the notion of the ‘system’ in terms of which certain fixed principles govern the arrangement of fluid and fluctuating ‘elements’ ’’ (34). That is, hierarchy can only be understood with reference to the caste system as a whole, not with reference to its elements, particular castes.

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Dumont argues further that the elements by which a system is composed are not essences in and of themselves, but have meaning only in relation to each other. Thus, ‘‘a phoneme has only the characteristics that oppose it to other phonemes; it is not some thing but only the other of others, thanks to which it signifies something’’ (40). Dumont elaborates on some of the central tenets of structuralist thought by picking up on Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the ‘‘distinctive opposition’’ (41) to argue that in India the fundamental opposition is between the pure and impure; it is this opposition that underlies hierarchy (43).Ω For Dumont, structure is ‘‘when the interdependence of elements of a system is so great that they disappear without residue if an inventory is made of the relations between them; a system of relations, in short, not a system of elements’’ (40). This system of relations is what Dumont calls the ‘‘ideology’’ of ‘‘holism.’’ Hierarchy itself can be defined as the ‘‘principle by which the elements of the whole are ranked in relation to the whole’’ (66) or ‘‘the attribution of rank to each element in relation to the whole’’ (91). Therefore, ‘‘while in our society the reference is to the elements, in [Indian] society it is to the whole’’ (41). For Dumont, then, the ‘‘whole’’ constitutes both method and object of his analysis. In a later essay drawn from his study of ‘‘homo aequalis,’’ From Mandeville to Marx, Dumont put it more starkly: ‘‘There is a logical relation, in the sense that that holism entails hierarchy while individualism entails equality; but in fact it is by no means the case that all holistic societies stress hierarchy to the same degree, nor do all individualistic societies stress equality to the same degree.’’ He continued, ‘‘Indian culture in my view, is characterized by the probably unique phenomenon of a thoroughgoing distinction between hierarchy and power, and it is due to this circumstance that hierarchy appears there in its pure form, exclusive and undiluted. We may say that India stays at the extreme end of holistic societies, while France at the time of her Revolution was, according to Tocqueville, distinguished from England and the United States by an extreme ideological stress on equality at the expense of liberty.’’∞≠ Thus, Homo Hierarchicus relies principally on a separation of status from power to advance both the structuralist argument about the nature of Indian society and the comparativist argument about the nature of Western societies. ‘‘Hierarchy certainly involves gradation, but is neither power nor authority’’ (65); it is, rather, ‘‘the principle by which the elements of a whole are ranked in relation to the whole’’ 106

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(66). For Dumont it is religion which provides the correct view of the whole. Hierarchy can thereby be isolated as ‘‘purely a matter of religious values,’’ and since it rests on the opposition between the pure and impure, which is a religious opposition, ‘‘it tells us nothing about the place of power in society’’ (ibid.). In asserting that opposition between Hindu notions of purity and pollution constituted the hierarchical principle of the Indian caste system, Dumont, of course, is faced with the problem of non-Hindu communities (Christians and Muslims) who exhibit caste-like features of social organization, but lack the underlying symbolic or religious justification for its presence. For Dumont to admit that caste could be constituted by criteria outside of this symbolic paradigm would be to concede that caste was not unique to Hinduism and was therefore a category of sociological comparison across a variety of cultural contexts, a view he called ‘‘sociocentric.’’ He is therefore forced to explain the presence of caste among Christian and Muslim groups as arising from their proximity to Hindu groups; in the Muslim case, coexistence has actually produced a ‘‘hybrid type’’ (211). Dumont thus concludes, ‘‘One is therefore led to see the caste system as an Indian institution having its full coherence and vitality in the Hindu environment, but continuing its existence, in more or less attenuated forms, in groups adhering to other religions. In other words, in the Indian environment, the ideological features may be missing at certain points or in certain regions, although other features constitutive of caste are present’’ (210). Dumont’s concession, that caste-like features of social organization could exist without a Hindu justification for their presence, is an important one, much discussed in the literature on caste in South Asian Muslim and other communities, and a source of debate about the influence of Sanskritization as a heuristic device and social process. It would seem to give important ground to the social stratificationist argument for caste in other societies.∞∞ Yet Dumont resolutely returns the argument to the notion of ‘‘pure’’ (as opposed to ‘‘hybrid’’) type or form. In order to dispense with the view that the caste system was a form of social stratification that could be understood comparatively within the Indian context, as well as outside of the Indian context, Dumont iterates the theory of the varnas to deduce the Hindu principles he claims di√erentiated between the temporal authority of the king (or Kshatriya) and the spiritual authority of the priest (or Brahmin).∞≤ Since kings have lost their religious prerogatives and cannot them-

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selves perform rites or ceremonies, power (in theory) is ultimately subordinate to priesthood, though on a day-to-day level, ‘‘priesthood submits to power’’ (71–72). Dumont concludes, ‘‘It is correct to say that the opposition between pure and impure is a religious, even a ritualistic, matter. For this ideal type of hierarchy to emerge it was necessary that the mixture of status and power ordinarily encountered (everywhere else?) should be separated, but this was not enough: for pure hierarchy to develop without hindrance it was also necessary that power should be absolutely inferior to status. These are the two conditions we find fulfilled early on, in the relationship between Brahman and Kshatriya’’ (74). In other words, the warrior or king who holds secular power is subordinate to the priest who holds higher sacral status. Much has been written of Dumont’s separation of power from status. Indeed, marking the convergence of status with power forms one of the major critiques of his work. Dumont’s response to his critics— that he has focused on the notion of an ideal type—has understandably never satisfied them.∞≥ Yet, in ‘‘Caste, Racism, and ‘Stratification’ ’’ Dumont made it clear that the notion of status he was working with was essentially a Weberian one: ‘‘The disjunction of power and status illustrates perfectly Weber’s analytical distinction; its interest for comparison is great, for it presents in unmixed form, it realizes an ‘ideal type’ ’’ (260). Thus, the value of Dumont’s ideal typic picture of India lay in the comparison. An equitable assessment of Dumont’s project—one that evaluates it according to the terms of argument he himself set out—therefore requires some attention to the form of society to which India is being compared.

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toward a self-reflexive social anthropology: comparative paradoxes

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Dumont’s sociology is an avowedly reflexive one. The first page of Homo Hierarchicus declares that ‘‘caste has something to teach us about ourselves,’’ but warns that because the ‘‘caste system is so di√erent from our own social system,’’ the reader may ‘‘condemn outright anything which departs from it’’ (1–2). Yet it is precisely because Indian society is so di√erent from ‘‘our own’’ that the comparison is fruitful. ‘‘Di√erence’’ represents both the danger and promise of analysis.

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Homo Hierarchicus rests on a philosophical distinction between what Dumont terms ‘‘holism’’ and ‘‘individualism’’: Regarding India and China—and leaving aside the question of internal diversity, which is quite irrelevant on the present level—I am not asserting that India and China are not profoundly dissimilar. They are similar only in comparison to us. There is no doubt that traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Indian ideologies are holistic while ours is individualistic. That they are holistic in di√erent ways does not alter an important consequence: the task of describing comparatively those societies would be made easier if our own fundamentally individualistic frame of reference could be substituted by another that would be developed from those societies themselves. Whenever we lay bare an idiosyncrasy of the modern mind, we make a little less impossible the task of universal comparison.∞∂

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Yet he goes further, claiming that ‘‘the principle of equality and the principle of hierarchy are facts’’ which distinguish Western from Asian societies (3). Throughout the introduction to Homo Hierarchicus, Dumont reflects (in a di√erent vein than does Lévi-Strauss) on the premises of egalitarianism and individualism in the thought of Rousseau (and de Tocqueville) to understand how ‘‘the fusion of equality and identity has become established at the level of common sense’’ (20). As a result of this fusion, we are therefore unable to separate our own identities from egalitarian ideology and hence are unable to understand the principles of other complex societies. In other words, the egalitarianism of Western observers is itself a kind of ‘‘sociocentrism’’—at best a blindness, and at worst a willful refusal to understand India on its own terms. Dumont concludes that ‘‘our modern denial of hierarchy is what chiefly hinders us in understanding the caste system’’ (20). Dumont argues that the Western misunderstanding of hierarchy stems from its conflation of hierarchy with the realm of power, from seeing hierarchy as synonymous with social stratification. The socialstratification bias results in part from viewing caste and social class as ‘‘phenomena of the same nature’’ (36). Dumont accepts that hierarchy exists elsewhere, but not in the ‘‘ideal’’ form found in India. Because it exists elsewhere as a ‘‘residual’’ e√ect of egalitarianism, it represents a contradiction, is therefore ‘‘unthinkable,’’ and in its contaminated form is labeled ‘‘social stratification’’: ‘‘We find, for example, in modern societies a residue of hierarchy in the form of social

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inequalities, but as hierarchy as such is condemned and unthinkable, we find that this residue is currently designated by an expression that evokes inanimate nature and thus presents the phenomenon as devoid of human meaning, incomprehensible: we call it ‘social stratification.’ ’’∞∑ For Dumont, the comparison between India and Western society had to yield pure antimony or di√erence. But since comparison between the two forms of society inevitably revealed significant similarity—hierarchy—Dumont had to account for hierarchy in an otherwise ‘‘egalitarian’’ society like the United States. And so we arrive at the question of race, and Dumont’s troubling contention that racism in the West results from the attempt of democratic or egalitarian society to eliminate di√erence. This is the central argument of Dumont’s essay, ‘‘Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification.’ ’’

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the problem of racism in democratic society: dumont, du bois, and the c aste school of race rel ations

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‘‘Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification’ ’’ fully anticipated the major themes of Homo Hierarchicus. First published in French, in 1960, in Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, it appeared in English in Contributions to Indian Sociology in 1961. In this essay, Dumont begins with the question of whether it is possible to speak of castes outside of India, and he asks more specifically whether the term can be applied ‘‘to the division between Whites and Negroes in the Southern states’’ of the United States. (247). The source of Dumont’s provocation was the caste school of race relations which posed an equivalence between caste and race, and more particularly, between casteism and racism. Interestingly, both Dumont and the theorists of the caste school of race relations seemed to have had the same problem in mind—the relationship of caste society to race—but o√ered divergent conclusions about that relationship. Dumont wrote ‘‘Caste, Race, and ‘Stratification’ ’’ at a time when Algeria had yet to achieve independence, and Homo Hierachicus appeared as the civil-rights movement in the United States had already crested. Where Lévi-Strauss might have been attentive to the movement’s developments through his work for unesco and a certain internationalism, Dumont’s focus remained resolutely Old World and European. His sociology was motivated not by the desire to 110

redress inequality, but by a desire to understand what he saw as the pathology of democracy: equality. W. E. B. Du Bois: Recast(e)ing the Argument on Race

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There is no doubt that W. E. B. Du Bois, as co-founder of the naacp, helped lay the foundations for the civil-rights struggle (even as he differed with Martin Luther King Jr. on strategies and was often nonplussed by Gandhi). Du Bois would also have a profound impact on the social scientists who were cited in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case. He mentored or influenced (through sometimes conflictual relationships) scholars who would become leading black social scientists of the 1930s and 1940s: E. Franklin Frazier, Charles Johnson, Allison Davis, St. Clair Drake, Horace Cayton, and Ralph Bunche.∞∏ In my view, it is not insignificant that Du Bois, as one of the foremost black intellectuals of his time, from the beginning of the twentieth century until his death in 1963, consistently used the idiom of caste to describe race relations in the United States. Notably, the term does not appear in his sociological work, the Philadelphia Negro (1899), or in the ‘‘Atlanta Studies’’ he supervised and edited from 1896–1914. Yet Du Bois himself claimed that from 1910 to 1930, he was ‘‘a main factor in revolutionizing the attitude of the American Negro toward caste.’’∞π In 1930, Du Bois o√ered a definition of ‘‘color caste’’ that was ‘‘based on legal and customary race distinctions and discriminations, having to do with separation in travel, in schools, in public accommodations, in residence and in family relations,’’ pointing to discrimination in public school education, in civil rights, courts, jails and fines; disenfranchisement of voters, including restrictions on registration, voting in primaries; and finally ‘‘lynching and mob violence.’’∞∫ Throughout his social commentary and political writings, however, it is possible to discern several overlapping uses of race as caste: as a system of ‘‘color-caste’’;∞Ω as a synonym for slavery;≤≠ as a synonym for segregation (physical, psychological); as a social or (feudal) economic system legitimated by (Jim Crow) law;≤∞ and as a form of imperialism. Du Bois also liberally used the term caste as a kind of lexical shorthand for detailing the depredations of slavery, racism, and Jim Crow. In the Souls of Black Folk (1903), for example, he speaks of the ‘‘barriers of caste,’’ ‘‘social caste,’’ and the ‘‘wide desert of caste and proscription.’’ The Niagara movement’s statement of 1906 as one of its

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principles called for ‘‘the abolition of caste distinctions based simply on race and color.’’≤≤ And in John Brown (1909), Du Bois referred repeatedly to the ‘‘caste of race and color’’ and to ‘‘caste and cruelty.’’ However, it is in Du Bois’s ‘‘The Evolution of the Race Problem’’ (1909), an ambitious review of U.S. history from 1619 to 1909, that we find his most extended argument about the emergence of caste society in the South. In this essay, originally delivered at the National Negro Conference held in New York in 1909, Du Bois argued that the ‘‘Negro problem’’ had its origin in a repeating cycle of the past. And ‘‘that problem of the past, so far as the Black American was concerned, began with caste—a definite place, preordained in custom, law and religion, where all men of black blood must be thrust’’ (142). Thus, in the opening passages of this essay, Du Bois emphasized caste as a historical formation bound to a particular place (the American South) and sedimented over time through social customs, laws, and religious beliefs. Du Bois continued,

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The caste idea as applied to Blacks was no sudden, full grown conception, for the enslavement of the workers was an idea which America inherited from Europe and was not synonymous for many years with the enslavement of the blacks, although the blacks were the chief workers. Men came to the idea of exclusive black slavery by gradually enslaving the workers, as was the world’s long custom, and then gradually conceiving certain sorts of work and certain colors of men as necessarily connected. It was when once set up in the southern slave system, a logically cohering whole which the simplest social philosopher could easily grasp and state. (142–43)

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Color caste became entrenched through the process of treating free blacks as if they were slaves; in other words, ‘‘color-caste’’ prevented the dominant society from recognizing di√erences in class status, for ‘‘the caste of color was so turned as to correspond with the caste of work and enslave not only slaves but black men who were not slaves’’ (143). Thus, it was ‘‘the free Negro in these manifold phases of his appearance who hastened the economic crisis which killed slavery and who made it impossible to make the caste of work and the caste of color correspond, and who became at once the promise and excuse of those who forced the critical revolution’’ (144). Du Bois’s historical analysis of the caste system as a pernicious source of social renewal is doubly inflected: caste is what both defines and succeeds the actual institution of slavery. It also reveals his interest in forging a 112

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materialist and class-specific analysis of racism that recognized the operation of a caste system (an emphasis later black intellectuals would bypass or reject). While European slavery was racialized over time, it was the free black who forced an ideological and economic crisis in the system: ‘‘In the southern slave system, the thing that from the first damned it was the free Negro—the Negro legally free, the Negro economically free and the Negro spiritually free’’ (143). And yet the attempt to change or ‘‘revolutionize’’ the system with the Emancipation Proclamation or the Fifteenth Amendment would lead to yet another ‘‘caste cycle’’ and a new round of legal and political disenfranchisement through the ‘‘caste program’’ of Jim Crow (145).≤≥ ‘‘Today we have the caste idea—again not a sudden full grown conception but one being insidiously but consciously and persistently pressed upon the nation. The steps toward it which are being taken are: first, political disenfranchisement, then vocational education with the distinct idea of narrowing to the uttermost of the vocations in view, and finally a curtailment of civil freedom of travel, association, and entertainment, in systematic e√ort to instill contempt and kill self-respect’’ (144). The emergence of ‘‘caste distinction,’’ then, was a means of shutting o√ the paths to further advance of the Black ‘‘rising classes’’ (151). Along with the historical and class-focused analysis of the caste system in ‘‘The Evolution of the Race Problem,’’ the essay also reveals Du Bois’s internationalism and anti-imperialism, in evidence long before the two World Wars. Significantly, the essay developed a critique of caste as a form of imperialism that tied the experiences of American Blacks with the peoples of Japan, China, and India: ‘‘The color line will mean not simply a return to the absurdities of class as exhibited in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but even to the caste of ancient days. This, however, the Japanese, the Chinese, the East Indian and the Negroes are going to resent in just such proportion as they gain the power; and they are gaining the power, and they cannot be kept from gaining more power. The price of repression will then be hypocrisy and slavery and blood’’ (155).≤∂ Much later, Du Bois would write in his autobiography that his attention had been distracted ‘‘from the fate of the war in Europe to struggle with Color Caste in America and its repercussions.’’≤∑ But he felt that the history of the day could be summed up in one word: ‘‘Empire; the domination of white Europe over black Africa and yellow Asia, through political power built on the economic control of labor, income and ideas. The echo of this industrial imperialism in

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America was the expulsion of black men from American democracy, their subjection to caste control and wage slavery.’’≤∏ Du Bois’s descriptive use of caste drew in part on a nineteenthcentury abolitionist idiom that utilized missionary accounts of the caste system in India as a means to argue against its republican character, on the one hand, and as a means of insisting on the biological unity of the human species by avoiding the term race, on the other. Caste appeared in the writings and speeches of antislavery advocates like Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Horace Greeley, and Harriet Beecher Stowe; in 1869 Senator Charles Sumner would also deliver an infamously rousing speech called ‘‘The Question of Caste.’’≤π But it is evident that the Du Boisian enunciation of caste as race ranged beyond abolitionist and antebellum understandings, especially as it posited ‘‘color-caste’’ as the ideology of imperialism. His understanding of how caste both constituted the social system of slavery and succeeded it would prefigure the same conclusions drawn by members of the caste school of race relations. It is also clear that in exploring Du Bois’s understanding of race as caste, one discovers a sublated, but generative lexicon of the black social condition from which a variety of black scholars drew, not all of them Chicagotrained sociologists or members of the caste school of race relations.≤∫

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The Caste School of Race Relations

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Emerging as a byproduct of the community studies undertaken by the Chicago School of Sociology, the lineage of the race-as-caste argument is conventionally traced to Lloyd Warner’s arrival at the University of Chicago. Yet sociology and anthropology in the United States had already planted the seeds for a comparative study of caste in the 1920s. Robert Park’s race-relations theory, for example, also relied on an understanding of caste that drew similarities between Indian and European experiences of distinction: ‘‘In India, caste is determined by birth, and it is distinguished by a characteristic trait: the persons of one caste can live with, eat with, and marry only individuals of the same caste. In Europe it is not only birth, but circumstances and education which determine the entrance of an individual into a caste; to marry, to frequent, to invite to the same table only people of the same caste, exist practically in Europe as in India. . . . We all live in a confined circle, where we find our friends, our guests, our sons- and daughters-in-law.’’≤Ω In an article, in 1928, Park asserted more particularly that ‘‘race prejudice in the Southern 114

States is caste prejudice’’;≥≠ while, in 1930, Alfred Kroeber’s article on caste for the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences elaborated, following Weber, a caste-class continuum: ‘‘Castes . . . are a special form of social classes, which in tendency at least are present in each society.’’≥∞ In ‘‘American Caste and Class,’’ published, in 1936, in the American Journal of Sociology, Warner drew substantially from Park’s and Kroeber’s definitions, but actually argued for a dual caste-class system: ‘‘The social organization of the deep South consists of two di√erent kinds of social stratification. There is not only a caste system, but there is also a class structure. Ordinarily, the social scientist thinks of these two di√erent kinds of vertical structures being antithetical to each another. It is rare that the comparative sociologists finds a class structure being maintained together with a caste structure.’’≥≤ Reminiscent of Du Bois’s argument about freed blacks and the evolution of the caste system in the South, Warner posed as preliminary evidence for this dual structure the fact that the achieved status of upper- or middle-class blacks did not protect them from the racism of lower-class whites who lacked comparable class status. The Negro who has moved or been born into the uppermost group of his caste is superior to lower whites in class, but inferior in caste. . . . Metaphorically speaking, although he is at the top of the Negro class hierarchy, he is constantly butting his head against the caste line. He knows himself to be superior to the poor white, yet to the poor white the upper class Negro is still a ‘‘nigger,’’ which is a way of saying the Negro is in a lower caste than himself. Furthermore, if it ever came to an issue, the supraordinate white class would maintain the solidarity of the white group by repudiating any claims by any Negro of superiority to the lower-class whites.≥≥

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The definitional articles by Park, Kroeber, and Warner were followed by a series of ethnographies of the American South undertaken by their students. B. G. Gallagher’s American Caste and the Negro College appeared in 1938, and the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker’s After Freedom (which avoided the term caste altogether and attempted to assert the question of social class) was published in 1939. But it was John Dollard’s study Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937) that would receive wide attention, and which a≈rmed Warner’s conclusions that ‘‘caste is often seen as a barrier to social contact or, at least, to some forms of social contact. It defines a superior and inferior group and regulates the behavior of members in each group. . . . [T]he caste idea seems to be a barrier to legitimate de-

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scent. A union of members of the two castes may not have a legitimate child.’’≥∂ Yet Dollard also attempted to distinguish the rigidity of the caste system as distinct from the flexibility of the class system (a distinction Warner would later contest): ‘‘The caste in which one is kept is determined by his external racial characteristics, and it is presumed that an individual cannot leave the caste into which he is born. . . . Caste is determined by birth; it may not change. Class is determined by ‘family’ and by economic circumstance; it may change.’’≥∑ Echoing Du Bois’s views on the relationship of caste to slavery, Dollard also held that ‘‘caste has replaced slavery as a means of maintaining the essence of the old status order in the South.’’≥∏ In ‘‘A Comparative Study of American Caste’’ (1939), Warner and Allison Davis attempted to contrast more systematically the Indian and American caste systems, drawing on the turn-of-the-century works of the Indologists Emile Senart and Celestin Bougle, and of the Indian colonial anthropologist Herbert Risley. They observed that ‘‘where caste is supposed to be found in its most ideal form, India, it is not a rigidly organized, highly formalistic system with invariant rules of behavior, but a variety of social systems which tend to recognize rules of endogamy, or descent, and of certain restrictions of relations which help preserve a not too rigidly organized rank order of relations. It must also be emphasized that constant change is the rule rather than the exception.’’≥π It is important to recognize that Warner and Davis advanced the flexible and changing nature of the caste system—di√erentiating their definition from Dollard’s (and later critics of their model, such as Charles Johnson and Oliver Cox). Noting the similarities in India and the American South between the prohibitions on mixed-race dining and intermarriages, Warner and Davis concluded, ‘‘There has been no attempt . . . to demonstrate that our caste structure and the India Caste structure are exactly the same, but rather we have attempted to show that they are the same kind of phenomena and, therefore, for the comparative sociologists and social anthropologists they are forms of behavior which must have the same term applied to them.’’≥∫ Warner’s and Davis’s comparative analysis of caste relied on the ethnographic work Davis had undertaken in the South from 1933– 35, which described the racial subjection and economic and social deprivation of Southern blacks. In 1940, the same year that Du Bois’s autobiography Dusk of Dawn appeared, Davis and Dollard published 116

Children of Bondage. Anticipating by a decade Kenneth Clark’s famous study of the e√ects of racism on black children, Davis and Dollard asked, ‘‘What e√ect does this American caste system, issuing out of slavery, have upon the personality development of lower caste children?’’≥Ω They also asked, ‘‘How are the di√erent ways of life characteristic of di√erent societies taught to the naïve children born into those societies? A study of the e√ect of color caste on the personalities of Negro children involves exactly this problem.’’∂≠ Davis and Dollard interviewed, from within the black communities of New Orleans and Natchez, Mississippi, eight children who were ‘‘excluded from full human opportunity and status.’’∂∞ They observed in one child study that ‘‘in the South all Negroes are members of a rigidly subordinated lower caste. The fact that Julie was born into this severely underprivileged group meant that the social and economic opportunities available to her have been arbitrarily limited. She goes to schools which are inferior even to those which lower-class white children attend. She and her parents constantly face a thoroughly organized occupational blockade which is directed against them as Negroes.’’∂≤ Davis and Dollard’s study was published just as the research for Gunnar Myrdal’s epic, An American Dilemma, was drawing to a close. Interestingly enough, Children of Bondage, in a manner that recalls Lévi-Strauss’s staging of train travel as metaphor for the temporality of spatial inequality, contains an extended reflection on what a foreigner traveling by train to the American South might find.

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Even if one travels frequently between the North and the South, it is always revealing to observe di√erences in the formalized relation between Negroes and Whites in the two areas. It will be helpful, therefore, to accompany a Midwesterner on his first trip to Natchez or to New Orleans. When such a ‘‘foreigner’’ approaches his train in Chicago, he may attempt to board that passenger coach which is immediately behind the last baggage car. In this case, if he is white, he will probably be told by the porter that this is not ‘‘his coach;’’ if he asks questions, he will learn that it is the ‘‘Negro’’ coach. Although the segregation of passengers is not legally required until the train crosses the Ohio River at Cairo and enters Tennessee, it is more convenient, presumably, for both white and colored passengers, to follow the arrangement when leaving Chicago. If the traveler comes from New York and has ridden in a coach with colored passengers as far as Washington, D.C, he will feel that all the Negroes disappear from his coach at the nation’s capital.

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Once our white traveler had begun to live in a Southern city like Natchez or New Orleans, moreover, he would receive daily training in his caste behavior. He would learn that he must not sit behind Negroes on a streetcar or bus, that he must not sit in the same section with them in the theater, that he must not allow them to eat with him, that he must not invite them to his home for a social night, that he must not address them as ‘‘Mr.’’ or ‘‘Mrs.’’ or ‘‘Miss’’ and that he must not shake hands with them. He would be learning the behavior required of an upper caste man; he would have to learn it to avoid the legal penalties provided for violators, or to escape the economic and social punishments which his own caste applies to enforce such behavior.∂≥

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Davis and Dollard highlighted the profoundly ‘‘foreign’’ experiences of a Northerner in the southern part of his own country. Twenty-five years after the publication of Children of Bondage, Davis pointedly noted, ‘‘When we were working in Mississippi, the white planters used to say, ‘You have to have a passport to come in here from the United States.’ ’’∂∂ Yet it is not improbable that the experiences Davis described also mirrored those of the foreign scholar Gunnar Myrdal, who in 1937 was selected by the Carnegie Corporation to head a monumental study of the condition of blacks in the United States. Myrdal, in the twentieth-anniversary edition to An American Dilemma, noted that he ‘‘started the study, not by reading books but by traveling around the country, in particular the South.’’ He reflected that he ‘‘was shocked and scared to the bones by all the evils’’ he saw.∂∑ Indeed, reports had it that Myrdal and Ralphe Bunche (who supervised thirteen of the eighty-one studies commissioned for the Carnegie-sponsored study) narrowly escaped angry white mobs at one point during the research. There is no doubt that Du Bois’s writing profoundly influenced Myrdal’s thinking, and perhaps his own understanding of race as caste. Throughout An American Dilemma Myrdal invokes Du Bois and the black political institutions he initiated (the Niagara Movement, Crisis, the naacp); a long passage from Dusk of Dawn, on caste as a form of psychological segregation, appears in the book, and also in Myrdal’s foreword to Kenneth Clark’s study Dark Ghetto.∂∏ Myrdal, in fact, consulted with Du Bois on the design of the study of the ‘‘Negro problem,’’ writing to him several times in 1939 to share preliminary outlines and to seek his advice on di√erent aspects of the project.∂π Myrdal’s proposed study design—outlined, on 28 January 118

1939, in a sixty-three page memorandum to the Carnegie Foundation —listed twenty-three di√erent items of study, including ‘‘7. Caste and Class Stratification within the Negro Group.’’ Responding to this point, Du Bois said, ‘‘No. 7 will repay very careful and discriminating collection of data with restraint in jumping at superficial conclusions.’’∂∫ Myrdal’s memorandum also takes note of John Dollard’s Caste and Class in a Southern Town and Charles Johnson’s The Shadow of the Plantation (1934).∂Ω However, the ethnography that would become the touchstone for Myrdal’s thinking on race as caste was published in 1941; it is cited extensively throughout An American Dilemma. Deep South, a fulllength study by Allison Davis, Burleigh Gardner, and Mary Gardner, completed under Warner’s supervision and with acknowledgments to Dollard, extensively documented the ‘‘color-caste’’ system of the South. Davis and his wife, Elizabeth, together with the Gardners spent eighteen months in and around Natchez, Mississippi, conducting the fieldwork for Deep South. The Davises worked with the black community in the area, and the Gardners with the white community. Segregation was so complete that the two couples could meet only occasionally, in isolated locations or in safe places like the all-black Tuskegee College in Alabama, for fear of social violence and reprisal if their collaboration was discovered. Deep South is a remarkable ethnography and describes in great detail not only the caste-class system of Mississippi, but the components of caste behavior and oppression. As the authors put it, ‘‘Caste is . . . no mere conceptual device for analyzing Negro-white relations. . . . It is a vigorous reality.’’∑≠

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The most striking form of what may be called ‘‘caste behavior’’ is deference, the respectful yielding exhibited by the Negroes in their contacts with whites. According to the dogma, and to a large extent actually, the behavior of both Negroes and white people must be such so as to indicate that the two are socially distinct and that the Negro is subordinate. The Negro when addressing a white person is expected to use a title such as ‘‘Sah,’’ ‘‘Mistah,’’ ‘‘Boss,’’ etc. while the white must never use such titles of respect to the Negro but should address him by his first name or as ‘‘Boy.’’ . . . In places of business the Negro should stand back and wait until the white has been served before receiving any attention, and in entering or leaving he should not precede a white but should stand back and hold the door for him. On the streets and sidewalks the Negro should give way to

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the white person. When going to a white house, the Negro usually knocks at the back door; or, if he should go to the front door, he must not ascend the porch to the door but should stand by the steps and knock. When his knock is answered, he then stands respectfully with his hat in his hand.∑∞

This social system of highly deferential behavior would be remarked on by others.∑≤ Violations of caste sex taboos led to lynchings, but were also used as a form of disciplinary action regardless of the supposed transgression, along with ‘‘ordinary forms of violence.’’ In a lengthy passage, also cited by Myrdal, Davis and the Gardners wrote,

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Although whippings . . . appear to be more or less routine punishments of Negroes for some specific violation of the caste rules, in many of them there is another factor involved. Periodically there seems to develop a situation in which a number of Negroes begin to rebel against caste restrictions. This is not an open revolt but gradual pressure, probably more or less unconscious, in which little by little, they move out of the strict pattern of approved behavior. The whites feel this pressure and begin to express resentment. They say the Negroes are getting ‘‘uppity’’ and that they are getting out of place, and that something should be done about it. . . . Finally the hostility of the whites reaches such a pitch that any small infraction will spur them to open action. A Negro does something which ordinarily might be passed over, or which usually provokes only a mild punishment, but the whites respond with violence. The Negro victim then becomes both a scapegoat and an object lesson for his group. He su√ers for all the minor caste violations which have aroused the whites, and he becomes a warning against future violations. After such an outburst, the Negroes again abide strictly by the caste rules, the enmity of the whites is dispelled and the tension relaxes.∑≥

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Deep South documented the structures of patronage and violence imbedded in the rural and urban South, and also how this violence turned inward. The closing pages of the ethnography describe the hanging of two black men charged with the murder of other blacks, and the diverging community responses to the hangings: pity or admiration from the black community, and a sense of salacious anticipation from the white community that ‘‘a hanging was due.’’∑∂ Deep South would thus become a foundational text, cited by every researcher who worked in the South or was interested in Southern race relations during this period. 120

Although Charles Johnson, in Growing Up in the Black Belt (1941), took exception to the description of Southern racism as being primarily caste-like, he also conceded, following his earlier essay, ‘‘The Conflict of Caste and Class in an American Industry’’ (1936): ‘‘Unquestionably, resemblances to caste do exist. Most prominent of these is the ban on intermarriage. There is also a certain linkage between racial classification and occupation. There is segregation in residences and social activities which bears at least superficial resemblance to that obtaining under a caste system. . . . As in a caste system, racial position is fixed at birth and cannot be altered by personal achievements or experience.’’∑∑ Johnson’s primary argument against a caste system in the American South—anticipated and refuted in Warner’s and Davis’s ‘‘A Comparative Study of American Caste’’—was based on his false impression that because caste restrictions were established by custom, they were thereby accepted without resistance by members of the system (a characteristic misreading by a number of critics of the caste school of race relations). In Johnson’s view, however, the South ‘‘fights overtly and specifically against a change of status.’’∑∏ And while Du Bois saw Jim Crow laws as prima facie evidence of a caste system, Johnson saw them as evidence to the contrary: ‘‘If, for example, interracial marriage were conceived of as impossible this would undoubtedly be termed caste. In the South, however, intermarriage is not accepted as impossible. It does not occur, but the fact that the legal restrictions are imposed indicates the lack of faith of the white group in its e≈cacy of traditional taboos against intermarriage. In a caste system, legal prohibitions are unnecessary, since intermarriage is inconceivable. Moreover, the South does not appear in vacuo. Intermarriage occurs to some extent in the North.’’∑π In 1945, Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake (who had worked with the Davises and Gardners for six months on the Deep South study) dedicated their landmark study, Black Metropolis, to Robert Park, seeking to test (in Warner’s words) whether the caste system of Deep South ‘‘was present elsewhere in the United States.’’∑∫ They concluded,

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As the center for formation of attitudes about the Negro, the South keeps alive the belief in the Negro’s di√erentness and inferiority and, in doing so, depends not only upon derogatory propaganda, but also upon a caste system which e√ectively limits the chances for Negroes to change their status. The situation thus becomes circular:

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Negroes are deemed unfit for citizenship or full equality; they must be kept in their place; through being kept in their place they cannot show whether they are fit for citizenship and equality. These southern attitudes exist in a watered down form in Midwest Metropolis, as they do throughout the North.∑Ω

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Myrdal’s monumental study, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, at two volumes and 1,500 pages (including notes and ten appendices), appeared in 1944, the result of two years of research undertaken between 1938 and 1940. The study was based on eighty-one separate reports, authored primarily by leading black social scientists such as the political scientist Ralph Bunche and the psychologist Kenneth Clark, but also by black anthropologists and sociologists working within the race-as-caste idiom: Allison Davis, St. Clair Drake, Horace Cayton, Charles Johnson, and E. Franklin Frazier.∏≠ Several of the reports submitted to Myrdal were also published separately, including Melville Herskovits’s Myth of the Negro Past (1941) and Charles Johnson’s Patterns of Negro Segregation (1943).∏∞ E. Franklin Frazier would use his notes for the Myrdal study to bring out The Negro in the United States (1949).∏≤ Following the Boasian resolution of the race concept, Myrdal applied caste to U.S. race relations because ‘‘class’’ and ‘‘race’’ seemed inadequate to the task of understanding American society. As Myrdal put it, ‘‘The term ‘race’ is . . . inappropriate in a scientific inquiry since it has biological and genetic connotations which . . . run parallel to widely spread racial beliefs. The . . . term ‘class’ is impractical and confusing . . . since it is generally used to refer to a non-rigid status group from which an individual member can rise or fall. . . . We need a term to distinguish the large and systematic type of social di√erentiation from the small and spotty type and have . . . used the term ‘caste.’ ’’∏≥ Yet Myrdal was also anxious to forestall critics of ‘‘caste as race,’’ who felt it underlined a static view of society in which social hierarchies went unchallenged. In a separate chapter called, ‘‘Caste and Class’’ Myrdal emphasized the notion of ‘‘caste struggle,’’ which he found to be more realistic than ‘‘class struggle,’’ noting that ‘‘the caste distinctions are actually gulfs which divide the population into antagonistic camps. And this is a conscious fact to practically every individual in the system. The caste line—or, as it is more popularly known, the color line—is not only an expression of caste di√erences and caste conflicts, but it has come itself to be a catalyst to widen di√erences and engender conflicts.∏∂ 122

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All of these works in some sense sought to establish caste as a historical formation with juridical sanction producing economic, social, and psychological e√ects, which while not unique to the American South, was nonetheless definitive of it (an instructive contrast to the Dalit appropriation of the black experience of racism as one analogous to the experience of caste oppression). Yet the caste school of race relations comprised a variety of motivations, di√erences of emphasis, and tensions around the theorization of race as caste. Even those, like Johnson and Frazier, who sought to move away from the ‘‘orthodoxy’’ of this idiom of description wound up acknowledging its descriptive power. For example, the concluding pages of Frazier’s The Negro in the United States noted that ‘‘the pattern of race relations in the South has some of the same features of a caste system. There is a legal prohibition against intermarriage and there are strong taboos against sexual contacts between Negro men and white women which have a quasi-religious sanction. Negroes are restricted to menial occupations and in the relations of the races the superior position of whites and inferior position of the Negroes must be recognized. There are symbols and an etiquette in race relations which support the taboos and the relative social positions of the two races.’’∏∑ Interestingly, Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and Clark’s and Frazier’s work stemming from it would influence the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and would be cited in the famous footnote eleven to the decision.∏∏ Though Kenneth Clark is best known for the ‘‘doll experiments,’’ which demonstrated the social e√ects of discrimination on Black children, Davis’s and Dollard’s ethnographic study, Children of Bondage, could not but have been one of his reference points. As late as 1965, in his study Dark Ghetto, Clark would state, ‘‘Millions of Negroes have come North seeking escape from the miasma of the South, where poverty and oppression kept the Negro in an inferior caste.’’∏π This, then, is the submerged legacy of the caste school of race relations. The rubric of caste was seen to reflect at once a common sense of the meaning and consequences of the racial discrimination of the time, and a form of historical consciousness with enduring social e√ects that resounded in the social science of the 1960s. In a retrospective chapter in the 1965 edition of Deep South, Davis wrote with considerable emotion that the conditions he had observed during fieldwork decades earlier, in Mississippi, remained largely unchanged. People were born into a caste, depending on the color of their skin, and when they died they were buried in segregated

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cemeteries. ‘‘We stated thirty years ago that conflict and violence within the color-caste system increased as the economic level of Negroes rose and as competition with whites for jobs and property increased.’’∏∫ Davis observed, further, that ‘‘the Negro in the deep South had little power except that of a laborer in a rather depressed labor market and that of a customer in a money economy, and since he had been trained by the economic and caste systems not to use the potential bargaining power he had, he remained the most severely subordinated group in the United States.’’∏Ω Yet Davis also thought that the civil-rights movement had brought about a fundamental shift in the caste system: ‘‘Both in the Montgomery bus strike and in the college-student sit-ins, the most basic change in the caste system was what Martin Luther King and other leaders term a ‘confrontation.’ Confrontation is an epochal change in the caste system. Instead of bowing his head before the segregation and intimidation on which the caste system rests, the Negro demonstrator confronted the representatives of white power and proclaimed that Negroes do not accept, and will no longer submit to, the caste system.’’π≠ Gerald Berreman, who worked in India, was an anthropologist whose experience of the Montgomery bus boycott would lead him to rea≈rm the similarities he saw between racism in the American South and caste discrimination. In ‘‘Caste in India and the United States’’ (1960), he would also stress how caste behavior was contested and a source of agitation and discontent.π∞ Berreman emphasized that the view of India as a society in which ‘‘people of deprived and subject status are content with their lot’’ was at least partly attributable to the ‘‘vested interests of the advantaged and more articulate castes in the perpetuation of the caste system and the maintenance of a favorable view of it to outsiders.’’π≤ There is, however, yet another unremarked legacy of the caste school of race relations. When Caste, Class and Race was published in 1948, Oliver Cromwell Cox had taken exception to the liberal race-ascaste school and entered the (secondary) Indological scholarship on India to establish that caste was unique to India, attempting thus to advance a materialist argument for the class basis of U.S. race relations. Accusing Myrdal of writing a ‘‘powerful piece of propaganda against the status quo,’’ he charged that ‘‘if the ‘race problem’ in the United States is pre-eminently a moral question, it must naturally be resolved by moral means, and this conclusion is precisely the social illusion which the ruling political class has sought to produce.’’π≥ Cox reacted to what he saw as a moralizing tone in Myrdal’s work, 124

and in that of other adherents of the caste-as-race school.π∂ Yet Cox, like many black intellectuals of the day, including Du Bois, Davis, Johnson, and Frazier, struggled with understanding the extent to which an analysis of capitalism was fundamental to understanding race relations in the United States.π∑ If class struggle was fundamental to race relations, then Cox (like Johnson and others) felt race struggle was inevitable—this seems to have been his primary objection to Myrdal and others of the caste school of race relations. Cox felt that ‘‘caste’’ had been so objectified as a concept that race relations in the Southern states were made to appear as a natural form of social organization. ‘‘The idea of a ‘type of society’ obscures the actual pathological racial antagonism, leaving some di√used impression that it is socially right, even as the caste system in India is right.’’π∏ It is di≈cult to think that Cox could have read Deep South and reached this conclusion about the analysis of race relations in that book. More ironic is the fact that while Cox would seem to be at odds with the static notion of typology Dumont would employ, his critique of the caste school of race relations was reincorporated by Dumont in his own essay on the subject to justify an Indological reading of the caste system, which also failed to recognize its basic social antagonism.ππ Dumont’s Reply to the Caste School of Race Relations

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I have spent some time detailing the use of caste as a social and historical signifier in the work of Du Bois, and the emergence of the ‘‘caste school of race relations’’ as a social analytic to establish the larger intellectual frame in which we should locate Dumont’s argument in ‘‘Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification.’ ’’ Dumont begins this essay by considering Kroeber’s definition of caste as an extreme form of social class, only to dismiss it in short order.π∫ This is in part because of Weber’s distinction between class and ‘‘strand’’ or status group, with caste representing the extreme version of a status group, is more useful for him.πΩ Though Weber’s notion of power di√ers from Dumont’s, Weber’s statement ‘‘The general place of ‘classes’ is in the economic order, the place of ‘status groups’ is within the social order’’ was easily assimilated into Dumont’s distinction between (economic) power and (social) status.∫≠ Ironically, Dumont seems to have ignored several points in Weber’s Religion of India, where the analogy of the Indian caste system to race relations in the American South is positively considered.∫∞ At one point Weber even refers to segregated Jim Crow trains

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as ‘‘caste coaches.’’∫≤ Similarly, in the section on ‘‘Ethnic Segregation and Caste’’ in Weber’s essay ‘‘Class, Status and Party,’’ forms of segregation are clearly seen to be caste-like.∫≥ Weber, who traveled in the United States in 1904 and was appalled by conditions in the American South, wrote to Du Bois requesting an article for his journal, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, and permission to translate The Souls of Black Folk into German.∫∂ While the German translation of The Souls of Black Folk was not to appear until the 1920s (well after Weber’s death), Du Bois’s article ‘‘Die Negerfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten’’ (‘‘The Negro Problem in the United States’’) appeared in Archiv in 1906. In it, Du Bois used caste to designate ‘‘slavery based on race and color,’’ to signify ‘‘slavery as an unfree caste of laborers’’ and as a form of ‘‘mentality.’’∫∑ Weber’s travels through the United States are widely credited with shaping his thinking in the Archiv essays published in 1904 and 1905, which would form the basis of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; it is thus not inconceivable that Weber’s own thinking on caste in The Religion of India, written in 1916–17, has a direct, but sublated link to the American South. In any case, Dumont used a rather narrow reading of Weber to charge the ‘‘social stratificationists’’ with introducing ‘‘that valuecharged word hierarchy’’ into the study of social classes without understanding the meaning of the term. Here Dumont advanced the formulation that would be the backbone of Homo Hierarchicus: ‘‘It is necessary to distinguish between two very di√erent things: the scale of statuses (called ‘religious’) which I name hierarchy and which is absolutely distinct from the fact of power; and the distribution of power, economic and political, which is very important in practice, but is distinct from, and subordinate to, hierarchy.’’∫∏ In Homo Hierarchicus Dumont argued that a misunderstanding of hierarchy is what made it possible to understand a ‘‘serious and unexpected consequence of egalitarianism’’: ‘‘In a universe in which men are conceived no longer as hierarchically ranked in various social or cultural species, but as essentially equal and identical, the di√erence of nature and status between communities is sometimes reasserted in a disastrous way; it is then conceived as preceding from somatic characteristics—which is racism.’’∫π Since racism is a modern phenomenon, Dumont reasoned that ‘‘racism fulfils an old function under a new form. It is as if it were representing in an egalitarian society a resurgence of what was di√erently and more directly and naturally expressed in a hierarchical society. Make distinction illegitimate and 126

you get discrimination; suppress the former modes of distinction and you have racist ideology.’’∫∫ Implicit here is an almost evolutionary view of hierarchical societies being the originary ones against which egalitarian societies fashion themselves. Hierarchy is naturalized by Dumont as he poses it as a universal means of conceptualizing difference in contrast to that ‘‘disastrous’’ somaticization of di√erence which is racism. Perhaps surprisingly, Dumont’s argument about the residual nature of racism occupies one scant paragraph near the end of ‘‘Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification.’ ’’ The argument can be isolated into four distinct propositions. 1. ‘‘Racial discrimination succeeded the slavery of the Negro people once the latter was abolished.’’ 2. ‘‘The distinction between master and slave was succeeded by the discrimination between White against Black.’’ 3. Racism appears because ‘‘the essence of the distinction (between master and slave) was juridical; by suppressing it the transformation of its racial attribute into racist substance was encouraged.’’ 4. If things had been otherwise, the distinction itself would have been overcome.∫Ω

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While Dumont’s fourth proposition is tautological, and need not concern us, the first proposition warrants further attention. Here, Dumont seems to rely too much on Hannah Arendt’s contention in ‘‘Race Thinking Before Racism’’ that ‘‘race-thinking, with its roots deep in the 18th century, emerged simultaneously in all Western countries during the 19th century.’’Ω≠ Arendt further suggested that ‘‘in America and England, where people had to solve a problem of living together after the abolition of slavery,’’ racism emerged as a part of this vacuum.Ω∞ While it is true that some of the most virulent forms of racism emerged in the wake of Reconstruction, that does not mean there were not forms of racism justifying slavery before its abolition. And while slavery existed in the classical world and was not necessarily racialized, by the middle of the sixteenth century in Europe, there was considerable evidence to suggest the development of what St. Clair Drake called ‘‘racial slavery’’ and corresponding racist ideologies to justify it.Ω≤ New World slavery, in particular, was founded on and justified by racial ideologies of inferiority. Therefore, with regard to Dumont’s second proposition, the terms white and black did not succeed the distinction between master and slave, but were rather so synony-

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mous that (following Du Bois) the free black was presumed a slave until proven otherwise. As for the third proposition, if we accept that the distinction between master and slave was founded on the distinction between white and black in the American South, then the distinction was not purely juridical, as Dumont would have it, but socially founded. It is thus not surprising that racial discrimination persisted after the formal end of slavery, because slavery was not merely a legal or economic institution, but a social one. Racial discrimination therefore took forms other than slavery, and caste was one of those forms. As Drake put it, in a formulation strikingly close to Du Bois’s, ‘‘After the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, the White racism that had buttressed racial slavery did not disappear but became the ideology supporting color-caste systems and systems of color-class with non-whites at the bottom.’’Ω≥ Ignoring Myrdal’s definition of race as caste, Dumont cannily based his hypothesis on a passage from Myrdal’s American Dilemma that describes how the philosophy of the Enlightenment sought to minimize innate di√erences, holding that the ‘‘natural rights of man’’ rested on a biological egalitarianism. Thus, ‘‘the dogma of racial inequality may, in a sense, be regarded as a strange fruit of the Enlightenment. . . . The race dogma is nearly the only way out for a people so moralistically egalitarian, if it is not prepared to live up to its faith. A nation less fervently committed to democracy could probably live happily in a caste system. . . . [R]ace prejudice is, in a sense, a function (a perversion) of egalitarianism.’’Ω∂ Dumont wondered whether the ‘‘mere recall of the egalitarian ideal’’ would be e√ective in the fight against racism. Quite polemically he asserted, ‘‘It would be better to prevent the passage from the moral principle of equality to the notion that all men are identical. One feels sure that equality can, in our day, be combined with the recognition of di√erences, so long as such di√erences are morally neutral. People must be provided with the means of conceptualizing di√erences.’’Ω∑ Unfortunately, it seems that for Dumont, hierarchy was the means of conceptualizing di√erence. It is hard to follow Dumont at this juncture: people do conceptualize di√erence (all the time); why hierarchy should be a better way of conceptualizing di√erence is unclear. At another point in his argument, Dumont himself seems to think (following Lévi-Strauss’s argument in ‘‘Race and History’’) that ‘‘the di√usion of pluralistic notions of culture and society, a√ording a counterweight and setting bounds to individualism, is the obvious thing.’’Ω∏ 128

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In ‘‘A Comparative Approach to Modern Ideology and to the Place within it of Economic Thought,’’ written after Homo Hierarchicus, Dumont responded again to his critics: ‘‘I never said, as some seemed to believe, that hierarchy is better than equality, or in the present instance that slavery is preferable to racism. I say only that facts of this kind show that ideology has the power to transform social reality only between certain limits and that when we ignore those limits we produce the contrary of what was desired.’’Ωπ Yet he insists, as he did in ‘‘Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification’ ’’ and Homo Hierarchicus that ‘‘the abolition of slavery also gave rise after a short period of time to racism’’; Dumont calls this, ‘‘a spectacular example of the involuntary consequences of equalitarianism.Ω∫ Here the conflict between a historical as opposed to a structuralist reading of the caste system is made manifest. Dumont also addresses the case of Nazism in ‘‘A Comparative Approach to Modern Ideology,’’ which he defines, not as an instance of racist ideology, but of totalitarianism. Although he is concerned to show how totalitarian society is not a form of holism (as in the Indian case), his account of the emergence of violence is parallel to that for the American South. In this essay he is concerned with distinguishing false notions of hierarchy from the ‘‘pure’’ form in India. In a similar vein, fascism provides the test case by which he can distinguish false notions of holism from the pure form in India. He says, ‘‘As the totalitarian regime constrains its subjects most radically, it appears to oppose individualism in the current meaning of the term, so the analyst is faced with a contradiction.’’ΩΩ To solve the contradiction, he says, involves a recognition that totalitarianism lies within modern ideology, not outside of it. Thus, totalitarianism results from the attempt, in a society where individualism is deeply rooted and predominant, to subordinate it to the primacy of the society as a whole.’’∞≠≠ As it combines conflicting values unknowingly, its ‘‘ferocious stress on the social whole’’ results in violence. Dumont again leaves us on unsatisfactory ground. Since democratic society and fascist society face similar (though apposite) contradictions—egalitarianism confronted with di√erence, on the one hand; extreme individualism confronted by the subordination to a whole, on the other—it is not clear why the one results in racism and the other in fascism. In fact, racism frequently does rely on and produce sociopolitical violence, and part of what made a ‘‘social whole’’ available for the exercise of fascist violence was the articulation of racial di√erence. In fact, the heart of the di√erence lies

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not with the opposition between the caste system and racism or fascism (which, though divergent phenomena, can then be made interchangeable and seen as similar), but with the opposition of the caste system and slavery to Nazism. As Uday Mehta has noted, ‘‘The Hindu caste system and slavery were at a minimum predicated on an exploitative conception of social and economic order, and in which, therefore, the systematic extermination of those exploited would have been antithetical to that order. In contrast, Nazism was directed precisely to such an extermination.’’∞≠∞ In the end, what Dumont’s arguments on racism and fascism reveal are the limits of the structural analysis of the whole coupled with a Weberian ideal type. If power cannot be separated from status, Dumont’s analyses of racism and fascism perhaps show more quickly the limits of his thinking than do two decades of critique by South Asia area specialists. Still, we might profitably ask why the comparative nature of Dumont’s reflections on racism and democratic society have been ignored for so long. It is almost as if the study of modern India could not exist without the critique of Dumont’s work, while an increasingly empiricist sociology could well a√ord to ignore it. And yet, Dumont, as one of the co-founders of the journal Contributions to Indian Society, left an indelible imprint on the course Indian sociology was to take over the next several decades. While the varied critiques of Dumont’s work took exceptions to his findings, they did not, by and large, dislodge Dumont’s Indological view of Hinduism being seen as the bedrock of Indian society. Contributions to Indian Sociology, coedited by Dumont for many years, would define the major trends in the field, establishing a Sanskritic-based, civilizational perspective for comprehending Indian society that would only solidify with the work of M. N. Srinivas and others. It is to this vexed legacy that the following essay turns.

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chapter 5

¡ India in South Africa Counter-genealogies for a Subaltern Sociology?

In July 2001, I and some colleagues at the University of Texas–Austin, received an invitation from a member of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (hss) in Houston to meet with K. S. Sudarshan, the Indian leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (rss), parent organization of the hss. Notably, the invitation was only sent to Sanskritists, scholars of Hindi, and those specializing in the study of Hinduism on the faculty.∞ My Muslim colleagues and those who work on Islam in India were not included. Since I am neither a Sanskritist, a Hindi teacher, nor a scholar of Hinduism, I surmised that I was included in the list primarily because of my South Indian Brahmin name, and possibly because I am a social anthropologist. While the upper-caste background of most Indian sociologists has been remarked, South Indian Brahmins, and those that have worked with them, have played a key role in the emergence of a national sociology which inherited an Indological and Orientalist paradigm that implicitly reflects a Hindu nationalist or ‘‘Hindutva’’ position on the essential ‘‘Hinduness’’ of Indian society.≤ Seen through the lens of a Dalit sociologist, for example, M. N. Srinivas’s time-worn theory of ‘‘Sanskritization’’ is but another naturalization of a system of caste oppression that reproduces upper-caste values for Dalits and other marginalized peoples to emulate. Noting this convergence is neither to accuse Srinivas and his students of being Hindu nationalists, nor is it to invite an evaluation of Srinivas’s intentions such that if we could show that Srinivas intended only to describe (and not to reproduce) a system of upper-castes values to which lower castes subscribed, the convergence would be seen to be accidental, rather than symptomatic of the ways in which casteism replicates itself at the level of both Indian society and its sociology. In this essay I explore how it was that certain forms of Indian sociology—one apparently internationalist in scope, the other na-

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tionalist in orientation—produced a field of discourse that not only rendered intelligible the Indian state’s position of denying discrimination based on descent and occupation as a form of racism at the World Conference Against Racism (wcar) in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, but fully justified it. Recent discussion about India’s success in keeping casteism outside the purview of the wcar thus occasions a review of the sociology that has validated the Indian state’s position. This essay attends to the historic relationship between minoritized peoples of India and the United States by considering some of the historical and political contexts for Indian sociologists’ assertion that caste oppression is not a form of racism, a conclusion that has come to represent a retrograde position with regard to Dalit politics. It also explicates how an earlier Boasian intervention (described in chapters 2 and 3) enabled an internationalization of the race concept in the 1940s, which paradoxically has worked to renationalize Indian sociology under liberalization. The wide acceptance of the Boasian position on race, which states that race is a biological entity, while culture or caste is socially constructed, has buttressed the claims of some Indian sociologists, but has unfortunately also pushed some sectors of the Dalit movement into endorsing the position that caste has a genetic foundation. This essay thus explores three propositions that have been interwoven into the debate—first, that race is biological, but caste is not; second, that caste has a genetic basis; and third, that caste is not unique to the South Asian subcontinent—in order to understand why a major school of comparative sociology, the caste school of race relations, dropped completely out of the debate on India’s position on casteism at the wcar. I conclude by suggesting how a socially constructed notion of race as caste helps to make the case for casteism to be understood as a form of racism. In analyzing and deconstructing the history of Indian national sociology, I hope to engage in a politics of alliance with emerging Dalit sociology. Dalit sociology does not need to be seen patronizingly, ‘‘in terms of its own emic categories and not through the eyes of academe.’’≥ Rather, Dalit sociology, by more accurately describing social reality, poses a major challenge to nationalist sociologies which are unable to adequately describe the reality of something like caste oppression. This inability to apprehend the proper object of analysis —not caste or the caste system per se, but the experience of casteism or caste oppression—results in the failure of Indian nationalist so-

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ciology to apprehend the transnational and historic alliances between di√erent peoples with similar experiences of oppression.

a critique of international social science: toward a national sociology for india

The advancement of science in India cannot be separated from the advancement of Independence. The end of our intellectual and practical apprenticeship in science is long overdue by any sensible reck-

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In 1957, the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology was founded by Louis Dumont and David F. Pocock.∂ They introduced the question of what constituted a ‘‘Sociology of India,’’ arguing for an Indological and civilizational notion of India’s ‘‘unity’’ as a basic postulate: ‘‘We learn in the first place never to forget that India is one. The very influence of the higher, Sanskritic civilizations demonstrates without question the unity of India. One might even think that it does not only demonstrate, but actually constitutes it. . . . [I]t is essential that this unity be postulated from the outset. . . . [I]f, for the sake of simplicity, we refuse this initial postulate, we shall be led . . . into di≈culty, and there will be no sociology of India except in a vague geographic sense.∑ By the 1960s, however, a new generation of Indian sociologists had transformed the debate into one of a sociology for India: what was the form of sociology required for a developing nation? The signal essay of this reformulation (which originally appeared in a special 1968 issue of Seminar on ‘‘Academic Colonialism’’ and was reprinted in Contributions to Indian Sociology) was J. P. S. Uberoi’s ‘‘Science or Swaraj.’’ Responding to the Ralph Beals report ‘‘International Research Problems’’ (1967), Uberoi advanced a skepticism of the ‘‘jargon of international anthropology,’’ ‘‘complete with international exchanges,’’ ‘‘cooperation and two-way cross-cultural research,’’ charging that ‘‘there is no ‘world community of science’ unless that phrase be another name for the national and international science of rich nations. . . . The existing system of foreign aid in science, to which the internationalist notion of collaboration lends credence, in truth upholds the system of foreign dominance in all matters of scientific and professional life and organization. It is nothing but the satellite system with an added subsidy.’’∏ In spare, but powerful prose, Uberoi asserted,

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oning, but we are constantly cajoled or browbeaten to prolong it for one reason or other. We can be frustrated by force where we cannot be contained by stratagem and system. Such things are done to poor nations today, in science as in politics, in the new fashion of a false cosmopolitanism and false humanitarianism, not in the old terms of colonial tutelage, or racism. The latter ideology’s emphases were discontinuous and hateful ones, while nowadays all talk is of brotherhood, harmony and sweet reasonableness, but the e√ects are not totally dissimilar.π

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Uberoi’s strong words originated the proceedings of an international conference, ‘‘Urgent Problems in Anthropology,’’ held in Washington in 1966, which reintroduced turn-of-the-century salvage ethnography as a means of recording populations disappearing under the advance of modernization. The framing document of that conference was actually the address given by Claude Lévi-Strauss in September 1965 at the Smithsonian Institution on the theme of disappearing societies, though Lévi-Strauss’s own declamations on the discipline that had been produced as ‘‘daughter to this [colonial] era of violence’’ were largely ignored.∫ In thus recuperating a silenced version of Lévi-Strauss’s own text, Uberoi concluded (in true LéviStraussian fashion), rich: poor :: international: national :: white: black. The final, ringing tones of Uberoi’s manifesto both admonished and appealed: ‘‘Every swarajist should recognize [that] . . . [u]ntil we can concentrate on our decolonization, learn to nationalize our problems and take our poverty seriously, we shall continue to be both colonial and unoriginal. A national school, avowed and conscious, can perhaps add relevance, meaning and potency to our science; continued assent to the international system cannot.’’Ω In some ways, Uberoi’s declamations could be taken as a credo for a postcolonial sociology in alliance with a secular nationalist state, and the ‘‘Sociology for India’’ debate continued on the pages of Contributions to Indian Society for another twenty years. An Indian sociology committed to anticolonialism had to address itself to national problems, yet ironically caste inequality or discrimination was not one of them. In part this arose from the development of an upper-caste, middle-class consensus that caste was a product of colonial divide-and-rule strategy, and that it should (in accordance with the constitutional mandate abolishing it) disappear from modern social life. Coupled with a postcolonial critique of the emergence of caste as a form of colonial sociology, the ‘‘ ‘colonial origins of caste’ 134

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thesis had the e√ect of strengthening common sense arguments that contemporary caste divisions were basically an imperial legacy.’’∞≠ Secular-nationalist sociology, as Satish Deshpande has so ably put it, attempted to solve the problem of caste by denying its existence. As a corollary, the Indian state’s practice has been both to confirm that caste discrimination is illegal under the constitution (its primary defense at wcar) and to declassify caste as an operative census category. Thus, ‘‘one of the paradoxical lessons of modern governance— that the state must measure what it wishes to eradicate—would not be learnt.’’∞∞ When the Mandal Commission’s report on the caste reservation system was released, prominent sociologists critiqued its methodology, or focused on the deleterious consequences of implementing the report’s recommendations to increase caste reservations, but as Deshpande has observed, ‘‘Forgotten were the questions that ought to have come first . . . for a discipline claiming specialized knowledge of caste as a social institution: Is caste discrimination still practiced in contemporary India? Does it continue to breed inequality? What is the nature and extent of such inequality? ’’∞≤ The Indian state’s ‘‘caste-blind’’ position at the World Congress on Racism was thus entirely unsurprising, not the least because it also reflected a common view in the sociology of the day.∞≥ As the sociologist Dipankar Gupta warned, the wcar debate on caste and race was but another form of ‘‘Mandalism’’ which would not ‘‘uproot caste identities in public life, but perpetuate’’ them, becoming a ‘‘selfdefeating project for any self-respecting scheduled-caste activist.’’ Thus, ‘‘once we use the language of race to the caste situation, the emphasis shifts from removing the scourge of caste from Indian society to making one’s caste identity a fixed political resource. In which case, quite understandably, castes would tend to be viewed as permanent fixtures and caste identities as political assets. The task would then be not so much to eradicate castes but to give proportional representation to di√erent castes in educational institutions, in jobs, housing, and so on.’’∞∂ In a situation not unlike that of American social scientists insisting race does not exist at a time of continuing racial immiseration, it is perhaps ironic that the disappearance of caste by India’s o≈cial sociologists marks one aspect of the process of liberalization, in which increasing economic deprivation among the rural poor is accompanied by the relative invisibility of deepening forms of caste conflict in the Indian countryside.∞∑

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sanksritization and the origins of a sociology of ‘‘hinduness’’

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At the moment Uberoi was advancing a secular-nationalist credo through his critique of internationalist anthropology, his (South Indian, Brahmin) colleagues were instrumental in helping to consolidate the civilizational focus of South Asian studies in the United States, through international collaborative work with Robert Redfield and Milton Singer at the University of Chicago, in what came to be known as the ‘‘great tradition’’ paradigm. Though Singer’s landmark book, When a Great Tradition Modernizes, would not appear until 1972, his first research in Madras during 1954–55 was a Fordfunded cultural-studies project directed by Redfield to conceptualize methodologies for the scientific study of civilizations. It was there that Singer met the well-known Sanskritist V. Raghavan, who urged Singer to make Madras the base of his future research in 1960–61 and 1964. India soon became the nexus of the Ford Foundation project, as Singer and Raghavan formed a close association, with Singer regarding Raghavan as a kind of ideal cosmopolitan interpreter of India’s great Sanskrit-based tradition.∞∏ For generations of American-trained students of South Asia (and I include myself), the great tradition of Hinduism as it existed in the Sanskrit Vedas and Dharmasastras seemed innocuous enough; it was but an orienting frame though which the anthropologist could best understand the ‘‘little traditions’’ where ‘‘Hinduism’’ was reframed and made into something new. Echoing Pocock’s and Dumont’s view that an Indological understanding of Sanskritic civilization provided the thematic unity required for a sociology of India, faculty at the University of Chicago produced a wealth of scholarship, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, on the great-tradition ‘‘modernization’’ thesis. McKim Marriot edited Village India: Studies in the Little Community in 1955. Milton Singer came out with Traditional India: Structure and Change in 1959 and The Expansion of Society and Its Cultural Implications in 1960. M. N. Srinivas’s work on villages included Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952), ‘‘The Social Structure of a Mysore Village’’ (1955), ‘‘The Social System of a Mysore Village’’ (1955), and The Remembered Village (1976). His work on social change and Sanskritization emerged in his work on the Coorgs, was refined in a University of Chicago seminar paper, ‘‘The Dominant Caste in Rampura,’’ in 1957, and was later elaborated as the primary 136

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form of social mobility for lower castes in a series of essays: ‘‘A Note on Sanskritization and Westernization’’ (1962), Social Change in Modern India (1966), and ‘‘The Cohesive Role of Sanskritization’’ (1967). Singer heralded Srinivas’s 1952 ethnography, Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India, as a ‘‘decisive event’’ and ‘‘the first anthropological monograph to show how a great tradition (of Sanskritic Hinduism) could be analyzed within a social anthropological framework.’’∞π The great tradition of Hindusim, as it was articulated by McKim Marriot in his own contribution to Village India, ‘‘Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization,’’ held it to be the ‘‘literate religious tradition, embodied in or derived from Sanskrit works which have a universal spread in all parts of India.’’∞∫ Throughout the essay, Marriot uses the terms ‘‘Great Tradition of Hinduism’’ and ‘‘Sanskritic Great Tradition’’ interchangeably. He further describes Sanskritization as a historical process through which the great tradition universalizes itself. Thus, describing the local festivals in Kishan Garhi, the village in Uttar Pradesh where he had undertaken fieldwork, he held, ‘‘One might well expect to find the great tradition predominant in a village which, like Kishan Garhi, lies in the heartland of Aryan settlement. One might with reason imagine even that Kishan Garhi once knew a purely Aryan religion, and that the process of Sanskritization first began to operate there between Ayran and non-Aryan religious traditions. In any event, the religion of Kishan Garhi must have been subject to Sanskritization over a period of about three thousand years.’’∞Ω Yet Marriot also qualified that it was the very revision of the great tradition by parochial or little traditions that led to its universalization. ‘‘By definition, an indigenous civilization is one whose great tradition originates by a ‘universalization,’ or carrying forward of materials which are already present in the little traditions it encompasses. Such an indigenous great tradition has authority insofar as it constitutes a more articulate and refined restatement or systematization of what is already there. Without subsequent secondary transformation of its contents and without heterogenetic criticism of the little tradition, the indigenous great tradition lacks authority to supplant the hoary prototypes that are the sources of its own sacredness.’’≤≠ By contrast, ‘‘parochialization,’’ the ‘‘downward devolution of great-traditional elements and their integration with littletraditional elements,’’ was seen to be a ‘‘process of localization. Of limitation upon the scope of intelligibility, of deprivation of literary

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form, of reduction to less systematic and less reflective dimensions.’’≤∞ Though both Marriot’s and Redfield’s schemes were seen, in retrospect, to reflect a residual social-evolutionist trend in American social anthropology, their impact upon social anthropology in India was substantially di√erent, helping to consolidate the form of o≈cial nationalism.≤≤ M. N. Srinivas first propounded his notion of Sanskritization as a form of group social mobility in his study of the Coorgs. Sanskritization, he argued, was the primary mode of social mobility for lowercaste communities, though he later clarified that Sanskritization was not the same as Brahminization, but was instead dependent on the dominant caste in any particular region.≤≥ In still another essay Srinivas elaborated that the use of Sanskritization was preferable to the term Brahminization because ‘‘Brahminization is subsumed under the wider processes of Sanskritization though at some points Brahminization and Sanskritization are at variance with each other,’’ and because ‘‘the agents of Sanskritization were (and are) not always Brahmins.’’≤∂ By 1967, however, Srinivas, like Marriot, held that ‘‘Sanskritization has been an important cultural process ever since the Vedic Aryans established themselves in India.’’≤∑ Quoting a 1950 essay by S. K. Chatterjee’s defining Sanskritization, Srinivas notes, ‘‘The progressive Sanskritization of the various pre-Aryan or nonAryan peoples in their culture, their outlook and their ways of life, forms the keynote of India through the ages, and in the course of this ‘Sanskritization’ the a√ected peoples also brought their own spiritual and material milieus to bear upon the Sanskrit and Sanskritic culture which they were adopting and thus helped to modify and enrich it in their own societies.’’≤∏ Thus, Sanskritization, according to Srinivas, was ‘‘the process by which a ‘low’ caste or tribe or other group takes on the customs, ritual, beliefs, ideology and style of life of a high and, in particular, a twice-born (dwija) caste. It normally presupposes either an improvement in the economic or political position of the group concerned or a higher group consciousness resulting from its contact with a source of the ‘Great Tradition’ of Hinduism such as a pilgrim centre or a monastery or proselytizing sect.’’≤π Sanskritization was not confined to any single part of the country, but was present throughout the subcontinent, a√ecting a wide variety of groups both in and outside of the ‘‘Hindu fold.’’ As a ‘‘profound and many-sided cultural process, its impress was seen upon language, literature, ideology, music, dance, drama, style of life

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and ritual.’’≤∫ Srinivas twice in this essay defines Sanskritization as an ‘‘ideological system’’ yet he never seems to understand it as an oppressive ideology since the process of adopting sanskritic practices appeared to be voluntary (though not also without contestation and conflict). He notes only that ‘‘Sanskritic ideology, especially in its reinterpreted form, emerged as the most prestigious of indigenous ideologies.’’≤Ω In retrospect, however, it is clear that statements like ‘‘The culture of the higher castes enjoys great prestige, and ambitious lower castes would like to take it over’’ could not be but presumptuous, even o√ensive, from the standpoint of Ambedkarite and recent Dalit-Bahujan thought.≥≠ As Kancha Ilaiah puts it, ‘‘Postcolonial brahminical sociology constructed theories that accepted antiproductive brahminical castes as ‘pure castes’ and the productive Dalitbahujan castes as ‘polluted castes.’ In order to brahminize the Dalitbahujan elite, this school of sociologists constructed a theory of ‘Sanskritization’ that virtually appealed to the Brahmin-Baniya civil society to open its doors to brahminize (co-opt) the Dalitbahujan elite so that the historical danger of destabilizing the brahminical castes could be averted.’’≥∞ Dalit and Bahujan intellectuals have thus contested the idea that lower castes want only to imitate upper-caste cultural or religious practices, asserting that the culture of the Brahminized upper castes has suppressed Dalit culture, or describing Hinduism itself as a form of ‘‘mental slavery.’’≥≤ The sociologist S. Selvam has also observed that ‘‘by constructing all-India Hinduism which is based on a body of Sanskrit scriptures, and identifying it mainly with the ritual practices prescribed by Brahminic Hinduism, Srinivas o√ers the Brahmanic tradition as the ideal standard bearer for personal and social life . . . an ideological construct that needs to be decoded and decanonized.’’≥≥ In retrospect, it is also evident that the Indological frame for Indian village studies also served to render as ‘‘Hindu’’ a range of local practices and outlooks that could have easily been understood as constituting something like a composite culture.≥∂ Thus, the formulation of an orienting Sanskritic-based Hinduism as the dominant frame for Indian sociology has had powerful consequences for how we think of India, recalling contemporary political articulations of Hindu nationalism. Mary Hancock’s important essay, ‘‘Unmaking the ‘Great Tradition,’ ’’ argues that the interface of Indian academics with the Ford Foundation’s cultural-studies project actually served the dual func-

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tion of consolidating a civilizational focus for area studies in the United States, and of expressing o≈cial (Hindu) nationalism in India.≥∑ The Indologist V. Raghavan, for example, held that Sanskrit should be considered India’s national language and that it served a more ‘‘integrative’’ function than Hindi; Hancock persuasively argues that Raghavan explicitly saw Sanskrit as a hegemonic device to develop national political culture. Srinivas also held that Sankritization fulfilled an integrative function for Hinduism: ‘‘Hinduism is best described as a loose confederation of innumerable cults, the connecting threads of which are found in Sanskritization, and in the last resort, Brahmins.’’≥∏ Hancock suggests that more was at stake than a relatively benign Brahminical Hinduism; Raghavan, who played a key role in shaping Singer’s work and research questions, also wrote for the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (rss) newspaper, and participated in rss projects in South India. It is striking that South India has been hegemonic in the formulation of the civilizational paradigm; it is perhaps not accidental that four of its key architects— M. S. Raghavan, Milton Singer, Louis Dumont, and M. N. Srinivas —all worked in this region of India. Even as the political and economic power of Brahmins in South India declined with the emergence of a powerful non-Brahmin Dravidian movement, ‘‘Brahminism’’ was to find a second life in Indian nationalist and EuroAmerican sociologies through the Sanskritization and great-tradition paradigms.

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indian sociology and its others

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Indian sociology and Euro-American anthropology exhibited, in different ways, aspects of a Brahminical paradigm, which also had profound e√ects on the conceptualization of community, caste, and gender in South Asia. In 1972, Imtiaz Ahmad’s plea for a sociology of India addressed the ‘‘poverty of Indian sociology’’: ‘‘Indian society comprises not only Hindus, who constitute the dominant majority, but also Muslims, Christians, Parsees, Jews and the adherents of the three major o√-shoots of Hinduism, namely Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Ideally a sociology of India should encompass all these groups and their traditions. It is however, one of the characteristics of the discipline today that it has tended to emphasize the study of

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Hindus and their religious tradition; the study of non-Hindus and their traditions has been sadly neglected by both Indians and foreigners.’’≥π Ahmad reasoned that while one could say that the greater focus on Hindu communities was a result of their greater numerical dominance, ‘‘a better criterion would be whether the literature tells us much about the structure of non-Hindu groups, and the sociocultural processes that have been operating amongst them, as it does about Hindus.’’≥∫ Recalling Dumont’s and Pocock’s essay, ‘‘A Sociology for India,’’ wherein the Sanskritic underpinning of Indian civilization was seen to comprise its ‘‘unity,’’ Ahmad went on to charge that this ‘‘intellectual preference or bias partly explains the historical development of Indian sociology as an academic discipline. The pronounced tendency among sociologists to equate Hindu society with India, though sometimes explicit, often remains an unstated assumption.’’ Ahmad continued, If we claim that the aim of Indian sociology is to reveal, not only the social characteristics of the di√erent ethnic and religious groups in Indian society and the prevailing processes, but also the nature of intergroup relations, historical and contemporary, it would appear that the discipline has failed in fulfilling one of its cardinal aims. For example, for many years now, the concept of Sankritization has enjoyed wide currency in Indian sociological discussions and may well be regarded as a key concept for the study of social change in Hindu society. Several scholars have hinted that similar processes have historically operated amongst other religious groups and communities as well, but Indian sociology provides no understanding of these processes or of the nature and consequences of interaction between them and Sanskritization.≥Ω

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Ahmad was particularly troubled by Srinivas’s ‘‘The Cohesive Role of Sanskritization,’’ wherein he drew a connection between Sanskritization and Hindu and Muslim communalism. Ahmad notes, ‘‘Srinivas does not tell us why increased Sanskritization should have initiated a vicious spiralling of communal hatred; nor does he examine the precise nature of the interaction between Sanskritization and the processes operating among Muslims and other religious communities; nor indeed does he ask whether the growing estrangement between Hindus and Muslims in the nineteenth century was a mere adventitious growth, or a more direct consequence of the structure of Indian society and the social and cultural processes taking place in

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it.’’∂≠ Ahmad concluded with a wry statement about the development of a communal sociology, arguing that in the absence of study of non-Hindu communities, ‘‘we may have Hindu, Muslim, or Christian sociologies, but hardly a sociology of India.’’∂∞ In the introduction to his edited collection, Caste and Social Stratification Among the Muslims (1973), Ahmad further elaborated that caste-like structures of stratification existed among South Asian Muslims, and that the degree of correspondence between caste and occupational group among Muslims did not represent a departure from the Hindu pattern.∂≤ Yet, ‘‘the Hindu ideological justification of the caste system does not exist in the case of Muslims,’’ as ‘‘the ritual dimension of caste is weak among the Muslims’’ and ‘‘ranking of castes is based quite frequently on a number of non-ritual criteria.’’∂≥ In answer to the question of whether the presence of caste among the Muslims arises from the acculturative influence of Hinduism or is due to ‘‘elements within Islam that support such distinctions,’’ Ahmad suggests the power of the latter over the former.∂∂ In a region where Hinduism is assumed to exercise a strong acculturative influence on other social groups, ‘‘Islamization’’ could be variously seen as ‘‘groups wishing to distinguish themselves from non-Muslims by purifying themselves of un-Islamic customs and practices,’’ or as the ‘‘processes of adoption and spread of those cultural or social elements which a particular Muslim group may come to recognize as the basis of its self-definition as a Muslim group of high and noble elements.’’∂∑ Here we can see the dominant use of the concept of Islamization to refer specifically to status mobility among Muslim groups, perhaps because it emerged from the inadequacies of the Sanskritization model applied to Muslims.∂∏ Islamization was less commonly seen as a counter (or dual) civilizational paradigm to speak of the widespread di√usion of Islamic beliefs and practices among Hindus or other groups on the subcontinent. While Ahmad’s definitions of Islamization refer specifically to Muslim groups, Zarina Bhatty describes the same process of social mobility among Muslims as ‘‘Sanskritization.’’∂π Another sociologist, Yoginder Sikand, refers to Islamization as the process Hindu groups experience when they convert to Islam. Thus, ‘‘entire local caste groups’’ undergo ‘‘a gradual process of Islamization, in the course of which elements of the Islamic faith were gradually incorporated into local cosmologies and ritual practice while gradually displacing or replacing local or ‘Hindu’ elements.’’∂∫ Yet while Sikand sees conversion as a gradual social process, it leaves behind 142

a kind of ‘‘residue’’ which explains the persistence of caste among India’s Muslims. Because mass conversion to Islam was also rarely, if ever, a sudden event, but rather took the form of a gradual process of cultural change often extending over generations, many of the converts retained several of their local, pre-Islamic beliefs and practices. It was thus not the influence of Hinduism among a previously ‘‘pure,’’ ‘‘uncontaminated,’’ Muslim community as such, but rather, the continued impact of Hindu beliefs and customs upon the converts who still remained in a largely Hindu cultural universe and retained many of its associated beliefs and practices that explains the continued hold of caste-related practices among large sections of the Indian Muslim community.∂Ω

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The varied understandings of Islamization have done much to address social processes among Muslim and non-Muslim groups in India. Yet Islamization, like Sanskritization, is only partially able to apprehend the mixed consciousness of social groups whose members find no contradiction in being Hindu and visiting a Sufi shrine, in being Christian or Muslim and visiting a shakti temple, and so on.∑≠ The great-tradition and Sanskritization paradigm for civilizational studies has thus clearly posed, in complicated ways, di≈culties for the study of Muslim, as well as Dalit, groups in India. Su≈ce it to say that between 1972 and 1994, by T. N. Madan’s own account, only twenty-seven papers on South Asian Muslims were published by Contributions to Indian Sociology. A paucity of scholarship on Dalit communities is also reflected in the pages of Contributions to Indian Sociology.∑∞ The political scientist Kancha Ilaiah and the sociologists S. Selvam and Gopal Guru have also noted the deleterious e√ect of the Hindu civilizational and Sanskritization paradigms as frameworks for understanding caste oppression and Dalit experience; they have advanced sophisticated conceptualizations of ‘‘Dalitization’’ as a form of self-respect and as a counterforce to Sanskritization.∑≤ In Ilaiah’s utopian version, Dalitization transcends all religions (Hindu, Muslim, Christian), and its transformative powers—the ‘‘universalizing of principles of labor as life and democracy and equality as the aims of life,’’ the ‘‘process of annihilation of caste, living labor as life, relegating property to community ownership, wife and husband living as equal producers, equal consumers and equal child-rearers’’— are already present in Dalit localities.∑≥ The sociologist Shyam Lal

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has taken the understanding of asprashyeekaran (embracing untouchability) one step further and has ingeniously defined ‘‘Dalitization’’ as the social process of degradation and downward social mobility of social groups that is central to making them ‘‘Dalit.’’∑∂ Late in his career, Srinivas admitted to a ‘‘serious and unpardonable oversight’’ in his formulation of the concept and theory of Sanskritization. For ‘‘the desire to control female sexuality, promote female reproductive powers, and culturally encourage the reproduction of sons while discouraging the production of daughters; are all built into Sanskritization.’’∑∑ While Bhatty cited the withdrawal of Muslim women into pardah as a form of Sanskritization, Gerald Berreman saw ‘‘Sanskritization as Female Oppression in India.’’∑∏ Sharmila Rege has more particularly argued that ‘‘the present practices of dowry need to be viewed in the context of processes of Brahminization and their impact upon marriage practices. That Brahminic ideals led to a preference for dowry marriage is well documented. In fact, it was the colonial establishment of the legality of the Brahma form of marriage that institutionalized and expanded the dowry system.’’∑π She continues, In the Brahminic social order, the caste-based and sexual divisions of labor are intermeshed such that elevation in caste status is preceded by the withdrawal of women of that caste from productive processes outside the private sphere. Such a linkage operates on presumptions about the accessibility of the sexuality of lower caste women because of their participation in social labor. Brahminism in turn locates this as a failure of lower caste men to control the sexuality of their women and underlines it as justification of their impurity. Thus gender ideology legitimizes not only structures of patriarchy but also the very organization of caste.∑∫

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That the control of women (often through sexual exploitation) was also seen to be at the center of the Brahminical social order has not escaped Dalit-Bahujan feminists. Rekha Thakur, for example has written,

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Manu-driven patriarchy in India operates at two levels; patriarchy in the family and brahminical patriarchy which exerts control from the highest positions in the caste hierarchy from outside the family. Brahminical patriarchy sustains the varna hierarchy and inequality through two broad methods. Firstly, it controls the sexuality of women belonging to non-Brahmin caste groups through the rape of

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women belonging to shudra and ati-shudra castes; the sexual exploitation of women through the heinous devadasi custom; sexual exploitation through prostitution in which mainly oppressed caste women are engaged; and perpetration of the caste system through restrictions on inter-caste marriages.∑Ω

national sanskriti: a sociology of hindutva? In sum, we can see two distinct strains of nationalist sociology that failed to address the problem of caste oppression: one focused on a Hindu Sanskritic civilizational paradigm that was consolidated with the support of U.S. area studies funding;∏≠ and the second, a leftnationalist, secular sociology, comprised of Marxist sociologists and a number of classically trained Indian sociologists like Andre Beteille, who argued against the Indological paradigm and for the importance of class as a category of sociological analysis. If the great-tradition paradigm installed Sanskritic Hinduism as the standard against which ‘‘little traditions’’ were seen to reference or deviate, Marxist sociology, by largely ignoring caste, failed to displace or even challenge the dominant operating paradigm of caste within Indian sociology. These two forms of sociology also reflect the poles of debate today between a ubiquitous Hinduizing nationalism and a (left-liberal) secular democratic nationalism.∏∞ Thus, even as a ‘‘commonsense on caste shapes sociologists and is also shaped by them,’’ so, too, was the dominant epistemological structure of Indian sociology such that the pervasive sense of Hinduness which infused it also provided a sociological description of Hindutva.∏≤ Consider Srinivas’s concluding words to ‘‘The Cohesive Role of Sanskritization’’:

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One of the most important tasks which confronts independent India is to draw all sections of India’s heterogeneous population into the mainstream of national life while at the same time retaining what is valuable in Sanskrit thought and culture. To do this it is necessary for Hindus to accept the entire Indian tradition to which all sections of the population have contributed, and for the latter to regard the Sanskrit heritage as their own. This can only be the result of a slow process of cultural osmosis, and in this context it is significant that independent India has declared itself a secular state, while Pakistan is

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an ‘‘Islamic Republic.’’ The seeds of tolerance as well as mutual appreciation of values among India’s religious groups are made easier by India opting for secularism.∏≥

Why, we might ask, is it so important for national culture to valorize Sanskrit (a language spoken by less than ten thousand people of a billion) or Sanskritic texts like the Rg Veda (which also legitimize the caste system)? Why should Sanskrit form the basis of a national form of cosmopolitanism?∏∂ While Srinivas clearly values tolerance and pluralism, and his secular-nationalist orientation is clear, he seems to identify the ‘‘entire Indian tradition’’ with Sanskrit thought and culture. His view that the osmosis of Sanskritic heritage through ‘‘all sections of the population’’ is the basis of Indian secularism comes strikingly close to Hindu nationalist formulations.∏∑ The analytic framework remains the same, only the conclusions di√er about outcomes. We have only to interpolate the central assumptions of the Indological-civilizational paradigm of Sanskritization into one form of nationalist anticolonialism to yield V. D. Savarkar’s Hindutva formulation that Indians are Hindus.

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A Hindu then is he who . . . inherits the blood of the great race . . . which assimilating all that was incorporated, and enobling all that was assimilated has grown into and come to be known as the Hindu people; and who, as a consequence of the foregoing attributes, has inherited and claims as his own the Hindu Sanskriti, the Hindu civilization, as represented by a common literature, common art, a common law and a common jurisprudence, common fairs and festivals, rites and rituals, ceremonies and sacraments. Not that every Hindu has all these details of the Hindu Sanskriti down to each syllable common with other Hindus; but that he has more of it in common with his Hindu brothers than with, say, an Arab or an Englishman. Not that a non-Hindu does not hold any of these details in common with a Hindu but that he di√ers more from a Hindu than he agrees with him.∏∏

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Savarkar, of course, will proceed in this passage to justify ‘‘why Christian and Mohamedan communities who were but recently Hindus and in a majority of cases had been, at least in their first generation, most unwilling denizens of their new fold, claim though they might have a common fatherland, and an almost pure Hindu blood and parentage with us, cannot be recognized as Hindus’’ since they ‘‘had ceased to own civilization (Sanskriti) as a whole.’’∏π If Srinivas feels it 146

is necessary for non-Hindus to claim ‘‘Sanskrit heritage’’ as their own, Savarkar assumes they cannot because ‘‘they belong, or feel they belong, to a cultural unit altogether di√erent from the Hindu one. Their heroes and their hero-worship, their fairs and their festivals, their ideals and their outlook on life, have now ceased to be common with ours.’’∏∫ There is, of course, a metalepsis between Srinivas’s advocacy of Sanskrit heritage and Savarkar’s understanding of ‘‘Sanskriti’’ as national culture or civilization. While ‘‘Hindu’’ tends to work as a silent marker of Srinivas’s notion of Sanskritization, ‘‘Sanskriti,’’ or civilization, is what makes a Hindu ‘‘Indian’’ in Savarkar’s scheme. Neither Srinivas nor Savarkar would have disagreed that it was Sanskritic civilization that defined modern India (nor for that matter would have Dumont or Marriot). I must reiterate, here, that the point of contrasting Srinivas’s thinking on the Sanskritic tradition and Sanskritization with Savarkar’s notion of national Sanskriti is not to reach the crude conclusion that Srinivas was a Hindu nationalist. It is, however, to take seriously Ilaiah’s criticism that the impact of Brahminism on secular nationalism (and national social science) has remained largely unexamined.

the social sciences of ‘‘race’’ and c aste in durban

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It has been said that a generation of Indian sociologists read André Beteille’s work as an alternative to the Dumont-Srinivas civilizational paradigm.∏Ω Indeed, Beteille was among those who criticized the work of Dumont and Marriot, for taking ‘‘their orientation from Hindu thought rather than Indian life,’’ which as a result, ‘‘led them and their followers to go back to the past and to relocate its basic elements in a classical Hinduism and its religious and philosophical literature.’’π≠ Yet, while a number of Indian sociologists have weighed in on the question of whether caste could be considered race, Beteille’s editorial ‘‘Race and Caste,’’ which appeared in the Hindu on 10 March 2001, has been most often cited as representing ‘‘scientific’’ opinion and sociological consensus about the Indian state’s rejection of paragraph 73 of the wcar Programme of Action, which sought to include discrimination based on work and descent.π∞ In his editorial, Beteille warns the United Nations against extending the meaning of racial discrimination to accommodate exclusion

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or preference ‘‘based on race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin,’’ which he argues will ‘‘give a new lease of life to the old and discredited notion of race current a hundred years ago’’ and in so doing ‘‘undo the conclusions reached by the researches of several generations of anthropologists.’’ Beteille charges the un initiative with ‘‘opening a Pandora’s box of allegations of racial discrimination throughout the world.’’ Thus,

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the latitudinarian attitude of the un will encourage religious and other ‘‘ethnic’’ minorities to make allegations of racial discrimination not only in India, but everywhere. The Catholics of Northern Ireland can claim they were victims of racial discrimination. The French Canadians, whose grievances are real enough, can also make the same claim. One can multiply examples from every corner of the world. By treating caste discrimination as a form of race discrimination, and by extension, caste as a form of race, the un is turning its back on established scientific opinion. One can only guess under what kind of pressure it is doing so. Treating caste as a form of race is politically mischievous; what is worse, it is scientifically nonsensical.

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In order to make his argument about established scientific opinion, Beteille invokes the names of two anthropologists, Ashley Montagu and Franz Boas, who in fact held two diametrically opposed views. Montagu, of course, was best known for his book The Fallacy of Race, while Boas in Race, Language and Culture went on to distinguish the biological basis of race from social groupings based on language or religion. Boas’s intervention, as Beteille sympathetically notes, was to establish a clear distinction between ‘‘race,’’ a biological category with physical markers, and other social groupings based on language, religion, nationality, style of life, or status. Ironically, in two essays republished in 1991, ‘‘Race, Caste and Gender,’’ and ‘‘Race, Caste and Ethnic Identity,’’ Beteille admits that ‘‘race is a cultural and not a biological fact,’’ and is less hostile to the idea that caste and race are similar phenomena, going so far as to say that ‘‘inequalities of caste are illuminated in the same way as those of race by a consideration of gender.’’π≤ Beteille’s position seems to resonate with Rege’s and Thakur’s in identification of the treatment of women as the basis of casteism by extending the analogy to race. Yet Beteille’s reiteration of the Boasian position on race during the wcar debates entails a misreading that has been as damaging historically for American anthropology as it has been for the emergence of a Dalit sociology.

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As I argued in chapter 2, Boas, in an e√ort to separate race from racist cultural-evolutiony theories, held that it could be scientifically studied as a biological fact. Montagu, like Boas, a Jewish scientist who struggled against antisemitism, felt that race could not be separated from the racist theories that generated it as a category and for this reason held that because race had no biological meaning, race did not exist. Although Montagu participated in the drafting of the 1951 unesco statement on race, his position was not adopted, and the un body rea≈rmed a more nuanced, but essentially biologized notion of race. The internationalization of the race concept thus installed a biological definition of race, making it di≈cult for groups like the Dalits or the Palestinians to claim racial discrimination at Durban. Both Boas’s and Montagu’s resolutions to nineteenthcentury evolutionary and racial theories (race is biological; race does not exist) also had the e√ect of making it di≈cult for American anthropologists to speak of the cultural construction of race. The best work on the social meaning of race (in the United States) has not come from anthropology, but from ethnic studies and cultural studies. Notwithstanding the fact that the misrecognition of what constitutes race has profound consequences for social justice in the United States, the position of the Indian state, as articulated by then Attorney General Soli Sorabji and sociologists like André Beteille or Dipankar Gupta, rests on a single faulty premise: that race and caste are incomparable phenomena because one is biological and the other is not. So if we could show (and this might be achieved rather easily) that race is a social phenomenon, apparently the comparison between race and caste would stand. At the same time Boas was writing, W. E. B. Du Bois, an African American intellectual who had studied sociology in Europe and who undertook the first studies of black social life in the United States, had a very di√erent understanding of race. Du Bois asked rhetorically how to define race: ‘‘What is this group; and how do you di√erentiate it; and how can you call it ‘black’ when you admit it is not black?’’ but then answered, ‘‘I recognize it quite easily and with full legal sanction; the black man is a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.’’π≥ By ‘‘Jim Crow,’’ of course, Du Bois meant the numerous and demeaning disabilities of law and custom imposed by whites on blacks. Du Bois thus asserted that the experience and category of race was created less by biology or blood, than through the social experience of discrimination. In probably the most famous passage of Du

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Bois’s autobiography, Dusk of Dawn, he mused that the mark of his ancestors’ heritage was ‘‘upon (him) in color and hair’’ but these are ‘‘obvious things . . . of little meaning in themselves.’’π∂ Of more importance was ‘‘the social heritage of slavery; the discrimination and insult; and this heritage binds together not simply the children of Africa, but extends through yellow Asia and into the South Seas.’’π∑ If we recognize, as did Du Bois, that the experience (and indeed, the category) of race is produced, not by biology, but by the social experience of racism, and extends this understanding to the relationship between caste and casteism, then we can see that the daily experience of harassment, subordination, and subjugation; ‘‘the social heritage of slavery; the discrimination and insult’’; the experiences of caste terror render the Dalit experience of casteism is very much like the experience of racism. Since caste is constructed through the social experience of casteism, it would thus seem that we have a socially constructed notion of caste that mirrors Du Bois’s understanding of the caste-like nature of racism in the United States. Caste, like race, is not an essence or identity, but a product of social forms of discrimination. As one Dalit activist put it, ‘‘Caste is not something one is; it is something that is done to you.’’ Yet sections of the Dalit movement have seized on the definition of race as biological in order to assert that caste, too, has a biological basis. It is not as if there hasn’t been discussion of race in South Asia, usually posed as one of the e√ects and strategies of colonial rule.π∏ Early Hindutva theorists also developed racial theories based on their reading of 19th nineteenth-century social evolutionary theory, and the question of ‘‘Aryan migration’’ (or ‘‘invasion’’) has been resuscitated through the new genetics of caste.ππ A spate of recent genetic studies which purport to show the existence of an ‘‘Aryan’’ gene pool has inspired Dalit activists to argue for a biogenetic understanding of the Indian caste system.π∫ A range of other studies have been mobilized to show that upper castes are ‘‘indigenous’’ to the region, a finding that has inspired Hindu nationalists in their attempts to rewrite history and history textbooks in India and the United States.πΩ Regardless of what the flawed science of population genetics may reveal about the genetic make-up of Indian populations, the question of race and caste, as Gail Omvedt so aptly put it, is simply the issue of caste as a form of social stratification.∫≠ To say that two phenomena (caste and race) are similar is, after all, not to say that they are identical.

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subaltern histories of c aste? And yet, perhaps we too quickly overlook the ways in which caste and race have referenced each other historically and as sociological paradigms. What the points of transference between caste and race allow is an apprehension of the a√ective social experience of discrimination. In the last chapter I described in some detail Du Bois’s thinking about caste, and the emergence of the caste school of race relations, as one expression of the Chicago School of Sociology during the 1930s and 1940s. Gerald Berreman’s essays of the 1960s and 1970s represented an extension of that earlier body of work, and they remain important reference points, not only for the comparative study of caste, but for the comparative study of race relations as well.∫∞ For Indian sociologists like Beteille, however, Berreman’s understanding of the comparative approach was problematic. Berreman brought his experience of life in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1953–5 to the study of a village in Dehra Dun district in which he lived in 1957–8, and found that the first experience greatly illuminated the second. He noted in particular the deep resentment of the underprivileged groups in both cases even when they appeared to acquiesce in their social subordination. He went on to construct a formal typology of kin groups, local groups, castes and classes, summarizing their similarities and di√erences in a somewhat mechanical manner. . . . To make matters worse, he appeared to be arguing that the real objective of the comparative method was to reveal similarities between systems.∫≤

When I try to explain American race relations to Indians, I describe and analyze America as a caste-stratified society, with attention to the similarities and di√erences in comparison to India. If I am trying to explain Indian caste stratification to Americans, I describe and analyze India as a racist society, with attention to the similarities and

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It is clear that despite Beteille’s rejection of Dumont’s focus on classical Hinduism, he is still in agreement with the aims of Dumont’s comparativist approach, which was to describe the di√erences between complex societies, especially between India and the United States. Berreman, however, saw his use of analogy as a form of translation to convey the a√ective experience of social discrimination. As he put it,

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di√erences in comparison to the United States. I do this as a matter of translation from the social idiom of one society to the other. It is the most economic, vivid, and accurate way I know how to convey these phenomena to people whose experience is limited to one system or the other. I do not think Indian caste is American race, or vice versa, but neither do I think racial stratification and racism are the same for blacks, Chicanos and whites in America, or that caste stratification and casteism are the same for sweepers, blacksmiths, and Rajputs in Hindu India. [But] there are features in all these that are the same and by focusing on them I think we can understand and explain the experience of people in these diverse situations better.∫≥

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A comparison of the ways in which Du Bois described the experience of racism and in which B. R. Ambedkar, a Dalit intellectual and framer of the Indian constitution, described the experience of the caste system highlights Berreman’s notion of translation. Du Bois, for example, used the idiom of caste to explain the psychological e√ects of segregation.

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It is di≈cult to let others see the full psychological meaning of caste segregation. It is as though one, looking out from a dark cave in a side of an impending mountain, sees the world passing and speaks to it; speaks courteously and persuasively, showing them how these entombed souls are hindered in their natural movement, expression and development; and how their loosening from prison would be a matter not simply of courtesy, sympathy and to help them, but aid to all the world. . . . It gradually penetrates the minds of the prisoners that the people passing do not hear; that some think a sheet of invisible but horribly tangible plate glass is between them and the world. They get excited; they talk louder; they gesticulate. Some of the passing world stop in curiosity; these gesticulations seem so pointless; they laugh and pass on. They still either do not hear at all or hear but dimly, and even what they hear, they do not understand. Then the people within may become hysterical. They may scream and hurl themselves against the barriers, hardly realizing in their bewilderment that they are screaming in a vacuum unheard. . . . [T]hey may even, here and there, break through in blood and disfigurement, and find themselves faced by a horrified, implacable, and quite overwhelming mob of people frightened for their own very existence.∫∂

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Ambedkar described the experiences of caste oppression and segregation using a comparable spatial metaphor of entrapment and social isolation: ‘‘Hindu society was just like a tower which had several storeys without a ladder or an entrance. One was to die in the storey in which one was born.’’∫∑ As we will see, he would also use the metaphor of slavery to understand the hidden psychological costs of the caste system. In the last chapter, I argued that DuBois and other black social scientists of his time used caste as part of a historically dense but polysemically rich lexicon to signify race and the problem of the ‘‘color line.’’ Here I contend that if caste had relevance for black intellectuals’ understanding of racism and the legacy of slavery, the history and lessons of slavery also contained lessons for the leaders of Indian anticaste movements, like Jyotirao Phule and Ambedkar. Phule, who is credited with initiating India’s first anticaste nonBrahmin movement, the Satyshodak Samaj (Society of the Seekers of Truth)—and whose influential friend would recommend Ambedkar to the Maharaja of Baroda for a scholarship to study in the United States—was inspired by the abolition of slavery in the United States. His pamphlet on slavery drew a direct correspondence between the experience of slavery and the lower caste (Sudras). Writing of the reaction that Indians had to news of the abolition of slavery, Phule wrote, in 1873,

But where Phule’s objective may have been to capture the rhetoric and international standing of the abolitionist movement with ‘‘Gulamgiri,’’ Ambedkar would undertake a more careful study of Reconstruction in the American South, poring over Herbert Apthekar’s

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The depressed and down-trodden people of India feel especially happy at this auspicious development, because they alone or the slaves in America have experienced the many inhuman hardships and tortures attendant upon slavery. The only di√erence between these two categories of slaves is this: the former were first conquered and then enslaved, while the latter were captured (in Africa) and were enslaved in America. The miserable condition of both types of slaves is identical. The hardships heaped upon the slaves in America were also su√ered by the depressed and down-trodden people in India at the hands of the Bhats. Nay even more! A mere mention of their cruel hardships will break the hearts of even the stonyhearted.∫∏

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history The Negro in the Civil War (1938).∫π Based on his readings, he argued, ‘‘Untouchables cannot forget the fate of the Negroes who joined the fight for freedom and democracy but who were betrayed by the North and left with no substantive protection from racism and violence at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan and the Southern state governments.’’∫∫ Ambedkar would repeatedly in his writing refer to the leadership of Lincoln and the position of blacks during the Civil War as a kind of allegory of betrayal for the perils faced by Dalits in the Gandhian-led Indian nationalist movement.∫Ω Much later, Ambedkar would draw a di√erent lesson from the Civil War with respect to understanding India’s regional divisions. Although we have no direct evidence that Ambedkar read Du Bois’s (1935) Black Reconstruction in America, it is quite likely he did, for Ambedkar claimed familiarity with Du Bois’s work, and on one occasion (most likely during the summer of 1946) wrote to him.Ω≠

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Dear Prof. Du Bois, Although I have not met you personally, I know you by name as every one does who is working in the cause of securing liberty to the oppressed people. I belong to the Untouchables of India and perhaps you might have heard my name. I have been a student of the Negro problem and have read your writings throughout. There is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of Negroes in America that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary. I was very much interested to read that the Negroes of America have filed a petition to the U.N.O. The Untouchables of India are also thinking of following suit. Will you be so good as to secure for me two or three copies of this representation by the Negroes and send them to my address. I need hardly say how very grateful I shall be for your troubles in this behalf.Ω∞

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It is possible that Ambedkar’s letter was also inspired by a complaint India lodged against South Africa before the United Nations on 22 June 1946, detailing the maltreatment of Indian laborers in South Africa and the passage of racial and discriminatory laws against them.Ω≤ In any event, Du Bois replied on 31 July 1946, assuring Ambedkar that ‘‘I have often heard of your name and work and of course have every sympathy with the Untouchables of India. I shall be glad to be of any service I can render if possible.’’Ω≥ Du Bois relayed to Ambedkar that the National Negro Congress had made a statement before the United Nations (which he enclosed in the letter to Am154

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bedkar), promising to send a more comprehensive statement by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People once it was drafted and submitted.Ω∂ This is the only record of correspondence between the two. And while it is clear that Ambedkar (who in his work on slavery and untouchability also quotes at length from Charles Johnson’s The Negro in American Civilization) was quite knowledgeable about the situation of American Blacks, Du Bois does not seem to have been clear about the political demands of Indian Dalits.Ω∑ Du Bois, while he did not always approve of Gandhi’s methods, had a substantial correspondence with him, and was in fact much more connected with upper-caste Indian nationalists such as Rabindranath Tagore and Lala Lajpat Rai. Yet it was Rai’s suggestion, in Unhappy India, that ‘‘Negroes in the U.S.’’ were ‘‘less’’ or ‘‘worse than the Pariah’’ that provoked Ambedkar to write his comparison of ‘‘Slaves and Untouchables’’ and to ask polemically, ‘‘Which Is Worse? Slavery or Untouchability?’’Ω∏ Rai, who had visited the United States twice, and lived there for five years between 1915 and 1919, went ‘‘touring all over the country’’ with the objective of making ‘‘a special study of the Negro problem.’’ In his first book, The United States of America: A Hindu’s Impressions and a Study (1919), Rai wrote, ‘‘The Negro is the Pariah of America. There is some analogy between the Negro problem in the United States of America and the problem of the depressed classed in India. The two cases are not on all fours with each other, but there is a great deal in common to both. The social problem in the United States is, in some of its phases, very similar to the social problem in India. Hence my desire to study it in all its bearings on the spot and to come in contact with the Negro leaders in these States, so as to know their point of view from first-hand knowledge.’’Ωπ In this way, Rai came to know W. E. B. Du Bois (whose news accounts and investigations for the Crisis he would draw on for Unhappy India), Booker T. Washington, and Marcus Garvey. Rai wrote Unhappy India in response to Katherine Mayo’s charges, in Mother India, that Indians were unfit for independence because of their treatment of women and untouchables. While Rai felt that there was nothing parallel in the history of India to the cruelties inflicted on American blacks during the period of slavery from 1619– 1865, he insisted that he did not want to be ‘‘understood to have produced all this evidence as a defence or in extenuation of untouchability.’’Ω∫ Rai condemned untouchability ‘‘in the strongest possible terms as an absolute indefensible, inhuman and barbarous institu-

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tion, unworthy of Hinduism and the Hindus.’’ΩΩ But he also proclaimed, ‘‘It does not lie in the mouths of the white people to tell us that we are a ‘world menace’ or that we treat a section of humanity as less than men. White imperialism is the greatest world menace known to history, and its racial arrogance rests on the assumption that those who are not ‘white’ are ‘less than men.’ ’’∞≠≠ He concluded, ‘‘What are the caste cruelties of India put by the side of what the white man has done to the non-white people?’’∞≠∞ In response to Rai’s assertions, Ambedkar wrote heatedly,

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Far from being ashamed of Untouchability, the Hindus try to defend it. Their line of defense is that the Hindus have never upheld slavery as other nations have done and that in any case, Untouchability is not worse than slavery. This argument was used by no less a person than Lala Lajput Rai in his book called ‘‘Unhappy India.’’ It would have been unnecessary to waste one’s time in refuting this countercharge had it not been that on account of its plausibility the world at large not having witnessed anything worse than slavery is likely to believe that Untouchability cannot be worse than slavery.∞≠≤

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It is unclear when Ambedkar’s essay, ‘‘Slaves and Untouchables’’ was written, but it would have had to have been after Unhappy India appeared in 1928. The essay appears as chapter 3 of a longer, unpublished manuscript entitled ‘‘Untouchables, or The Children of India’s Ghetto.’’ Analogizing from the experiences of European Jews and urban blacks in the United States, Ambedkar titled chapter 4 of the same manuscript ‘‘The Indian Ghetto—The Centre of Untouchability,’’ and described Indian village society as the fulcrum of Dalit oppression. In chapter 8, ‘‘Parallel Cases,’’ he discusses slavery in Rome, ‘‘villeinage’’ in England, Jews and servility, and Negroes and slavery.∞≠≥ He describes the physical and material experiences of slavery, including the Middle Passage, the process of ‘‘seasoning’’ slaves through punishment and deprivation, and details the legal dimensions of considering slaves to be property rather than persons. It is in ‘‘Slaves and Untouchables,’’ however, that Ambedkar develops his most extended comparison of slavery and untouchability. Slavery was never obligatory. But untouchability is obligatory. . . . The law of slavery permitted emancipation. Once a slave always a slave was not the fate of the slave. In untouchability there is no escape. Once an untouchable always an untouchable. The other dif-

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ference is that untouchability is an indirect form of slavery. A deprivation of a man’s freedom by an open and direct way is preferable form of enslavement. It makes the slave conscious of his enslavement and to become conscious of slavery is the first and most important step in the battle for freedom. But if a man is deprived of his liberty indirectly he has no consciousness of his enslavement. Untouchability is an indirect form of slavery. To tell an Untouchable ‘‘you are free, you are a citizen, you have all the rights of a citizen,’’ and to tighten the rope in such a way as to leave him no opportunity to realize the ideal is a cruel deception. It is enslavement without making the Untouchables conscious of their enslavement. It is slavery though it is untouchability. It is real though it is indirect. It is enduring though it is unconscious.∞≠∂

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This passage is remarkable because Ambedkar starts by wanting to strongly di√erentiate slavery from untouchability (and in other parts of the text actually claims that latter is worse than the former); but by the end of the passage he says that untouchability is slavery, buttressed by enduring, but unconscious e√ects. Certainly the description of the psychological e√ects of second-class, unrealizable citizenship would have resonated with the experiences of black Americans subjected to Jim Crow. In perhaps his most famous tract, The Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar also equated the social form of slavery with untouchability: ‘‘Slavery does not merely mean a legalized form of subjection. It means a state of society in which some men are forced to accept from others the purposes which control their conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legalized sense. It is found when, as in the Caste System, some persons are compelled to carry on certain prescribed callings which are not of their choice.’’∞≠∑ Echoing passages from ‘‘Slaves and Untouchables,’’ Ambedkar’s What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1945) also distinguished slavery from untouchability in a way that seems to misunderstand the nature of slavery: ‘‘In slavery, the master at any rate had the responsibility to feed, clothe and house the slave and keep him in good condition lest the market value of the slave should decrease. But in the system of untouchability the Hindu takes no responsibility for the maintenance of the Untouchable. As an economic system it permits exploitation without obligation.’’∞≠∏ In that same work, however, Ambedkar’s description of the caste system resonates remarkably with the social experience of Jim Crow.

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In India, the castes are not merely non-social. Often they are antisocial. This is particularly true of the Hindus toward the Untouchables. For instance, the Hindus will not allow the Untouchables to take water from a well. The Hindus will not allow Untouchables entry in schools. The Hindus will not allow the Untouchables to travel in buses. The Hindus will not allow the Untouchables to travel in the same railway compartment. The Hindus will not allow Untouchables to wear clean clothes. The Hindus will not allow Untouchables to wear jewelry. The Hindus will not allow Untouchables to put tiles on their houses. The Hindus will not tolerate Untouchables to own land. The Hindus will not allow Untouchables to keep cattle. The Hindus will not allow an Untouchable to sit when [a] Hindu is standing.∞≠π

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Another essay, ‘‘Which Is Worse? Slavery or Untouchability?,’’ incorporates passages from ‘‘Slaves and Untouchables’’ and may date to the period of 1943–47.∞≠∫ It is more precise in attempting to distinguish the descriptive from metaphorical usages of the term slavery, as when wives or serfs could be spoken of as slaves, from the juridical meaning of slavery.∞≠Ω Ambedkar’s insistence on the juridical definition of slavery allowed that actual ‘‘ownership’’ made the position of the slave worse than the position of the untouchable.∞∞≠ But he ingeniously contrasts the de jure and de facto positions of slaves and untouchables, to show instances of the progress and development of the former, and of the systematic degradation of the latter. Ambedkar marked the slave as ‘‘a human being who is not a person in the eye of the law,’’ but juxtaposed that legal status with the de facto position of slaves under the Roman empire who could be librarians, clerks, or amanuenses; rhetoricians, grammarians, philosophers, tutors, doctors, and artists.∞∞∞ He also cites a long passage from Charles Johnson’s The Negro in American Civilization, which showed that black slaves could be artisans, craftsmen, and tradesmen.∞∞≤ Yet he could find no comparable record of social or economic attainment allowed for Dalits. Ambedkar saw in this a paradox, for ‘‘slaves who were worse o√ in law than untouchables were in fact better o√ than untouchables, and untouchables who were better o√ in law than slaves, were in fact worse o√ than slaves.∞∞≥ Ambedkar explained this paradox by arguing that ‘‘in the case of the slave the law by refusing to recognize him as a person could do him no harm because society recognized him more amply than it was called upon to do. In the case of the untouchables, the law by recognizing him as a person failed to 158

do him any good because Hindu society is determined to set that recognition at naught.’’∞∞∂ In Ambekar’s writing, then, we see an oscillation between the desire to strongly di√erentiate slavery from untouchability in order to claim that untouchability was worse than slavery, and the desire to identify untouchability as slavery. Even as Ambedkar would consider slavery to be both a framework of reference and a point of di√erentiation with modern untouchability, Du Bois and the caste school of race relations would consider the caste system to be a historical formation in the American South. I suggest that these metaphorical transferences between casteism and racism provide a generative structure through which contemporary Dalit politics can be engaged.

new histories, new sociologies: transnational disjunction and affiliation in social movements

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Among the numerous critiques of Homo Hierarchicus, it was perhaps Berreman’s that presented the strongest case against Dumont’s comparative sociology, which held the inegalitarianism of the Indian caste system to be based on complementarity and assent and the egalitarianism of Western democratic society to be based on conflict and competition. Ironically, the outcome of a series of debates no one thinks Dumont actually won was a reinforcement of one of Dumont’s key assumptions: the idea that caste hierarchy was unique to India. The most important feature of what I am calling a ‘‘subaltern history of caste’’ is one that releases it from a form of anthropological exceptionalism on the one hand, and Indian nationalism on the other, freeing it for analytic service in di√erent subaltern groups with visions of liberatory politics. Our understanding of the possibilities of such politics is usually limited to a rehearsal of Martin Luther King Jr.’s reading of Gandhi. But I want to ask how the practice of reading across di√erent histories of oppression can begin to account for the forms of a≈liation and disjuncture engendered in Gandhi’s admiration for Booker T. Washington (an agonist of Du Bois), Du Bois’s friendship with Rai (an agonist of Ambedkar), and Ambekar’s admiration for Du Bois? What do we make of the fact that Gandhi’s program for untouchables was limited to asking them to follow Booker T. Washington’s model of trade education, and that King himself came to identify as a Dalit?

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Highlighting his visit to a school of former untouchables in Kerala, King recounted, in a 1965 sermon,

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The principal introduced me and then as he came to the conclusion of his introduction, he says, ‘‘Young people, I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.’’ And for a moment I was shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable. . . . I started thinking about the fact: twenty million of my brothers and sisters were still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in an aΔuent society. I started thinking about the fact: twenty million of my brothers and sisters were still by and large housed in rat-infested, unendurable slums in the big cities of our nation, still attending inadequate schools faced with improper recreational facilities. And I said to myself, ‘‘Yes I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States is an Untouchable.∞∞∑

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More telling, perhaps, is the intensity with which Ambedkar studied the language and history of legal Reconstruction in the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments of the U.S. Constitution, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, while King would demand federal programs to promote integration and federal funds to lift the standards of ‘‘a people too long ignored by America’s conscience,’’ crediting these ideas to his 1959 trip to India and a meeting with Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. In King’s meeting with Nehru, he learned of Ambedkar’s inclusion of the anti-untouchability and castereservation provisions in the Indian Constitution, and that the Indian government had spent ‘‘millions of dollars a year in scholarships, housing and community development to lift the standards of the untouchables.’’∞∞∏ King, who was drawn to Gandhian nonviolence, in the end identified both with the plight of India’s untouchables and with the remedies sought for their plight, though it is quite possible he never read Ambedkar or understood Ambedkar’s struggles with Gandhi (and later the Constituent Assembly) over the principle of reservation.∞∞π Thus, even the conventional story of Gandhi’s influence on King is rendered more complex in considering the ways in which race and caste operated as sites of displacement and rea≈liation in the Indian nationalist and civil-rights movements. Daniel Immerwahr’s incisive study ‘‘Caste or Colony? Indianizing Race in the United States’’ (2007) suggests that a ‘‘race-caste’’ analogy as a point of a≈liation between black intellectuals and Indian nationalists was superseded by the analogy of racism and imperialism as a framework of soli160

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darity whereby American blacks were also seen to occupy the position of colonized peoples. While Immerwahr cites Du Bois’s muchdiscussed novel, Dark Princess, and Rai’s insistence that Indians and blacks had to unite against white imperialism, we have seen in the preceding chapter that caste was an ongoing source of metaphor and analogy for Du Bois, developed alongside and imbricated within his critique of Western imperialism. And while it may be true that black nationalism during the 1960s posed a militant response to Gandhian nonviolence and developed an understanding of ‘‘Third World Liberation’’ predicated on the understanding of blacks as colonized people, one might wonder, why, if the caste-race paradigm was no longer a meaningful ideational framework, Dalit activists and their allies in India have seen their histories reflected in the black experience.∞∞∫ From Dalit writers who turned to the Harlem Renaissance for inspiration, to the formation of the ‘‘Dalit Panthers,’’ to the founding of the preeminent Dalit newspaper, the Dalit Voice, black art, history, and political strategy has been a source of inspiration for contemporary Dalit cultural politics, occasionally framed as an injunction: ‘‘Dalit culture has to cut through nationalities and languages and identify with the culture of Blacks.’’∞∞Ω More than twenty years before the convocation of the wcar in 2001, V. T. Rajasekhar, the editor of the Dalit Voice, argued that the Indian caste system was a form of apartheid, in a tract called Apartheid in India: A Document for Foreigners, which pronounced that ‘‘the Problem of the Indian Untouchable is not an internal problem but an international problem.’’∞≤≠ First published as a pamphlet in 1978, it was presented at the Asian Racial and Minorities Conference in New Zealand of that year. A second, revised edition was published in 1983 and submitted as an annexure to a representation made to the un Subcommission on Human Rights. Rajasekhar would allude to the hypocrisy of India’s support of the naacp’s petition to the un on racial injustice, ‘‘An Appeal to the World’’ (1947; the same document about which Ambedkar had queried Du Bois in 1946), while insisting that since untouchability had been abolished by the Indian Constitution, its continued practice was an internal, not an international issue. He wrote scathingly, ‘‘This hierarchical caste system—an ingenious Aryan invention—is a fantastic institution, the depth of which cannot be fathomed by even Indian social scientists, let alone foreign experts. The Eighth Wonder of the World. The caste system is a pyramid.’’ Rajasekhar went on to give ‘‘a listing of groups in descending degrees of contempt.’’∞≤∞

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In the preface to his book Dalit: The Black Untouchables (1995), the U.S. edition of Apartheid in India, Rajasekhar extended his conclusions about the relationships between American blacks and Dalits, and held that untouchability was a form of racism.

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The world has at last come to know that (1) India’s Dalits (forming 20% of India’s 1,000 million population together with another 10%, their blood relations, tribals) are the world’s single largest Black population outside Africa; (2) that they constitute the world’s most oppressed and persecuted people; (3) that Dalits—the Black Untouchables of India—and Africans have a common origin; (4) that the Indian brand of sanctified racism is more serious than that of South African apartheid; (5) that India is the original home of racism, and (6) that Aryan Brahminism is the father of racism.∞≤≤

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While the tenets of emerging ‘‘Afro-Dalit’’ literature by Rajasekhar and others have been critically reviewed, it is striking that Rajasekhar, like Ambedkar before him and other Dalit writers after him, has continued to see the experience of untouchability as worse than slavery or apartheid.∞≤≥ In any event, the Indian state’s position at the Durban conference worked to deny enduring relationships between black, Dalit and other Indian nationalist intellectuals, erasing long histories of intellectual and political exchange that Vijay Prashad has called ‘‘AfroAsian tra≈c.’’∞≤∂ In this sense, Indian sociology must better address transnational realities, moving away from the internationalist sociology that Uberoi critiqued, but also from the nationalist sociology that sought to contain, rather than explain its object. For histories of oppression, like theories of liberation, always travel. So, too, do strategies of state ‘‘blindness.’’ Thus, the ‘‘color-blind’’ position of the U.S. state and dominant culture is uncannily similar to the ‘‘caste-blind’’ position of the Indian state and dominant culture. More than a decade ago, Troy Duster, director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California–Berkeley, writing of the defeat of a≈rmative action in California, concluded, ‘‘There are some disturbing parallels between the American system of social stratification and those of South Africa and India.’’∞≤∑ Yet, while Duster’s article brings the argument full circle and raises the need for comparative work on the system of caste reservations in India and a≈rmative-action programs in the United States, to date there have been only two studies that attempt an analysis of both systems.∞≤∏ Clearly, both social programs emerge from di√erent his162

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torical contexts, but as we have seen, also share an overlapping history, through Ambedkar’s study of the U.S. Constitution and King’s admiration for the nondiscrimination and remedial provisions of the Indian Constitution. Both programs are also increasingly under attack and have been sites of powerful political contention for well over forty years. In particular, the way class has been used to o√set arguments for caste reservations, on the one hand, and ‘‘racial preferences,’’ on the other, suggests certain parallels in each country’s course of liberalism. The debates on Durban suggested, but did not actually enunciate, an important question. The reverse of asking whether caste is race, this question asks when and how it has been productive to understand that race is caste—or more precisely, when the experience of casteism is seen to be the most compelling illustration of the experience of racism. One wonders why some of black anthropologists of the 1930s and 1940s found descriptions of the caste system to be such a powerful and profound tool for analyzing racism in the United States, a trend that has not stopped with University of Alabama law professor Brian Fair’s Notes of a Racial Caste Baby: Color Blindness and the End of A≈rmative Action (1999). In a di√erent vein, Native American and Chicana scholars like Jack Forbes and Martha Menchaca have also used caste as a means of describing the social structure and historical experience of native peoples in the colonial Americas.∞≤π The concept of caste has had many lives. Perhaps in our eagerness to question its determinative e√ects on the subcontinent, scholars have failed to track its other genealogies, and the caste school of race relations has thus far remained a footnote to the many arguments leveled at Dumont. In spite of the many thoughtful critiques of Dumont, one wonders whether they did not leave a kind of vacuum such that it was di≈cult to track other genealogies of caste: some leading to other parts of East Asia and Africa, and others to the United States and the Americas. Arjun Appadurai’s foundational essay of the 1980s, ‘‘Center and Periphery in Anthropological Theory,’’ observed that some regions of the world are (over)identified with particular gate-keeping concepts. It is perhaps by letting caste out of the gates of South Asia that we learn to shape social theories more attentive to the social movements that too often elude them.

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chapter 6

¡ Legacies of Culture, Languages of the State The United States is currently at war in South Asia, not against a rogue state, but with an individual who is the product of a rogue state (Saudi Arabia) that is seen by the United States (a fellow rogue state) as an ‘‘ally.’’ Now consider the statement a Pakistani general made recently, in the wake of September 11: ‘‘Pakistan was the condom the Americans needed to enter Afghanistan.’’∞ Aside from noting the transformation of a rape narrative into a safe-sex narrative, one might productively examine the shifts in language and consciousness necessary to see the history of the Cold War in South Asia as ‘‘sex.’’ Part of the larger project with which this essay is engaged is the attempt to reconstitute a symbolic anthropology of states so that one might more productively analyze the statement above as meaningful about South Asia in the world system in the same way feminist scholars like Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Urvashi Butalia, and Veena Das have written of the transfer of the languages of honor and shame from the community to the state.≤ Matthew Arnold long ago held that ‘‘culture suggests the idea of the State.’’≥ In this essay, however, I want to explore how some notion of absolutist or ‘‘totalizing’’ culture has continued to mark the history of anthropological analysis despite its avowed preference for the relativist notion. If the era of colonialism posed a binary between those with culture and those without it, the postcolonial or ‘‘developmentialist’’ regime is marked by those with culture, and those with too much of it. Nowhere is this more clear than in the attempts of anthropology to confront the question of the state during the crisis of decolonization. I will argue that while symbolic anthropology emerged through a particular miscoding of decolonization, it still may o√er tools to understand the character of states when the hyphen in ‘‘nation-state’’ has become unstable. I thus see this essay as part of a modest e√ort to reconceptualize political anthropology through a reworking of some of its classical forms. If an older form, represented best by Edmund Leach’s Political

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Systems of Highland Burma, focused on community and lineage, and a spate of work throughout the 1980s and 1990s, inspired especially (but not exclusively) by Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, sought to address nation-states and ethnic nationalism, an emerging form of ethnography, persuasively schematized by Arjun Appadurai, has pointed toward global, transnational forms. The point here is not that the local, state, or transnational levels should be viewed as each superseding the other, but rather that each of these distinct levels is interpenetrated by the others, constituting what George Marcus has called ‘‘Ethnography in/of the World System.’’ Popular writing has it that the state is everywhere (including the bedroom), and nowhere (unable to control capital or to provide its citizens with even the most basic education and healthcare). Just as ‘‘state talk’’ proliferates in the public sphere, so, too, does scholarship on the state. Anthropologists have typically seen the state as the final stage in the evolution of political and cultural organization. Remember Elman Service’s infamous mantra: band, tribe, chiefdom, state; or Pierre Clastres’s disquisition, in Society against the State, of the idea that ‘‘society is inconceivable without the state; the state is the destiny of every society.’’∂ The discipline made subsequent forays into segmentary states, prehistoric states, and Marxist-Wittfogelian ‘‘despotic states.’’∑ Political theorists continue to distinguish between, on the one hand, the autocratic state of pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment Europe, wherein the principle of organization was territorial rather than identitarian, producing arbitrary relations of rule, and, on the other hand, modern states whose authority is derived from a people, wherein sovereignty is the principle of organization through which the people and their institutions are expressed through the state. Feminists speak of the patriarchal state, while ‘‘magical’’ and phantasmatic states have also emerged; and the developmentalist strong (core) and weak (peripheral) states of international-relations theory have never gone away.∏ A spate of review articles and edited collections on the state usefully remind one to think of state systems, state forms, and fissures, and to recognize the state as an ideological project, as well as a form of cultural inscription.π The debate about whether states create nations (Europe from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth) or nations create states (the postcolonial world from 1945 to the present) is alive and well. Some of these essays show that the state is not a thing, but a set of e√ects producing a sense of coherence, or a set of processes designed to create, control, and

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classify citizens, and here a Foucauldian turn to governmentality is most pronounced.∫ What is warranted, however, is a form of institutional ethnography that might help to lay a framework for emerging ethnographies of the state that locates the problem of state ‘‘character’’ in a di√erent disciplinary and regional history than implied in the above vocabularies. Two concerns inform this attempt: the first lies in developing ways of tracking forms of culturalist explanation, which fill in as stereotypic or racialist arguments when cruder forms of racism have been undermined. Anthropologists have often assumed their accounts of culture provided a remedy to culturalist argument in the same way they assumed the anthropological notion of culture discussed in chapter 2 provided a solution to racism. Here I explore an unintended legacy of the linguistic turn: the emergence of a symbolic anthropology, which left a fairly problematic (if not ‘‘culturalist’’) form of cultural description in place to describe areas of the world emerging from decolonization. Thus, my second concern is to suggest an alternate account of why the anthropological notion of culture remained internally generated and indebted to notions of order, wholeness, coherence, and stability throughout the decades of decolonization between the end of the Second World War and roughly the 1980s. In the late 1960s the discipline took a hard look at its relationship to colonialism, a reassessment encapsulated in Dell Hymes’s Reinventing Anthropology (1969), Kathleen Gough’s manifesto ‘‘Anthropology and Colonialism’’ (1970), and Talal Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973), which together represented a cleansing of disciplinary conscience. Remembering that in the nineteenth century Western powers held 35 percent of the land, but claimed 67 percent of the world’s territory, the discipline’s e√orts to ‘‘decolonize anthropology’’ have to date been largely limited to studies of the historical e√ects of colonialism on Third World societies, and have less often considered the epistemological e√ects of anthropology as a mode of knowing. As Carol Breckenridge and Peter Van De Veer have noted, ‘‘Critiques of colonialism have not really led to a reflection on the evolution of knowledge that brings us into the postcolonial (or neocolonial) present.’’Ω The question of why anthropology did not look to the theorists of anticolonial movements who sought to decolonize culture by analyzing the cultural pathologies and fractures that emerged through colonialism—from Aimé Césaire, to Édouard Glissant, Albert Memmi, 166

Frantz Fanon, or Léopold Senghor—certainly warrants exploration, but is beyond the scope of these reflections. It is possible, however, to examine how a particular question, about how order is maintained in societies throwing o√ the yoke of colonial rule, helped shape a particular answer: symbolic anthropology deployed a particular view of culture as internally consistent and meaningful, one where culture and the weak state were inevitably linked. In so doing, I want to explore Cli√ord Geertz’s writing on the ‘‘new states,’’ and the spaces between India, Indonesia, and Morocco, as well as the work of Harvard’s department of social relations and the University of Chicago’s Committee for the Study of New Nations. My argument here is not that Geertz was unaware of this generation of anticolonial and nationalist intellectuals—Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Fanon, or Senghor—or that he failed to take them seriously. But Geertz’s particular misreading of their writings has, on the one hand, enabled a particular form of symbolic anthropology to flourish, and with it, a notion of culture that is largely continuous, in many respects, with the late-nineteenth-century holistic notion of culture that Boas and his students worked so hard to establish; and on the other, signaled the collapsing of this notion of culture with nationalist thought itself, so that contrary notions of nationalism or even of culture could not be understood. Let me illustrate the last point with two passages from Geertz’s essay ‘‘After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States’’ (1971):

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The first formative stage of nationalism consisted essentially of confronting the dense assemblage of cultural, racial, local, and linguistic categories of self-identification and social loyalty that centuries of uninstructed history had produced with a simple, abstract, deliberately constructed, and almost painfully self-conscious concept of political ethnicity—a proper ‘‘nationality’’ in the modern manner. The granular images into which individuals’ views of who they are and who they aren’t . . . so intensely bound in traditional society, were challenged by the more general, vaguer, but no less charged conceptions of collective identity, based on a di√use sense of common destiny, that characterize industrialized states. The men who raised this challenge, the nationalist intellectuals, were thus launching a revolution as much cultural, even epistemological, as it was political. They were attempting to transform the symbolic framework through which people experience social reality, and thus, to the extent that life is what we make of it all, that reality itself.

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. . . As the mass attack . . . upon colonialism developed, it seemed to create . . . the basis of a new identity that independence would merely ratify. The popular rallying behind a common, extremely specific political aim—an occurrence that surprised the nationalists nearly as much as it did the colonialists—was taken for a sign of deeper solidarity, which produced by it would yet outlive it. Nationalism came to mean, purely and simple, the desire—and the demand—for freedom. Transforming people’s view of themselves, their society, and their culture—the sort of thing that absorbed Gandhi, Jinnah, Fanon, Sukarno, Senghor, and indeed all the bitter theorists of national awakening—was identified, to a large extent by some of those same men, with access of such peoples to self-government. ‘‘Seek ye first the political kingdom’’—the nationalists would make the state and the state would make the nation. (emphasis mine)∞≠

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Geertz’s identification of nationalism as a cultural project expressed through its symbols was ahead of its time. But subsequent anthropological writing on culture and nationalism tended to celebrate the importance anthropologists and nationalists grant to culture, without questioning the conflation of an anthropological notion of culture with nationalist cultures. Bruce Kapferer could thus write, ‘‘The reification of culture in nationalism and the declaration by nationalists of its motive force in human action is the practical carrying forward of some of the key assumptions of anthropology. Nationalists appear to demonstrate what many anthropologists say.’’∞∞ I mark this simply as a problem, and not as an a≈rmation of how symbolic anthropology theorized culture throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Between 1945 and 1968, sixty-six countries achieved independence. This period also signifies an extended process of decolonization for what Cli√ord Geertz termed ‘‘the new states.’’ Yet, he notes, ‘‘The term new states, indeterminate to begin with, becomes even more so as time passes and the states age. Though my main referent is the countries that have gained independence since World War II, I do not hesitate, where it suits my purposes and seems realistic, to extend the term to cover those in the Middle East, whose formal independence came earlier, or even those, like Ethiopia, Iran or Thailand, which in the strict sense, were never colonized at all.’’∞≤ This definition exposes some of Geertz’s discomfort with the notion of decolonization, for a prior experience of colonization becomes a non-necessary condition for being deemed a ‘‘new state.’’ A developmentalist paradigm is subtly put into play because, by Geertz’s definition, what these coun168

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tries all share is underdevelopment. Unsurprisingly, or significantly, Geertz was perhaps the first anthropologist to have applied the term postcolonial to the new states, by noting that ‘‘formal liberation from colonial rule turns out not to have been the climax but a stage; a critical and necessary stage . . . but quite possibly far from the most consequential one’’—hence the specter of the weak, dependent, struggling new state.∞≥ Geertz’s essays on the new states contain some of his most complex and sophisticated writing; although they are possibly the least read in a corpus that includes several books, they are perhaps the most deserving of extended attention today.∞∂ What I want to suggest, however provisionally, is a certain complicity between a kind of new-states writing in the social sciences of the 1960s (including the work of Edward Shils and others) with a form of symbolic and linguistic anthropology (ascendant in the 1960s, hegemonic throughout the 1970s and 1980s) in typologizing cultures as particular kinds of polity. (Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus, as we saw in chapter 4, was but one variant of this tendency). There is a long history of thinking about the relationship between culture and the state, with Western democratic theory emphasizing the development of civil society outside the state.∞∑ The vantage point of the current moment enables one to see the limitations of the very notion of civil society and to articulate the possibilities of ‘‘political society,’’ emphasizing the process through which social movements, networks, and political parties interact with the state.∞∏ Yet even Partha Chatterjee’s critique of the civil society– state distinction fails to register not only the way in which ‘‘civil society’’ articulates a project of cultural modernization against ‘‘primordiality,’’ but the ways in which social theory reflects the same process.∞π The rise of a postwar symbolic anthropology portraying certain cultures as forms of ‘‘uncivil society’’ precluded the emergence of viable theories of power within postcolonial states.∞∫ Put di√erently, my suggestion is that a kind of complicity between symbolic anthropology and weak-state (or what Gunnar Myrdal called the ‘‘soft state’’) theory not only enabled the meteoric rise of the latter, but ensured its successful application until the present. What might the ‘‘weak state’’ and a Geertzian ‘‘theater state’’ share in common? In ‘‘Ideology as a Cultural System’’ (1964), Geertz argued that the new states were ‘‘still groping for usable political concepts, not yet grasping them; and the outcome in almost every case . . . is uncertain not merely in the sense that the outcome of any historical process is uncertain but in the sense that even a broad and general assessment of

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overall direction is extremely di≈cult to make.’’∞Ω Geertz went on to characterize Indonesia’s situation, in 1964, as ‘‘times of chaos, opinions a scramble, parties a jumble where the whole political process is mired in a slough of ideological symbols, each attempting and so far each failing to unjumble the Republic’s catalogue, to name its cause, and to give point and purpose to its polity. It is a country of false starts and frantic revisions, of a desperate search for a political order whose image, like a mirage, recedes more rapidly the more eagerly it is approached. The salving slogan amid all this frustration is, ‘the Revolution is Unfinished!’ And so indeed it is. But only because no one ever knows, not even those who cry most loudly that they do, precisely how to go about the job of finishing it.’’≤≠ In another essay, ‘‘The Politics of Meaning’’ (1973), Geertz is concerned with ‘‘organizing a cultural hodgepodge into a workable polity,’’ but concludes with some exasperation that ‘‘if Indonesia gives any overall impression, it is of a state manqué, a country which, unable to find a political form appropriate to the temper of its people, stumbles on apprehensively from one institutional contrivance to the next.’’≤∞ Geertz’s view had been precipitated by Edward Shils’s lead essay for Old Societies and New States, wherein Shils wrote, ‘‘The new states rest on a prepolitical matrix of institutions, beliefs and solidarities. In the case of the new states, the prepolitical matrix is in a most rudimentary condition. The constituent societies on which the new states rest are, taken separately, not civil societies, and taken together, they certainly do not form a single civil society. . . . They are constellations of kinship groups, castes, tribes, feudalities—even smaller territorial societies—but they are not civil societies.’’≤≤ In other words, lacking civil society, and lapsing into primordial forms of identity, culture is collapsed with the state. This failure to separate culture from the state is also what leads to its demise: culture prevents the development of a healthy state. As Geertz put it, ‘‘The new states are abnormally susceptible to serious disa√ection based on primordial attachments.’’≤≥ For Geertz, primordial sentiments and civil sentiments were always potentially in conflict.≤∂ Political ethnography must not only search out ‘‘communalistic challenges to the civil state,’’ but recognize that an ‘‘enduring structure of primordial identification’’ is latent, lying concealed, ready to take political form given the right social conditions.≤∑ Clearly, in the Third World, there is simply too much culture. And Geertz, not unlike the nineteenth-century anthropologists who enumerated traits that were seen to be markers of culture, obliges us with a list of primordial traits that indicate too much culture: an 170

emphasis on ‘‘assumed blood ties,’’ ‘‘race,’’ ‘‘language,’’ ‘‘region,’’ ‘‘religion,’’ ‘‘custom.’’≤∏

riotous feelings I first went to the Southeast Asian town of Pare, Indonesia, a district town in the great Brantas river plain of east central Java in 1952. It was less than two years since the Kingdom of the Netherlands had transferred sovereignty, after five years of scattered and intermittent fighting, to the Republic of Indonesia. I was part of a team of graduate students sent out from Harvard to open up that part of the now unowned world for American Social Science. There were 10 of us, including my then wife, and we arrived in Jakarta by ship three weeks from Rotterdam . . . a day after the first attempted coup in the new state’s history. There were tanks in the streets, and the political living rooms of the capital were alive with rumors, hopes, dashed hopes, and imaginings of new conspiracies.≤π

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Geertz confesses he never had a ‘‘year of living dangerously,’’ having arrived to conduct his fieldwork in Indonesia and later Morocco always ‘‘at a pause between a turbulence somehow got through and another one obscurely looming’’—he was, to use Orin Starn’s telling phrase about Peru, an anthropologist ‘‘missing the revolution.’’ My intent here is not to castigate Geertz for choosing to go to Morocco to avoid the political violence in Indonesia, although one might reasonably ask why an anthropology of violence did not emerge from his work (and did not, in fact, emerge in anthropology until the globalizing decade of the 1990s). It is, however, worth exploring how Geertz’s writing is riddled with metaphors of violence and cataclysm; instability and ‘‘agitated stagnation,’’ ‘‘underdeveloped versions of muddling through’’ and ‘‘whistling in the dark’’ mark his writing on the period of decolonization initiated after the founding of the new states. It is not so much the description of the riot that works its way through Geertz’s writing, as it is the apprehension of it. In the opening passages to Geertz’s most compelling essay on the new states, ‘‘The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiment and Civil Politics in the New States’’ (1963), the troubled figure of Jawaharlal Nehru paces across the page, deeply disturbed by his experience on the Linguistic Provinces Committee in 1948, where he was ‘‘face to face with centuries old India of narrow loyalties, petty jeal-

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ousies and ignorant prejudices.’’≤∫ Nehru’s mood was not to improve in 1960 when riots broke out in Assam, resulting in fifty deaths and the flight of 50,000 Bengalis from the region. Nehru bemoaned the fact that ‘‘our superficial covering of what you like to call nationalism bursts open at the slightest irritation. The language question for them had become a symbol of their individuality, of their existence as Assamese, of their future. And when a thing becomes a symbol like that, rightly or wrongly, it becomes di≈cult to deal with. It becomes above reason.’’≤Ω Indeed, for an increasingly pessimistic Nehru, India was a ‘‘haunted place . . . with all kinds of ghosts and specters pursuing us—ghosts of the past, of our feelings, our conflicts.’’≥≠ In Nehru’s language, the use of feelings and symbols was not to be trusted. Ironically, they became the grid for a Geertzian symbolic anthropology of the state.≥∞ Although Geertz edited Old Societies and New States, which included his essay ‘‘The Integrative Revolution,’’ it was David Apter, the executive secretary for the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations, who wrote the preface for the volume, and Edward Shils, quite senior to Geertz at that time, who wrote the lead essay. It was not until 1995, with the publication of After the Fact, that Geertz reflected on his role in the new-nations project. Significantly, Geertz himself suggested that the new-nations project provided the context for the development of his thinking on symbolic anthropology. The question, then, to my mind, is what part did the rise of symbolic anthropology play in the constitution of nations as areas of study? What was the relationship between the rise of symbolic analysis and the crisis of decolonization that confronted anthropology in the late 1960s but was, arguably, not meaningfully addressed for another twenty years? The Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations was formed in 1959–60, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. As Geertz writes, ‘‘The New Nations Committee was conceived by two Chicago Professors, Edward Shils (who had also been peripherally involved in the Social Relations project at Harvard), and the political scientist David Apter.’’≥≤ He continued, In its own way, of course, the Committee was very much a creature of the times. But, focused on understanding the changes consequent upon the collapse of European imperialism after 1945, it was directed outward toward the world in general, not inward toward the domestic malaise. The formation of nearly 50 new states by the early

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1960s, with another 50 promised, virtually all of them in Asia and Africa, virtually all of them weak, unstable, poor, and ambitious, seemed to provide a whole new field of inquiry—one in which comparative study could tease out similarities and di√erences and provide, thereby, guides to intelligent policy.≥≥

The idea for the committee took shape during 1958–59, when Shils, Apter, Lloyd Fallers, and Geertz were fellows at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavorial Sciences at Stanford University.≥∂ Back at the University of Chicago, these four scholars were part of a committee of thirteen (two members—Shils and Marriot— wrote on India): two sociologists, three political scientists, five anthropologists (one of whom was McKim Marriot), an economist, a lawyer, and professor of education.≥∑ A careful reader of Geertz’s essays will find multiple references to the works of both Shils and Fallers. Geertz reports that, during his first five years at the University of Chicago, he was entirely on the committee’s budget, even as he maintained an appointment in the anthropology department and became engaged in the project redefining the ethnographic enterprise as ‘‘symbolic anthropology.’’ Yet the root of the New Nations Committee also lay in what Geertz called the Harvard ‘‘social-relations idea.’’

The Harvard department of social relations, where Geertz began as a student in 1950, had been founded, in 1946, ‘‘by a handful of nationally prominent professors, mostly in their forties, dissatisfied 173

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The time had come for anthropology to turn away from its nearly exclusive focus on ‘‘primitives’’ and begin to investigate large-scale societies directly in the stream of contemporary history. There was the idea that it should also turn away from intellectual isolation, cultural particularism, mindless empricism, and the lone ranger approach to research and begin to work together with other, more conceptualized disciplines (psychology, economics, sociology, political science) in a big push e√ort to construct a unified, generalizing science of society from which could emerge a practical technology for the management of human a√airs. And there was the idea that the groundwork for such a science had already been laid by the great social theorists of the ‘‘long nineteenth century,’’ the one that ended with the First World War—Marx, Freud, Weber, Pareto, Simmel, Durkheim, and somewhat latterly, Malinowski. All that was needed was systematization, funding and the perfection of method.≥∏

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with their own fields as then defined and anxious to rearrange things so as to produce a more broadly integrative approach in the social sciences. There were four subfields, sociology, social psychology, clinical psychology and social anthropology.’’≥π Talcott Parsons, Henry Murray, Clyde Kluckhohn, Samuel Stou√er, Jerome Bruner, and George Homans were some of its leading lights. Geertz reports that his graduate work in Indonesia was part of

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a well-financed, multidisciplinary, long-term, team field project directed toward the study not of an isolated tribal culture but of a two thousand year old civilization fully in the throes of revolutionary change. Of the nine members of the team, six—a sociologist, three anthropologists, a social psychologist, and a clinical psychologist— were from the Social Relations Department as such; of the other three, two were anthropologists from the established Anthropology Department, from which the Social Relations Department was in some sense a breakaway, and one was a historian of China, seconded in from Far Eastern Studies.’’≥∫

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It’s easy to see the Harvard social-relations idea working itself through the structure of the both the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations and Geertz’s own scholarship emerging from his work with the committee.≥Ω As an interdisciplinary group of scholars, however, the committee’s objectives were to seek out, ‘‘through the comparative analysis of new nations, principles that underlie their social and political development’’ to enable the training of students to better observe the new nations themselves.∂≠ As Apter comments, ‘‘The new nations are engaged in a form of social change that makes nation building and material development simultaneous political problems. As a result, all aspects of social life have a heavily political element. In this the new nations are di√erent from most older and established nations. They are characterized by a singular urgency to get on with their tasks. Discontinuities appear in tradition, culture, social organization, and material standards and are being met by new cultural and political forms.’’∂∞ In retrospect, it seems a bit harder to make the distinctions that seemed so obvious to scholars in the 1960s. What nation, for example, is not possessed of an urgency to get on with its tasks? Where in the world is social life ultimately not imbued with a heavy political element? With globalization, where has discontinuity not been met with new cultural and political forms? It is equally clear, however, that the project the Committee for the Comparative Study of New 174

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Nations sought to undertake involved an important rethinking of area studies based on the history of colonialism. Thus, ‘‘rather than emphasizing area specialization, such as Asia, Africa, or the Middle-East, we prefer to consider certain common experiences that the new nations have entertained.’’∂≤ All such new nations have gone through the experience of colonialism and have a common response to colonialism in nationalism. ‘‘Certain countries that experienced British colonialism, for example, are for some purposes more e√ectively comparable than two countries in Africa, that, living side by side, have had di√erent colonial experiences, for example, British and French. Or, Malaya and Taganyika, two plural societies, make more revealing comparison than Tanganyika and Uganda, in spite of the latter’s contiguity and the similarity of their colonial experiences.’’∂≥ But here again we might dispute the rather arbitrary definition of new states coming to independence from colonial status since 1945—one that excluded China, despite a varied history of European contact and colonialism. Thus the postwar definition of the new nations cannot be separated from a concern for the historical event, ‘‘the reaching out, one to the other, of African and Asian nations in the so-called Afro-Asian bloc.’’∂∂ In other words, Bandung. Apter’s passing remark about the Non-Aligned Movement animates the entire collection, and other writers in the collection similarly do not fail to mention it. As a specter of extra-state political organization, it posed a threat both to received forms of internationalism and to First World nationalism. Twenty-nine countries met in Bandung, Indonesia to explore the idea of Afro-Asian unity and to create a third bloc between the first and second world blocs carved out by the Cold War. Although Nehru, Marshal Tito, and Gamal Abdel Nasser held a Yugoslav summit in 1956, the meeting that formally launched the Non-Aligned Movement did not take place until September 1961 in Belgrade. Yet it was Bandung that fired the imagination of black and postcolonial intellectuals. As Richard Wright would write in his report on the Bandung Conference, ‘‘This was a meeting of almost all of the human race living in the main geopolitical center of gravity of the earth. . . . The despised, the insulted and the hurt, the dispossessed—in short the underdogs of the human race were meeting. . . . Who had thought of organizing such a meeting? And what had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel. This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon that Western world!’’∂∑

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Much has been written of the postwar development of area studies. But in indexing this moment as the Cold War period, we forget that area studies deliberately did not address the emergence of a predominantly socialist ‘‘third bloc’’ loosely united around a critique of ‘‘cultural imperialism.’’∂∏ The fact that countries that experienced British colonialism—say, India and Kenya—might share something in common because of a continuity and similarity of colonial experience could be noted, but that shared strategies of opposition to the colonial experience might in itself constitute new areas of study did not brook question. Or perhaps more accurately, it remained the unspoken question throughout the scholarship on the new states. By the time Gunnar Myrdal’s study of South Asia, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, appeared, in 1968, Bandung no longer commanded quite the same trepidation or respect among social scientists, and Myrdal summarily dismissed it. Myrdal’s work in South Asia was undertaken over a period of several years that overlapped his wife Alva Myrdal’s postings as Swedish Ambassador to India, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, between 1955 and 1961. Asian Drama, at three volumes, more than two thousand pages, and including twenty-two appendices, was even more massive than An American Dilemma. In it, Myrdal echoed several of the themes posed by the ‘‘new states’’ writers, particularly in his understanding of the ‘‘drama’’ of complexities and conflicts in South Asia ‘‘speeding toward a climax,’’ with mounting tension, economically, socially and politically (1:34–35). Like other new-nations analysts, Myrdal stressed the conflict between tradition and modernity, but argued that ‘‘modernization ideals directly need nationalist emotions in order to be grasped’’ (1:118). He emphasized ‘‘diverse emotional pressures for change working in a framework of strong inhibitions and obstacles’’ (1:121). The primary question for Myrdal was whether the ‘‘flood of emotions’’ in these ‘‘long stagnant countries’’ could be ‘‘controlled in the interests of national consolidation, rationalism, planning and coordination of national policies for development’’ (1:122). Yet while nationalism in Europe was tinged with romanticism, it was also strongly anticlerical. The problem in South Asia, Myrdal maintained, was that nationalism became associated with religion (1:119). Thus, ‘‘what could in Europe unfold gradually and proceed in grand symphony with one movement following the other in thematic sequence is by destiny syncopated in South Asia into almost a cacophony’’ (1:119–20). Here, Myrdal made explicit the unspoken comparison in new-nations writing between the ‘‘old 176

states’’ of Europe and the new ones of South Asia. While he never quite lapses into Geertz’s primordialism, crediting nationalist intellectuals with rational attitudes in their embrace of full democracy, Myrdal remained pessimistic about South Asia’s ability to e√ectively modernize, for ‘‘the masses everywhere are steeped in ignorance and superstitions to a far worse degree than was true in Europe at that fairly late stage when democracy was being propagated’’ (2:2111). It is possible that Myrdal’s pessimism may in part have had something to do with the strong understanding he developed of the socially divisive and discriminatory e√ects of caste from his work on An American Dilemma. Noting that the Indian Constitution of 1955 made untouchability a criminal o√ense, Mydral saw the persistence of the caste structure as a strong example of the conflict between precept and practice, observing that ‘‘caste is so deeply entrenched in India’s traditions that it cannot be eradicated except by drastic surgery; and for this there has been no serious public pressure. As a result caste is coming more and more to be tacitly accepted and privately condoned’’ (1:278). Characteristically, however, Myrdal saved much of his argument for the appendices, and in appendix 9, ‘‘A Comparison of European and South Asian Nationalism,’’ Myrdal wrote more harshly. In India, and to a lesser extent, in Pakistan, the caste system and all the other social and spatial barriers, and the di√erences in attitudes and modes of living and working that go with these institutions, create unbridgeable chasms and inequalities that split the new nations much worse than the feudal system ever did in medieval Europe. . . . When religion weakens allegiance to the now independent would-be nation-state, they strike out against ‘‘communalism’’ as they do against the other particularist tendencies, founded on other non-rational divisions in traditional society—in India, ‘‘linguism,’’ ‘‘casteism,’’ and ‘‘provincialism.’’ But the fact that they have to keep up this fight proves that this new nationalism, which as earlier in Europe is essentially secular and rational, meets strong forces of resistance. (2:2118)

The cumulative work of the new-nations theorists, including Geertz’s own new-states essays, set the scene for his more extensive writing on 177

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the theater state

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the Balinese state. In fact, the core arguments for his book Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-century Bali (1980), found in the theory of the ‘‘exemplary center’’ and the alternating focus on ritual and structure, are actually laid out in ‘‘Ideology as a Cultural System’’ (1963) and ‘‘The Politics of Meaning’’ (1962). If Geertz’s first essays on the new nations were seen to explore the relationship between old societies and new states, Negara could have been subtitled ‘‘changeless society, timeless state.’’ The book opens as if a colonial o≈cial were still trying to place Indonesia in a typological schema: ‘‘When one looks panoramically at Indonesia today it seems to form a dateless synopsis of its own past, as when the artifacts from di√erent levels of a longoccupied archeological site, scattered along a table, summarize at a glance thousands of years of human history’’ (1). Unsurprisingly, Geertz goes on to comment that the notion of type is not far from his project, for ‘‘one can formulate on the basis of a far-ranging historical sociology, ideal-typical paradigms that isolate the central features of the relevant class of phenomena—the approach made famous, of course, by Max Weber’’ (6). But this is only part of his method, which also involves ethnographic description and analysis of the structure and functioning of a current or recent system ‘‘that one has some reason to believe bears at least familial resemblance to those one seeks to reconstruct, illuminating the more remote by the light of the less’’ (ibid.). The present may indeed help clarify the past (yet another way of saying that the past shapes the present), but Geertz does not ask at what point the present overdetermines our understanding of the past. Indeed, Geertz wants to claim on the basis of the Balinese material that ‘‘one can construct a model of Negara as a distinct variety of political order, a model which can then be used generally to extend our understanding of the developmental history of Indic Indonesia: Cambodia, Thailand, Burma’’ (90). Many an anthropologist has found the slippage easy to forgive. For further along the same page, Geertz disputes the colonial view, propagated by Thomas RaΔes, that modern Bali was a place without history, a museum in which precolonial inner Indonesia was preserved intact. And yet Geertz’s notion of a theater state seemed to deny such a history: ‘‘The expressive nature of the Balinese state was apparent through the whole of its known history, for it was always pointed not toward tyranny, whose systematic concentration of power it was incompetent to e√ect, and not even methodically toward government, which it pursued indi√erently and hesitantly, but rather toward spec-

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tacle, toward ceremony, toward the ruling obsessions of Balinese culture: social inequality and status pride’’ (13). At least one anthropologist has noted the saddling of Southeast Asia with a meaning-based interpretive notion of culture, and as a region where ‘‘the state has taken culture’s place as the generalized and generalizing superorganic center of our theories of meaning.’’∂π And while it is not possible here to detail the response of postcolonial intellectuals to Geertz’s writing, su≈ce it to say that at the Thirtieth International Congress of Human Sciences in Asia and North America, Anouar Abdel-Malek was to conclude that the ‘‘growing recognition of Max Weber’s ideal type approach throughout the whole range of the social sciences in recent years’’ contributed to an essentializing segregationism and exoticism that ‘‘increased the marginalization of non-Western societies’’ by insuring that ‘‘few links, if any, remained with the mainstream socio-cultural power centers.’’∂∫

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During the heyday of symbolic anthropology in the United States, Geertz’s writing was often paradoxically invoked as an argument against comparative analysis. Yet Geertz famously used the two countries he conducted fieldwork in, Indonesia and Morocco, to launch the basis of a comparativist project in a di√erent mode than did Dumont. His mastery of the elementary politics of several places (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Malaysia, Lebanon, Nigeria, Morocco) is impressive, and his attention in The Interpretation of Cultures to epochalism and essentialism (in the sections ‘‘The Spirit of the Age’’ and ‘‘The Indigenous Way of Life,’’ respectively) as historical processes in the news states, while flawed, is also ingenious. For Geertz, Nehru’s India was epochalist, while Gandhi’s was essentialist, ‘‘but the fact that the first was a disciple of the second and the second the patron of the first (and neither managed to convince all Indians that he was not, in the one case, a brown Englishman, or, in the other, a medieval reactionary) demonstrates that the relation between these two routes to self-discovery is a subtle and even paradoxical one.’’∂Ω The paradigmatic example of what Geertz saw as the interplay between the two processes of essentialism and epochalism is language choice, or the ‘‘language issue,’’ which he frames as follows:

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For any speaker of it, a given language is at once either more or less his own or more or less someone else’s, and either more or less cosmopolitan or more or less parochial—a borrowing or a heritage; a passport or a citadel. The question of whether, when and for what purposes to use it is thus also the question of how far a people should form itself by the bent of its genius and how far by the demands of its times. The tendency to approach the ‘‘language issue’’ from the linguistic standpoint, homemade or scientific, has somewhat obscured this fact. Most discussion, inside the new states and out, concerning the ‘‘suitability’’ of a given language for national use has su√ered from the notion that this suitability turns on the inherent nature of the language—on the adequacy of its grammatical, lexical, or ‘‘cultural’’ resources to the expression of complex philosophical, scientific, political or moral ideas. But what it really turns on is the relative importance of being able to give one’s thoughts, however crude and subtle, the kind of force that speaking one’s mother tongue permits as against being able to participate in movements of thought to which only ‘‘foreign’’ or in some cases ‘‘literary’’ languages can give access. It doesn’t matter therefore whether, in concrete form, the problem is the status of classical as against colloquial Arabic in Middle Eastern countries; the place of an elite Western language amid a collection of ‘‘tribal’’ languages in sub-Saharan Africa; the complex stratification of local, regional, national, and international languages in India or the Philippines; or the replacement of a European language of limited world significance by others of greater significance in Indonesia. The underlying issue is the same. It is not whether this or that language is ‘‘developed’’ or ‘‘capable of development;’’ it is whether this or that language is psychologically immediate and whether it is an avenue to the wider community of modern culture. . . . Formulated in this way, the ‘‘language problem’’ is only the ‘‘nationality problem’’ writ small, though in some places the conflicts arising from it are intense enough to make the relationship seem reversed. Generalized, the ‘‘who we are’’ question asks what cultural forms—what systems of meaningful symbols—to employ to give value and significance to the activities of the state, and by extension to the civil life of its citizens. Nationalist ideologies built out of symbolic forms drawn from local traditions—which are, that is, essentialist—tend, like vernaculars, to be psychologically immedi-

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ate but socially isolating; built out of forms implicated in the general movement of contemporary history—that is, epochalist—they tend, like lingua francas, to be socially deprovincializing but psychologically forced.∑≠

There is more to say about Geertz’s assumptions of the ‘‘vernacular,’’ but not before examining Geertz’s application of these ideas to India in his essay on primordial attachments, ‘‘The Integrative Revolution.’’ Here, Geertz makes the link between the weakness of civil society and the strength of primordial bonds: ‘‘In modernizing societies, where the tradition of civil politics is weak and where the technical requirements for an e√ective welfare government are poorly understood, primordial attachments tend, as Nehru discovered, to be repeatedly, in some cases almost continually proposed and widely acclaimed as preferred bases for the demarcation of autonomous political units. And the thesis that truly legitimate authority flows only from the inherent coerciveness such attachments are conceived somehow to possess is frankly, energetically, and artlessly defended.’’∑∞ Geertz follows with a passage from Thoughts on Linguistic States (1955) by B. R. Ambedkar, Indian constitutionalist and statesman and the Dalit leader. Ambedkar wrote, The reasons why a unilingual state is stable and a multilingual state unstable are quite obvious. A state is built on fellow feeling. What is this fellow feeling? To state briefly it is a feeling of a corporate sentiment of oneness which makes those who are charged with it feel that they are kith and kin. This feeling is a double-edged feeling. It is at once a feeling of ‘‘consciousness of kind’’ which, on the one hand, binds together those who have it so strongly that it overrides all di√erences arising out of economic conflicts or social gradations and, on the other, severs them from those who are not of their kind. It is a longing not to belong to any other group. The existence of this fellow feeling is the foundation of a stable and democratic state.∑≤

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Here, it is clear that Geertz viewed Ambedkar’s writing as an illustration of ‘‘the crystallization of a direct conflict between primordial and civil sentiments—this longing not to belong to any other group —that gives to the problem variously called tribalism, parochialism, communalism and so on, a more ominous and deeply threatening quality than most of the other, also very intractable problems the new states face.’’∑≥ What Geertz’s writing on primordial sentiments obscured were the rather blatant political or economic interests that

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shaped their emergence. Yet to o√er a suitable reply to Geertz’s misappropriation of Ambedkar, we must address the complex history of language politics in India. Ambedkar’s Thoughts on Linguistic States was preceded by Thoughts on Pakistan (1940; the second edition was titled Pakistan, or the Partition of India), wherein he first defines nationalism as ‘‘a longing not to belong to any other group.’’∑∂ In Thoughts on Pakistan, the question of language is laid out rather carefully in the second chapter, ‘‘A Nation Calling for Home.’’ If nationalism is ‘‘a longing not to belong to any other group,’’ Ambedkar suggested, one should apply that criterion to the Muslim claim for Pakistan: ‘‘Is it or is it not a fact that the Muslims of India are an exclusive group? Is it or is it not a fact that they have a consciousness of kind? Is it or is it not a fact that that every Muslim is possessed by a longing to belong to his own group, and not to any other group?’’ (13). Ambedkar argued that if the answers to these questions were in the a≈rmative, ‘‘then the controversy must end, and the Muslim claim that they are a nation must be accepted without cavil’’ (ibid). Ambedkar challenges Hindus to show that ‘‘there are enough a≈nities between Hindus and Musalmans to constitute them into one nation, or . . . which make Hindus and Muslims long to be together’’ (ibid.). Ambedkar concedes that there is no di√erence of ‘‘race’’ between Hindus and Muslims, that the land both communities inhabit has been shared for centuries, that social and religious customs are intermingled and shared, and that languages, too, are shared.

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It is said that the Musalmans have no common language of their own which can mark them o√ as a linguistic group separate from the Hindus. On the contrary, there is a complete linguistic unity between the two. In the Punjab, both Hindus and Muslims speak Punjabi. In Sindh, both speak Sindhi. In Bengal, both speak Bengali. In Gujarat, both speak Gujarati. In Maharashtra, both speak Marathi. So in every province. It is only in towns that the Musalmans speak Urdu and the Hindus the language of the province. But outside, in the mofussil, there is complete linguistic unity between Hindus and Musalmans.∑∂ (14)

Ambedkar concludes that because Hindus and Muslims do not share common historical antecedents that bind them together, ‘‘there was no common cycle of participation for a common achievement. Their past is of mutual destruction—a past of mutual animosi-

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ties, both in political as well as in the religious fields’’ (18). Hindus revere the memory of Shivaji, for example, and Muslims remember Aurangazeb. ‘‘Political and religious antagonisms divide the Hindus and Musalmans more deeply than the so-called common things that bind them together’’ (ibid). These assertions are highly contested, of course, and Ambedkar’s rhetorical use of polarizing Hindu and Muslim figures to make his argument should also not go unremarked. Ambedkar, in other words, is not suggesting that language is a kind of primordial trait that distinguishes one group of people from another. It is, rather, the state’s use of language which brings this to fruition, and postpartition linguistics bear this out. Three years after partition, a majority of Pakistanis (93 percent) and a majority of Indian Muslims (62 percent) spoke a language other than Urdu. Indeed, a majority of Pakistanis today still do not speak Urdu as their first language. Hindustani, the bridge between Hindi and Urdu, had 50 percent more speakers than did Urdu in 1951, but had virtually disappeared from the o≈cial statistics by 1961.∑∑ Aijaz Ahmad notes that not only were there movements across territorial boundaries, but movements of millions of people from one language category to another: from Hindustani to Hindi, from Hindustani to Urdu, as the new states of India and Pakistan presented language as a choice between Hinduism and Islam.∑∏ Myrdal was equally pointed on the subject: ‘‘The split of the syncretized Hindustani into Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi has produced a much smaller language in terms of popular usage. . . . The Indian philologists who have devoted their e√orts to improving Hindi have usually been purists, eager to cleanse it of foreign words, and to enrich it by adding words from Sanskrit. As a result Hindi has tended to become a strange language even to the people who live in the area that is o≈cially supposed to be Hindi speaking.’’∑π Aside from the passage in Thoughts on Pakistan, Ambedkar said no more on the language question until 1955, in Thoughts on Linguistic States, which he penned as a reply to the recommendations of the report of the States Reorganization Commission.∑∫ This is not the place to enter into the voluminous literature on Ambedkar which sees him either as a spoiler of national unity or as a champion of minority interests endowed with superior foresight. It is su≈cient to note that to the extent to which the ‘‘logic of the minority’’ fuelled Ambedkar’s writing, his attempts to safeguard minority interests can be seen to animate his writing on ‘‘linguistic states.’’∑Ω Ambed-

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kar’s principles for the establishment of linguistic states were quite simple:

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1) The idea of having a mixed state must be completely abandoned. 2) Every state must be a unilingual state. One state, one language. 3) The formula one state, one language must not be confused with the formula of one language, one state (for a people speaking one language may be cut up into many states as is done in other parts of the world). 4) The number of states into which people speaking one language should be divided depends on: a) the requirements of e≈cient administration b) the needs of the di√erent areas c) the sentiments of the di√erent areas and d) the proportion between the majority and minority. 5) As the area of the state increases the proportion of the minority to the majority decreases and the position of the minority becomes precarious and the opportunities for the majority to practice tyranny over the minority become greater. The States must therefore be small. 6) The minorities must be given protection to prevent the tyranny of the majority.∏≠

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Ambedkar thought the creation of linguistic states according to the principle of one state, one language was the route that all states passed through, though there were notable exceptions in bilingual states such as Switzerland or Canada. But in his chapter ‘‘The Limits of Linguism,’’ in Thoughts on Linguistic States, he also noted the danger that ‘‘a linguistic state with its regional language as its o≈cial language may easily develop into an independent nationality. The road between an independent nationality and an independent State is very narrow’’ (15). Ambedkar’s solution was to have English or Hindi serve as the o≈cial language, and Hindi as the national language. In all this, Ambedkar clearly did not think of language as more than a strategic interest. When, for example, he first asks, ‘‘Why do Tamils hate Andhras and Andhras hate Tamils? Why do Andhras in Hyderabad hate Maharastrians and Maharastrians hate Andhras? Why do Gujaratis hate Maharashtrians and Maharashtrians hate Gujaratis?’’; he then replies, ‘‘The answer is very simple. It is not because there is any natural antipathy between the two. The hatred is due to the fact that they are put into juxtaposition and forced to take part in 184

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a common cycle of participation, such as Government. There is no other answer’’ (14). Interestingly, Ambedkar used these examples as a means of arguing against what he called the ‘‘composite’’ states of Bombay and the Madras Presidency, where the structure of interests necessitated conflicts between groups that were marked linguistically. Take away the competition of one group for power with another, and the structure of linguistic antagonism, Ambedkar predicted (correctly, as it turned out), would melt away. But there was still regional antagonism between North and South.∏∞ Ambedkar characterized the North as predominantly Hindispeaking and the South as non-Hindi speaking, arguing that the size of the Hindi-speaking population was as much as 48 percent of the population of India. Ambedkar reveals that when the draft constitution was being considered, no article was more controversial than Article 115, which called for the adoption of Hindi as the national language, and which barely won by a vote of 78 to 77. Ambedkar took this to be evidence of the South’s dislike of the North, a dislike that might grow into hatred if the North remained consolidated and the South was ‘‘disintegrated’’ (20). Ambedkar charged that ‘‘in creating this consolidation of the North and the balkanization of the South, the Commission did not realize they were dealing with a political and not a merely linguistic problem’’ (23, emphasis added). Ambedkar then raised the objections of his longtime foe and political adversary, C. Rajagopalachari, former chief minister of the Madras Presidency, against partitioning the South into four or five separate states: ‘‘You are committing a great mistake. One federation for the whole of India with equal representation for all areas will not work. In such a federation the Prime Minister and President of India will always be from the Hindi speaking area. You should have two federations, one federation for the North and one federation of the South’’ (22). The man who regarded himself as ‘‘the philosopher of Pakistan,’’ (16) called Rajaji (Rajagopalachari) the ‘‘prophet predicting the break-up of India into the North and South’’ and exhorted his readers to ‘‘do everything’’ to falsify Rajaji’s prophecy (23), warning that ‘‘it must not be forgotten that there was a civil war in the USA between the North and the South. There may also be a civil war between the North and South in India. Time will supply many grounds for such a conflict. It must not be forgotten that there is a vast cultural di√erence between the North and the South and cultural di√erences are very combustible’’ (23).∏≤ Linguism, for Ambedkar, was the site for the articulation of politi-

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cal interests. That most of the nationalist politicians of the day understood this cannot go unsaid. Nehru himself, writing in his autobiography, held that ‘‘narrow political demands, benefiting at the most a small number of the upper middle classes, and often creating barriers in the way of national unity and progress, were cleverly made to appear the demands of the masses of that particular religious group. Religious passion was hitched on them in order to hide their barrenness.’’∏≥ This allows us to reframe the image of Nehru pacing across the opening paragraph of Geertz’s essay—for Nehru clearly understood the assertion of primordial attachment as a means of articulating political interest. My point here is not to insist that primordialism is really just instrumentalism in disguise, or to argue instrumentalist interpretations are superior to symbolic or constructionist ones. But Geertz’s misreading of both Ambedkar and Nehru, is I think, an unfortunate one. Geertz confused what was, for Ambedkar, a tactical argument with a primordialist one, and misread Nehru’s despair over the tactical use of primordialism as despair over regional attachments themselves. In short, lingualism—one of Geertz’s readily enumerable primordial traits and, according to him, ‘‘particularly intense in the Indian subcontinent’’—can clearly be seen as political and, in the case of Hindi and Urdu, as state interests.∏∂ People may be mobilized through language and culture, but culture and language do not always motivate them as a set of spontaneous or reactive impulses. In fact, for most of the working peoples of South Asia, multilingualism is a simple act of economic survival: as they migrate in search of work, they acquire and speak new languages of labor. It is this multilingualism—a source of social resiliency and of plural society— that remains undocumented and poorly understood in South Asian area studies.∏∑ The new-states writing of the 1960s provided the social sciences with a tool for challenging and displacing anticolonial formulations of national culture which threatened, through forms of internationalism like the Non-Aligned Movement, to destabilize the cultural project of progress instigated by the West. Geertzian symbolic anthropology, as a subset of that writing, enabled the discipline to avoid confronting its colonial legacy for another twenty years. In so doing, however, it activated an evaluative and absolutist notion of culture the discipline thought it had left behind. In this history obscured by the very object that launched a discipline, culture can no longer be reduced to ‘‘a√ective states.’’ 186

conclusion: cultures in common Ambedkar was a brilliant and complex thinker, who, as we saw in the preceding chapter, sometimes turned to the black experience in the United States as a means of conceptualizing democratic rights for Dalits. Recent work on Ambedkar has pointed to his support for Pakistan as political calculus designed to insure that Dalits remained the largest minority within the Indian nation-state.∏∏ And, indeed, of his own instrumentalism when making the case for the partition of India. Ambedkar wrote,

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Reliance is placed . . . upon certain common features in the social and cultural life of the two communities. It is pointed out that the social life of many Muslim groups is honeycombed with Hindu customs. For instance, the Avans of the Punjab, though they are nearly all Muslims, retain Hindu names and keep their genealogies in Brahmanic fashion. Hindu surnames are found among Muslims. For instance, the surname Chaudhari is a Hindu surname but is common among the Musalmans of U.P and Northern India. In the matter of marriage, certain groups are Muslims in name only. They either follow the Hindu form of the ceremony alone, or perform the ceremony first by the Hindu rites and then call the Kadi and have it performed in the Muslim form. In some sections of Muslims, the law applied is the Hindu Law in the matter of marriage, guardianship and inheritance. Before the Shariat Act was passed, this was true even in the Punjab and N.W.F.P. In the social sphere, the caste system is alleged to be as much a part of Muslim society as it is of Hindu society. In the religious sphere, it is pointed out that many Muslim pirs had Hindu disciples; and similarly some Hindu yogis have had Muslim chelas. Reliance is placed on instances of friendship between saints as the rival creeds. At Girot, in the Punjab, the tombs of two ascetics, Jamali Sultan and Diyal Bhawan, who lived in close amity during the early part of the 19th century, stand close to one another, and are reverenced by Hindus and Musalmans alike. Bawa Fathu, a Muslim saint, who lived about 1700 A.D. and whose tomb is at Rainital in the Kangra District, received the title of prophet by the blessing of a Hindu saint, Sodhi Guru Gulab Singh. On the other hand, Baba Shahana, a Hindu saint whose cult is observed in the Jang District, is said to have become the chela of a Muslim pir who changed his original name (Mihra) of his Hindu follower, into Mir Shah.∏π

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There was, of course, absolutely nothing wrong with Ambedkar’s ethnography. It was stunningly and wonderfully accurate. The question is why Ambedkar, with a clear conscience, could say that none of this—the shared cultures, languages, and religious traditions— mattered, that what people shared was less important than the political interests that divided them. It is thus important to remember that when Ambedkar proclaimed that ‘‘the genius of India is quite different than the genius of Canada, Switzerland and South Africa,’’ that the genius of India was to divide and the genius of Switzerland, South Africa, and Canada was to unite, he was articulating a structure of political choices, an epochal blueprint for making political decisions, not an essentialized description of lived polity.∏∫ Globalization produces new forms of cultural hybridity, but older forms of syncretism or composite culture still remain on the subcontinent, not as forms of cultural survival, but as actively a≈rmed and recreated living traditions. Yet Ambedkar’s form of ethnographic description is increasingly rare in anthropology today—perhaps because there is no name for it, no concept of culture that could adequately describe it. It is, rather, traditionally trained area-studies and religious-studies scholars who have undertaken the important work of documenting South Asia’s shared religious and cultural traditions, its cultures in common.∏Ω This commitment to documenting the practices of composite cultures that bypass the social sciences of primordialism are also at odds with the purist forms that cultural nationalists dream up, the instrumentalist choices of politicians, and the re-organicized, symbolic models of culture that anthropologists of a particular generation utilized.

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chapter 7

¡ Gendered States Rethinking Culture as a Site of South Asian Human-Rights Work

In the late 1990s the titles of many Amnesty International reports for South Asia were arresting: Women in Afghanistan: The Violations Continue (June 1997), Bangladesh: Institutional Failures Protect Alleged Rapists (July 1997), India: Amnesty International Campaigns Against Rape and Sexual Abuse by Members of the Security Forces in Assam and Manipur (November 1998), Pakistan: Honor Killings of Girls and Women (September 1999). These were followed by newspaper headlines on the plight of Afghan women, which were so readily generated by the U.S. administration of George W. Bush as a justification for going to war with Afghanistan in October 2001. The title of this essay is drawn from the way particular nation-states— Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka—are often reduced to a set of cultural practices deemed violent for women in human-rights reporting. The transparency with which human-rights claims are made about South Asia can be assessed by exploring how the language of universal feminism and human rights recreates patterns of cultural deviance which fall disproportionately on some nations and geographical areas, and not on others.∞ In the last essay, I explored the ways in which a certain strand of modernization theory in the 1960s rendered primordiality as a kind of ‘‘a√ective state,’’ I now ask how culture is gendered such that particular countries or nation-states are marked by their crimes against women, identified not as democracies or dictatorships, but as bride-burners or honor-killers. In the process of gendering states, how is it that women become exiled, not from their nations of origin, but from their communities of birth or a≈liation? In asking such questions, my objective is neither to reject nor to condemn feminist human-rights work (which is urgently needed), but rather to explore some of its (unintended) consequences as a mode of sub-

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jectification when women’s rights are divorced from community or nation-state and relocated in an abstract international realm. In analyzing how contemporary human-rights discourses recapitulate a nineteenth-century ‘‘woman question’’ by depicting brown women in need of saving from brown men by First World human-rights activists (to paraphrase Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), I address how a current debate in feminist theory—the critique of feminist universalism (or gender essentialism), that is, the idea that all women have something in common, regardless of race, class, sexuality, or national origin—founders on human-rights work in South Asia.≤ This essay then, examines how culture brings human-rights talk on South Asia into crisis. The critique of gender essentialism posits that women share nothing in common as women that warrants the attempt to understand women’s condition as a universal one. Women become women in ways as complex and diverse as the world’s sexual orientations, class, religious, and cultural formations might suggest. If the second-wave feminism of Robin Morgan posited a global sisterhood based on shared victimization, and Mary Daly catalogued a list of cultural practices from footbinding to sati as instances of women’s universal degradation, feminists like Bernice Johnson Reagon and Chandra Mohanty were quick to assert shared survival as the basis of feminist solidarity and resistance. These writers have also made it clear that claims to the very category of experience reified woman as a universal subject. Yet most feminist human-rights work locates the foundation of feminist internationalism in women’s shared experience of oppression, constructing a transnational identity of ‘‘woman.’’ With respect to the feminist legal scholarship on human rights, Vasuki Nesiah has written cogently,

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Most feminist human rights theorists posit the experience of the denial of women’s human rights across the globe as proof of, and grounds for, an international sisterhood. They emphasise that although women are ‘‘one half of humanity,’’ they su√er oppression all over the world. They thus illustrate a gendered gap between rights theory and action. The attraction of the human rights framework is notable. . . . If ‘‘woman’’ could become ‘‘a name for a way of being human,’’ then the gap between the rights women have as women, and the rights they should have as humans would be eliminated.≥

Nesiah warns that this form of feminist universalism masks global structural contradictions in gender oppression. There are times, 190

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however, when the critique of feminist universalism, when it rests on the axis of cultural di√erentiation, is indistinguishable from a form of cultural essentialism that uses gender as the logic of articulation. Contemporary human-rights discourse on women is one such example, producing the ‘‘female subjects of public international law’’ through a notion of the ‘‘exotic other female.’’∂ On the one hand, legal instruments such as gender asylum rely on an understanding of universal rights that give women venues for redress against gender discrimination outside their nation-state of origin. On the other hand, such human-rights ‘‘instruments’’ also depend on the naming of culturally specific practices such as dowry harassment, honor killings, or female genital mutilation as a means of validating universal principles of justice, precisely by pointing to how violence against women is culturally constructed and results in what philosopher Uma Narayan has called ‘‘death by culture.’’∑ Anthropological culturalism plays a role here even as most feminist anthropologists would acknowledge that gender subordination is a feature of all known societies. Others, like the political philosopher, Susan Okin, assume an implicit scaling for understanding women’s rights cross-culturally. Thus, ‘‘in many cultures in which women’s basic civil rights and liberties are formally assured, discrimination practiced against women and girls within the household not only severely constrains their choices, but also severely threatens their well-being and even their lives.’’∏ Lest one think Okin might also be referring to women in the United States or Europe, she clarifies, ‘‘Western majority cultures, largely at the urging of feminists, have recently made substantial e√orts to preclude or limit excuses for brutalizing women’’—the presumption being that other societies have not made similar e√orts.π A recent article in the New York Times, on the United Nations Children’s Fund (unicef) campaign on Violence Against Women, also aptly illustrates the point: ‘‘In some countries, even when laws defending the right of men to use violence against women are repealed, the culture that created them continues to exert a tremendous influence over behavior. . . . The situation is worst across a swath of countries stretching from the Mediterranean to the edge of Southeast Asia, especially Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.’’∫ Given the strength and vibrancy of feminist movements in South Asia—movements that can produce remarkable documents, such as the 1996 apology from Pakistani feminists to Bangladeshi women for the rapes and abductions of the 1971 war—the move to assign particular atrocities to cultural norms rather than political conflict is one

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that bears scrutiny.Ω Clearly, the articulate and outspoken women who organize to change the unjust conditions that a√ect their lives also find support and sustenance from the cultures that produce them as individuals.∞≠ Although this essay focuses on one particular legal instrument (political asylum) as it relates to human rights, the un, and newspaper reports, it bypasses a conventional definition of human rights founded in international protocols. My understanding of what constitutes human rights not only operates at the level of international conventions, but includes refugee and immigration law as it operates within particular nation-states, local dispute resolution practices which function largely outside the domain of formal courts, and grassroots activist movements, or what are now being called ‘‘transnational advocacy networks.’’∞∞ My aim here is to stage a conflict between the recognition of civil rights or liberties in the national realm and human rights in the international realm, to describe what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have called a ‘‘juridical formation’’ consisting of flexible networks of authority and sovereignty, and mechanisms of command that establish continuities through the horizontally linked institutions of the new world order—the International Monetary Fund (imf) and the World Bank, non-governmental organizations (ngos) such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, global-health organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières—as well as the new regional political-economic structures, including General Agreement on Tari√s and Trade (gatt), the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta), the European Union (eu), the Organization of African Unity (oau), and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (saarc).∞≤ If we are to locate human rights in the world system, then we need to understand its increasing linkage to structural adjustment policies, and, as Saskia Sassen urges, the overlap and contradiction between global and national arenas.∞≥ This overlap is not seamless, but rather productive of disjunctures and displacements which are amenable to the form of analytic cartography this paper also undertakes. As some analysts have observed, the international community created two distinct legal regimes for the articulation of human rights: the regime of international human-rights law to monitor and deter abuse, and the refugee law regime to provide surrogate state protection for those crossing borders.∞∂ Some have seen these two bodies of law to be mutually reinforcing, with refugee law being able 192

to absorb Nuremburg human-rights jurisprudence, or being in the vanguard of a√ording protection for certain kinds of persecution (sexual-orientation asylum) in advance of changes made to international treaties and protocols.∞∑ Others have seen these bodies of law to be more distant from each other, in part because international refugee law is seen to be imbedded in the domestic law of particular countries.∞∏ The United States, for example, is not a party to the 1951 un Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, but Congress did pass the Refugee Act of 1980 to bring the United States in compliance with its ratification of the 1967 un Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. Tensions also emerge between international and domestic refugee law, however, as when the United States initiated its ‘‘expedited removal process’’ for asylum applicants under the terms of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, putting domestic policy in conflict with the Refugee Convention’s principle of ‘‘non-refoulement’’ imbedded in the Refugee Protocol.∞π The emergence of gender-based asylum as a category of political asylum is a good example of how international human-rights law and refugee law regimes come into contact in particular regions of the world. Perceived failures in the workings of law internal to South Asian nation-states become the basis for a displacement of women’s rights into unenforceable international protocols such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (now known as cedaw).∞∫ This process in turn places pressures on refugee law to ‘‘open up,’’ so that refugee law, as a subset of the immigration laws of particular countries, becomes the means for realizing human rights precisely because international conventions cannot be enforced.∞Ω In other words, there is a displacement of women’s rights from the national realm to the international, resulting in their reintroduction into another, explicitly national realm, creating simultaneous moments of disarticulation and rearticulation.

the emergence of gender-based asylum

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About 20 percent of the one million immigrants to the United States are political refugees, pointing to displacements at the level of international refugee law and creating a new immigration regime in the United States, where human-rights discourse becomes the means of defending ‘‘illegal immigrants.’’ In the last two decades, there

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have been increasing numbers of gender-based asylum cases heard in the United States. Women filing such claims have often been victims of domestic violence, and their immigration status is usually contingent upon their husband’s visa status. If the woman’s husband is a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident, the woman can file a ‘‘battered spouse waiver’’ under provisions of the Violence Against Women Act (vawa) in order to stay in the country. If, however, a woman is unmarried, or her spouse is not a citizen or permanent resident, an asylum claim may be the only thing standing between her and deportation.≤≠ In recent years, new forms of political asylum have emerged to contend with issues of sexuality and violations of women’s human rights. Though more than half the refugees in the world are women (and 80 percent of all refugees are women and children), genderbased (or gender) asylum is a recent concept under U.S. immigration law, emerging in part from the di≈culties women have had in filing successful claims for political asylum. The un High Commission for Refugees, the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees define refugee as a person ‘‘with a well-founded fear of persecution due to his or her race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a social group.’’≤∞ Women who did not fall into the first four categories usually sought asylum under ‘‘membership in a social group.’’ Historically, women had little success obtaining political asylum in the United States when facing gender-based persecution argued under membership in a social group. In the 1980s, for example, Salvadoran women who petitioned that rape had been used as a political tool to intimidate them and their families were denied asylum because immigration judges understood rape to be a private act or an expression of random, ‘‘spontaneous sexual impulses’’ committed by individual military o≈cers or guerrillas in their own self interest. In one case, even the chanting of political slogans during a rape did not persuade the judge that the act was public or political in nature.≤≤ Women were thus unable to prove they had been singled out for rape because of membership in a particular social or political group. Though rape has frequently been used as a political weapon during times of war and ethnic or communal conflict (most recently in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, but also during the partition of India, in 1947, and the Bangladesh War for Independence, in 1971), it has not always been seen as a form of persecution.≤≥ The mass rapes of Bos194

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nian women by Serbian forces during 1991–92, however, and the insistence of the international community that rape be treated as a human-rights violation and war crime have helped to establish it as a form of gender persecution.≤∂ Following the 1991 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (unhcr) Guidelines for the Protection of Refugee Women and the 1992 unhcr Handbook, which holds that circumstances surrounding women’s fear of persecution may be ‘‘unique to women,’’ Canada, in March 1993, became the first country to issue Guidelines on Women Refugee Claimants Fearing Gender-related Persecution. These guidelines have been the model for U.S. law on the subject. A person seeking asylum must establish actual or well-founded fear of persecution, which hinges on two elements. First, the harm apprehended has to amount to persecution. The claimant may be the victim of violent crime, but that does not necessarily count as persecution. Second, there is the question of state accountability for the infliction of harm. If the state is unwilling or unable to control the perpetrators of persecution, a case for asylum can be made. In March 1995, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (ins) issued a memorandum, Considerations for Asylum O≈cers Adjudicating Asylum Claims from Women, which, like the Canadian guidelines, defined two broad areas of gender persecution which can be argued under ‘‘membership in a particular social group’’: (1) the persecution is a type of harm that is specific to the applicant’s gender (such as domestic violence, rape, sexual abuse, genital mutilation, bride burning, infanticide, forced marriage, forced sterilization or forced abortion); and (2) the persecution is imposed because of the applicant’s gender (as in violation of social norms defining women’s roles, or refusal to accept restrictions of women’s rights).≤∑ An example of an asylum claim that meets the first criteria for gender persecution might be that of an Indian Hindu woman who has faced physical or sexual abuse from her husband or in-laws for inability to meet continual dowry demands. Despite the fact that the giving and receiving of dowry is illegal in India, and that recent legislation exists with the intent of making it easier for women to file dowry-harassment complaints, dowry harassment in India frequently results in death or severe injury in the form of ‘‘bride burnings.’’ Since the state fails to protect women by enforcing its own laws, the claimant could plead that her forced return to India would be life threatening. Another example of gender persecution argued under the first cri-

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teria might be the case of a Pakistani woman who has been raped by an outsider or family member. Under the Hudood Ordinances, a woman must corroborate her complaint with the testimony of four male witnesses. Failure to prove that sexual contact occurred without her consent makes the woman herself subject to criminal prosecution for adultery or fornication. False cases of Hudood o√enses may also be registered against women who are seeking divorce, who choose to marry against their parent’s wishes, or because they are related to men who are wanted by the authorities for other reasons.≤∏ Although the unhcr guidelines state that the line between discrimination and persecution is unclear, and that a woman seeking refugee status cannot base her claim solely on being subject to laws she objects to, the Hudood Ordinances can be seen as a form of legal discrimination which is persecutory because, while all Pakistani citizens are subject to these laws, they are disproportionately applied to women, and with more devastating consequences. An example of an asylum claim filed under the second criteria might be an Afghan Muslim woman who refused to veil in public, although the Taliban interpretation of Islamic law in Afghanistan required women to do so. Since the punishment or social sanctions for a woman who defied this aspect of the law might be severe or life threatening, she could make a case for being awarded gender asylum in this country. In fact, asylum was granted on these grounds for twelve of the nineteen cases I reviewed that were filed by Afghan women in the United States as of August 2000. The Clinton administration’s opposition to the Taliban regime had resulted in the State Department doubling its resettlement quota for South Asian refugees, from 4,000 to 8,000, specifically to allow more Afghan women into the country.≤π

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women as a social group and ‘‘essential’’ persecutions

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Although the above three examples of South Asian gender-asylum cases establish gender persecution under ‘‘membership in social group’’ in di√erent ways, one of the di≈culties with the case law developed around gender asylum is that it tended to naturalize a collapsing of gender with ‘‘women’’ such that all the persecutions faced by women became de facto examples of gender persecution. Rape and domestic violence, harms typically associated with women, 196

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also have male victims or may involve same-sex partners, but appeared in the law review literature as predominantly heterosexual women’s concerns.≤∫ The narrow understanding of gender in genderasylum cases eventually provoked advocacy of a series of ‘‘sexual orientation’’ asylum cases that faltered on the definition of ‘‘social group’’ used by a number of courts for adjudicating gender-asylum cases.≤Ω For example, a 1985 Bureau of Immigration Appeals (bia) decision, Matter of Acosta, held that a social group consisted of those who (1) share a common, immutable characteristic or (2) share a characteristic that is so fundamental to one’s identity or conscience that it ought not be changed.≥≠ The bia also named sex as an ‘‘immutable characteristic,’’ which was seen to be critical for women fearing gender-based prosecution, especially for the landmark Fauziya Kasinga case of 1996. Here, the bia ruled that female genital mutilation is a form of persecution, the threat of which can be a basis for granting asylum.≥∞ Thus, the notion of social group operating in Acosta led to a fairly essentialist notion of gender operating in the idea of ‘‘gender persecution,’’ which some theorists would also see as a conflation of (biological) sex with (socially constructed) gender. Although Acosta ’s first definition of social group has been e√ective for many gay male asylum applicants, the immutablity criteria implies a narrow and essentialist definition of sexuality that prevents asylum seekers from defining their sexuality as entirely or partially chosen.≥≤ The second definition in Acosta might similarly require the applicant to prove that sexual orientation is fundamental to his or her identity.≥≥ In the case of Geovanni Hernandez-Montiel, a gay transgender male who dressed e√eminately, for example, the court found that his membership in a social group was not immutable because he chose to dress in women’s clothes, drawing a distinction between identity and conduct.≥∂ The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, however, ruled in favor of Hernandez-Montiel’s asylum petition, adding a test of voluntary associational membership to the immutability and fundamental identity criteria, leading to a more expansive definition of ‘‘particular social group.’’≥∑ Before the recent emergence of a more expansive definition, the narrow application of gender for constituting a particular social group had also led to the erosion of any standard to hold the state accountable for the persecution of women because they were members of distinct ethnic or religious communities. Early arguments for gender asylum held that ‘‘the failure to recognize women as a social group persecuted on account of their gender either ends in the denial

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of otherwise valid claims, or results in the incorrect tailoring of a claim to fit into one of the other specified groups of persecution.’’≥∏ Yet defining women as a social group also meant that the specific political conditions faced by ethnic-minority women tended to be sidelined in favor of emphasizing cultural practices like pardah. For example, while opposition to the imposition of the Taliban restrictions on Afghan women could be argued under other asylum group categories, many have been decided using ‘‘particular social group’’ criteria. In other words, though the Taliban, which was largely dominated by the Pashthun community, also persecuted Afghan religious and ethnic minorities like the Hazara or Tajik, a Tajik woman was more likely to have asylum granted as an Afghan woman facing ‘‘repressive social norms.’’≥π Here we can see how the need for international intervention is signaled by pointing to how violence against women symbolizes a community’s oppression, but the successful gender-asylum application might ignore the role of the state in perpetrating gender violence as part of its strategy for waging ethnic or communal violence because women are understood to be a part of a social group with immutable characteristics, which are shared, regardless of community or culture of origin. Asylum cases typically have a ‘‘state action’’ component for establishing persecution: the harm has to be inflicted by the government or by persons or organizations the government would normally control. Yet the trend in gender-asylum cases has been precisely to push for a recognition of harm by nonstate actors, such that domestic violence has come to be seen as the paradigmatic example of genderspecific abuse committed by private actors. Thus, it was the combination of serious harm in conjunction with the inattention and inaction of the state (or ‘‘state failure’’) that established battering as a systematic discriminatory practice.≥∫ However, the gap between the law and the state’s ability to either make or enforce it was inevitably filled by culture. In other words, the state’s failure to draft legislation protecting women, or to enforce existing laws protecting them, was often attributed to the force of culture, rather than to inadequate state policy or lack of political will. Despite the routine use of anthropologists to provide evidence of harmful cultural practices in genderasylum cases, cases filed on behalf of Muslim women claiming to hold a political opinion (‘‘feminism’’ or membership in women’s organizations) at odds with state laws suggest that many South Asian cases might more ably explained by an analysis of state-level 198

practices, and not by a cultural description of oppression.≥Ω This would still not answer the question, however, of why it is that the preference seems to be to grant gender- and sexual-orientation– asylum cases under the ‘‘social group’’ category, rather than the ‘‘political opinion’’ category, which are more frequently turned down. It is perhaps the case that the United States, as a refugee-receiving country, has a preference for asylees who are cultural victims, rather than political dissidents.

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One of the di≈culties with ‘‘gender persecution’’ as a condition of asylum is that the shift from active state persecution to ‘‘state failure to protect,’’ required to understand rape, domestic violence, or female genital mutilation as forms of persecution, established a relationship between a ‘‘failed state’’ and patriarchal culture, subjecting the cultures of the South to new forms of surveillance and scrutiny. Asylum cases typically use country reports published by the U.S. State Department or human-rights organizations like Amnesty International to help document the persecutions being addressed. Given the heavy tra≈c between human-rights reporting and asylum adjudication, it makes sense to turn to this reporting in more detail. The title of a recent Human Rights Watch report, Crime or Custom? Violence Against Women in Pakistan, suggests that there is a possibility that violence against women might be the result of state policy rather than social ‘‘custom.’’ Yet, while the report makes clear that the Islamization of the law was a policy decision undertaken by the Zia regime, it also makes blanket assertions such as ‘‘Pakistani women remain . . . second class citizens as a result of . . . social and cultural norms and attitudes’’ which are all too frequently reproduced in asylum cases.∂≠ The slippage between government ‘‘institutionalized misogyny’’ and religious or cultural ideas is also illustrated in the following argument on gender persecution, written by a feminist legal scholar. ‘‘The definition of refugee should be expanded to include those with a well-founded fear of persecution because of their gender. This would protect women from institutionalized misogyny in which the government carries out sanctions, or ignores oppression of or violence against women because they are women. The most notorious example of such persecution is probably Islam with its strict rules regarding the status and behavior of women. However,

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similar conditions exist in India under the Hindu religion, in Africa under tribal laws, and in Latin America under the tradition of machismo.’’∂∞ In this passage, we can see how government sanctions are conflated with the ‘‘strict rules’’ of Islam, Hinduism, and tribal laws, though all societies have ‘‘rules regulating the status and behavior of women.’’ Regional and country-specific di√erences in the interpretation of Islamic traditions are obliterated, so that Islam is seen to be universally bad for women, with parallels drawn to Indian Hinduism, African tribalism, and Latin American machismo.∂≤ Gender-asylum cases often straddle the line between communal violence and domestic violence, forcing us to confront the continuities between these forms of violence, and to be attentive to recognizing active state persecution of women as members of minority or oppressed communities. This requires a rigorous analysis of statelevel practices, rather than detailed cultural description. Yet a review of 120 case summaries available from the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies through the year 2000 made it clear that particular countries become associated with particular persecutions: of sixteen cases concerning genital mutilation filed between 1995–2000, all but four were for West Africans, the majority being for Nigerians. Of forty-three cases filed under the category ‘‘Repressive Social Norms,’’ twenty, or almost half, were filed for Afghans, while fifteen (almost one-third) were filed for Irani women. (One was filed for a Pakistani woman, and one for a Nepali woman.) Honor killings, on the other hand, have come to be associated primarily with Jordan and Pakistan. The thirty-five cases filed under rape and sexual violence were spread out over several countries, as were twenty-five cases categorized as domestic-violence cases, with five being from South Asia (one from Nepal, one from India, three from Pakistan). Yet most of the successful asylum cases concerning women who had experienced some form of gender-related violence were actually granted on the basis of race, religion, or political opinion, not membership in a social group. In one Indian case, a Sikh woman who was a member of the All India Sikh Student Federation, and who was arrested and raped by Indian police, received asylum on the basis of political opinion and religion. Similarly, a Bangladeshi Christian woman and her daughter who had been harassed and raped by Muslim men, and whose house had been burned to the ground, were granted asylum on the basis of religious persecution in 1999. Likewise, a Christian Anglo-Pakistani woman married to a Muslim, a Nepalese Christian woman married to a Hindu, and a Tamil Christian Sri Lankan 200

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woman married to a Buddhist were all granted asylum based on race and religion. That a number of these cases involved the communalization of marriage in South Asian plural societies under various forms of religious nationalist regimes is notable. In other words, in a country like Sri Lanka, where the Singhalese-majority state and Tamil militants have been, until recently, engaged in a violent civil war, intercaste and interfaith marriages are subject to more cultural pressure and become vulnerable targets of political attack. The same is true (in di√erent ways) for India and Bangladesh.∂≥ In the preceding five cases, rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence did not constitute the basis for a positive asylum ruling, membership in a persecuted minority group (Sikhs or Christians) provided the basis for the claim. This strategy appropriately puts the emphasis on state practices or ideology, not on culture. While unprecedented lobbying by feminists at the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights in 1993 resulted in the un Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (devaw), and the notion that ‘‘women’s rights are human rights’’ (the rallying cry of the 1995 Women’s Conference in Beijing) seems so commonsensical as to warrant no comment, the call for mainstreaming women’s rights into human-rights protocols often works to condemn cultural practices without analysis of state-level involvement in those practices.∂∂ Thus, on the face of it, the call for Western countries to recognize rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence as valid reasons for an asylum claim seems an enabling gesture. Yet, in so doing a pernicious double movement is enacted whereby universalist criteria are asserted at the expense of culture (women constitute a social group apart from their cultural membership), at the same time that culture is used as a means to specify the qualitative nature of violence, so that heterogeneity and diversity within communities is downplayed in order to establish evidence of persecution.∂∑ The notion of culture itself remains strangely unidimensional and static—a caricature of its worst patriarchal tendencies.∂∏ Sherene Razack, in her criticism of Canadian gender-asylum cases, has noted that the successful asylum seeker must cast herself as a cultural other, ‘‘fleeing from a more primitive culture,’’ and Anita Sinha has similarly shown a tendency to grant gender-based asylum in the United States only when there is a strong ‘‘cultural hook,’’ that is, when the persecutory practices are seen to be cultural in nature (a phenomenon also true of gay gender asylum cases).∂π

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Yet most host states o√ering surrogate protection can no more protect asylees from rape or domestic violence than can their home states. One feminist legal scholar has suggested that since most states cannot protect people from domestic violence, this should become the operating assumption in refugee law, and evidentiary hurdles for claimants seeking to demonstrate failure of state protection should either be lowered or eliminated entirely.∂∫ The contradictions of South Asian immigrants who have experienced domestic or sexual violence in the United States (as a continuation of the violence they have experienced in the subcontinent), yet apply for asylum in the United States are immense. Asylees fleeing domestic violence, rape, or other persecutions in their home country are often confronted with the same set of harms in the host country through institutionalized sexism, racism, or homophobia. As Saeed Rahman puts it,

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One of the things that I learned during my asylum process, and one that I hope lawyers are aware of, is that the language around asylum applications is rooted in imperialism. The ways in which the asylee and his or her country were constructed, in fact, the entire discourse was at times problematic for me. It is incredibly di≈cult as a colonized subject not to feel discomfort when colonial language is being produced to describe your country of origin. When lawyers use terms like intolerant, police brutality, Islamic fundamentalism, etc., images of the Third World, underdeveloped folks, backwardness and fanaticism are evoked. . . . However, for some asylees this can be a di≈cult discussion. . . . We are also aware of the ways in which our histories are shaped by the U.S. For instance, in my case, I grew up under a military dictatorship in Pakistan which was strongly supported and maintained by the United States. . . . It would not have worked out to my advantage if I gave an introductory class to my immigration o≈cer on U.S.–Pakistan relations. . . . It needs to be clear that although there are homophobic practices in di√erent parts of the world, the ways in which they are talked about in front of the ins works within a highly problematic framework. . . . It needs to be acknowledged that we do not all come to the table with the same types of negotiating power in determining historical, political and cultural context. It is also important to know that universal human rights do not seem to include the violations that happen in the U.S. It is still legal in certain states to fire, evict and harass queers. . . . Even though there are important laws in this country to fight homophobia, granting asylum does not mean that the same kinds of homophobic prac-

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tices will not happen here. When standards are placed on other nations, they should be consistently maintained here.∂Ω

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As Rahman’s narrative suggests, the deployment of apparently culturally specific descriptions of violence does not result in the strategic use of an essentialism we should endorse. A more sound tactic would be to try to distinguish between gender-enabling and genderdiscriminatory practices within South Asian cultures; in this way the emphasis is on particular values, institutions, or practices within a culture that are patriarchal, so that no one culture or community is characterized as exclusively patriarchal. To do so is only to recognize that gender norms within cultures are frequently contested by people themselves, and that many cultures also carry feminist traditions of resistance and rebellion. A mischaracterization of women’s complex relation to patriarchy elsewhere leads to a misrecognition of patriarchy in the United States, which has profound consequences for feminist movements in this country. The hypervisibility of culturally constructed violence against women in South Asia is linked to the continued pervasiveness and invisibility of violence against women in the United States.∑≠ The double movement between the universal and the culturally particular in human-rights discourse pits a woman’s rights against her community’s rights, as if they were separable elements, for the very articulation of the category ‘‘women as a social group’’ depends on splitting women from their cultures. It is, in fact, the very success of mainstreaming a particular form of feminism into human-rights culture that leads Michael Ignatie√ to proclaim, ‘‘Human rights is the only universally available moral vernacular that validates the claims of women and children against the oppression they experience in patriarchal and tribal societies; it is the only vernacular that enables dependent persons to perceive themselves as moral agents and to act against practices—arranged marriages, purdah, genital mutilation, domestic slavery and so on, that are ratified by the weight and authority of their cultures.’’∑∞ Yet the critique of gender essentialism also suggests that a woman’s rights are often inseparable from her community’s rights, so surely moral agency is generated as much through those communities as through the discourse on human rights. This is also literally true in India, where a woman’s civil rights are imbedded in the personal laws of her community. That this situation is inherited from colonial times does not make it any less a subject of debate and critique.∑≤ Indeed,

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it is one of the major issues facing the civil-liberties community in India today. For countries like India, with long histories of democratic contestation, the current practice of recognizing gender-based persecution as it occurs with regard to membership in a social group based on religion or ethnicity is probably a better alternative than arguing for domestic violence to be seen as a form of gender-based persecution.∑≥ This is because the standard used to show that the Indian state is negligent in enforcing its own laws, or that a women facing harassment cannot reasonably move to another part of the country, never takes into account the considerable resources provided by women’s groups and lawyers who are working not only to change laws, but to see that they are enforced. In other words, successful U.S. genderasylum cases argued on the basis of domestic violence might have the unintended e√ect of undermining the civil-liberties movement and feminist democratic politics in India and other parts of South Asia.∑∂ The irony is that international law would not have changed without the influence of those feminist movements, yet the successful application of asylum law must assume that those movements either do not exist or are too weak to provide protection and sustenance to women victims and survivors who have galvanized those very movements.∑∑ Aiwha Ong has questioned the tendency of ‘‘cosmopolitan feminists’’ to focus on the unequal distribution of gender rights across the world, and in a like vein, one must ask why it is that feminist legal scholarship finds its surest footing in portraying South Asian women as victim subjects, but is less able to deal with the agency of South Asian feminist theorists and activists.∑∏ This is a moment when structures of accountability that operate between women’s groups in the United States and South Asia can pose an important challenge to humanrights discourse, allowing us to ask about the politics of culture in human-rights feminism.∑π Despite the tremendous and growing influence of transnational feminist movements through mainstream and nonmainstream sites, the language of universal human rights works to recreate patterns of deviance which fall disproportionately on some nations or geographical areas, and not others. As Minoo Moallem puts it, ‘‘The discourse of protection enables (some) subjects to render violence visible while simultaneously concealing the framework against which violence is measured, a framework that constitutes certain positions of power as both nonviolent and invisible.’’∑∫ In the case of gender asylum, culture or community collapses back on the state.∑Ω So 204

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particular states then assume certain identities, not as democracies or dictatorships, but as bride-burners, honor-killers, or genitalmutilators. These are the classic ‘‘weak states’’ of international relations and dependency theory—unable to separate culture from politics, or to muster adequate political will to contain the vicissitudes of culture. The characterizations of such gendered states work to obscure both the pervasiveness of domestic violence in the United States and its other-human rights violations. The question is, when are nation-states still the legitimate arbiters of women’s rights? At what moments should ‘‘universal’’ or international rights instruments be applied? In India and Sri Lanka, for example, it matters that ethnic conflict or civil war have been endemic to both countries for more than thirty years. It matters that India is a democracy, and that Pakistan and Bangladesh have seen almost as many years of military dictatorship as democratic governance.∏≠ It matters that Indian gender-asylum cases emerge from a complex colonial history that established the personal laws of different communities as sites of non-intervention, and substituted a uniform penal code as a default civil code. It matters that U.S. support of Zia al-Haq in Pakistan and the mujahideen in Afghanistan undermined the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (pdpa) and gave rise to extremist forms of Islam that led to the erosion of women’s rights in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.∏∞ While a recent Human Rights Watch report on Pakistan notes that ‘‘the militarization of politics have had a profound impact on the trajectory of women’s advancement,’’ it fails to mention that the notorious Zina Ordinances were brought into law during the U.S.-backed Zia regime, a regime that was the beneficiary of millions of dollars of aid in the form of U.S. military contracts.∏≤ Gender-asylum cases in both Pakistan and Afghanistan thus need to be seen as the direct result of U.S. Cold War policies of intervention in the region. According to Amnesty International, Afghans are the single largest refugee group in the world.∏≥ Yet neither the Amnesty International report Women in Afghanistan: Pawns in Men’s Power Struggles nor its report Pakistan: Women Killed in the Name of Honor makes mention of the e√ects of U.S. policy in the region.∏∂ When these reports specify the myriad ways in which women were made victims, one would never know that women in the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan fought the political agenda of the mujahideen (who opposed, among other things, universal education for women), or that Pakistani feminists have organized against both the

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Islamization of law and its unfair application for more than three decades.∏∑ In states where formal legal equality pertains, the problem is with implementation of the law and enforcement—and that is true in the United States as well. In the United States, 1.3 million people are stalked each year, and yet stalking laws exist on a piecemeal basis and are di≈cult to enforce. An ‘‘Order of Protection’’ is only a piece of paper—it cannot stop an enraged partner from perpetrating further violence and harm. Yet no one argues that the di≈culty in enforcing these laws is a reason for American women to claim gender asylum in France or India. Culture, then, makes its appearance in genderasylum cases in troubling ways. The problem cannot be solved simply by avoiding the use of cultural sterotypes, as some feminist asylum advocates urge.∏∏ This ignores the ways in which culture itself is increasingly assumed as the ground for human-rights work in general, and gender asylum claims in particular. One must, therefore, insist on marking the asymmetry of the very production of cultural explanation, even as one recognizes that this asymmetry emerges from the interface of the international economy and liberal theory. This is not a matter of forcing a choice between universalistic or relativistic criteria—that debate has stalled and need not be rehearsed here.∏π It is, rather, a matter of resituating questions of culture and community in South Asian human-rights work by moving beyond a universal human-rights versus cultural-rights dichotomy to examine the antinomies of displacement that emerge from the confrontation of the two as they move unevenly through national and international arenas. The objective is to understand the points at which the application of universalist criteria force the emergence of culturalist explanation, and conversely to identify those points at which we mistakenly attribute a cultural explanation when a ‘‘universal’’ one might serve as well. Consider, for example, the South Asian languages of honor and shame that have been used to explain why rapes go unreported and women are reluctant to share stories of sexual violence even with close family members. The argument is that intense cultural shame about bringing further dishonor to their families prevents women from talking about rape or sexual violence.∏∫ This issue has been raised for Sikh women fleeing state violence in the Punjab who are seeking asylum in the United States and have been reluctant to recount their experiences to asylum o≈cers.∏Ω Yet domestic- and sexual-violence

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specialists know that victims of sexual violence anywhere may feel intense shame and reluctance to talk about what they have experienced. This is one instance in which an experience not understood as universal might e√ectively be applied as one, so that the use of culturalist explanation as an essentialist tool to make the case for gender asylum can be avoided. Given the sensationalized reporting of such cases by the international media, there is both a stereotyping of non-Western cultures as oppressive to women, and a presumption that patriarchal norms, discriminatory laws, and gender-related violence are not also features of Western societies. Yet the observation that ‘‘the un sometimes uses sexist human rights language and does not consistently include a gender perspective in human rights reporting and gender expertise in field visits and operations,’’ as well as the call by Amnesty International and others for the un ‘‘to bring women’s human rights from the margins into the mainstream by adopting gender-sensitive language’’ have also resulted in the highlighting of cultural di√erence to reinforce stereotypic assumptions in human-rights reports.π≠ For example, a news release by Amnesty International on the twentieth anniversary of the Women’s Convention began, ‘‘Pakistan 1999. Ghazala was set on fire by her brother in the name of honor. Her burned and naked body lay unattended on the street for two hours as nobody wanted to have anything to do with it.’’π∞ The report continued, ‘‘Pakistan has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (Women’s Convention). The government is failing to take serious measures to safeguard and protect women’s human rights.’’π≤ Amnesty International also singled out, in March 1997, Pakistan for a special report on cedaw, ‘‘No Progress towards the Realization of Women’s Rights after the Ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.’’π≥ Yet the United States is the only state in North America and Europe that is not a signatory to the Women’s Convention.π∂ All nations of South America have signed. The South Asian countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal have signed. In Nepal and Sri Lanka, cedaw was also the basis of providing for constitutional protections for women’s rights; while feminists in Bangladesh were successful in reducing the number of the country’s reservations on cedaw. India ratified cedaw in 1993, but also specified reservations on articles 5 (a), relating to cultural and customary

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practices, and 16 (1), relating to equality in marriage and family relations.π∑ It is important to recognize, however, that these reservations are not necessarily regressive in the sense that the state is refusing to protect women from their communities (though many would argue that this is indeed the case), but can be seen as accountable to the tremendous ferment within the country about the merits of having a uniform civil code versus having reforms be generated by women’s rights activists within those communities.π∏ In other words, the supposed failure to observe international law—the point at which national sovereignty is either challenged by or exercised through the woman question—may also be the space where democratic civil-libertarian politics emerge to hold the nation-state accountable. Recent proposals have called for the establishment of a ‘‘regional gender asylum law regime in South Asia’’ that would explore the ability of South Asian states to a√ord refugee protection, rather than forced repatriation for women facing gender persecution.ππ cedaw (or the Women’s Convention) might eventually become an e√ective alternative to gender asylum. It calls for un member states to ratify sixteen articles which pertain to women’s social, economic, and political rights. Article 19 specifies gender-based violence as a form of discrimination. At this moment, only 165 of 188 member nations have signed. In 1999, the un also established an Optional Protocol to the Women’s Convention which would allow women to bring complaints against states that have failed to uphold their commitments to the Women’s Convention.π∫ Only twenty-eight states have so far signed the Optional Protocol. The Women’s Convention also establishes a committee (cedaw), of twenty-three independent experts, which reviews the reports that state parties are required to submit indicating measures taken to implement the Women’s Convention.

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u.s. domestic violence as a human-rights issue In a recent Human Rights Watch report on Pakistan, it was estimated that eight women were raped every twenty-four hours, and 70–95 percent of Pakistani women had experienced domestic or familial violence.πΩ Those are rather shocking statistics. Still, the recitation of such statistics also works to obscure certain facts about the United States. 208

—As many as four million women are abused by their husbands or live-in partners each year. —A woman is raped every two minutes (or according to another estimate, 1.3 women are raped every minute, resulting in 78 rapes each hour, 1,872 rapes each day, 56,160 rapes each month, and 683,280 rapes each year).∫≠ Between 1995 and 1996, more than 670,000 women were the victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault. Yet, for that same year, it was estimated that only 31 percent of rapes and sexual assault were reported—less than one in every three.∫∞ —In 1992, the United States had the world’s highest rape rate of the countries that publish such statistics: four times higher than Germany, thirteen times higher than England, and twenty times higher than Japan.∫≤ —Thirty-one percent of all rape victims develop rape-related posttraumatic stress disorder (rr-ptsd) at some point during their lifetimes. Based on U.S. census reports, it has been estimated that 1.3 million women currently have rr-ptsd, 3.8 million women have had rr-ptsd, and roughly 211,000 will develop rr-ptsd each year.∫≥

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Violence against women has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. Yet one will never see any of these statistics cited in a human-rights report.∫∂ Until recently, the Human Rights Watch web page on domestic violence stated, ‘‘Unremedied domestic violence essentially denies women equality before the law and reinforces their subordinate social status. Men use domestic violence to diminish women’s autonomy and sense of self-worth. States that fail to prevent and prosecute domestic violence treat women as second-class citizens and send a clear message that the violence against them is of no concern to the broader society.’’ It went on to list fifteen states, including Nepal and Pakistan, where domestic violence is a problem. The United States was not mentioned.∫∑ Examining the percentage of women who have been physically assaulted by an intimate partner, one finds that the rate is 22 percent for the United (based on a 1993 survey, with no accounting for the one in three rapes that go unreported), 26 percent for India (based on a study of six states for 1999), and 47 percent for Bangladesh (based on a 1992 study). Thus, by one set of estimates, the United States and India have much more in common in terms of rates of domestic abuse (certainly a quality-of-life issue) than might be sup-

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posed by perusing the Human Development Index, produced by the United Nations Development Programme, in which the United States is ranked 2 and India is ranked 134 in terms of development. (In the same year Sri Lanka was ranked at 97, Pakistan at 128, Bangladesh at 146, Nepal at 151, Bhutan at 160, and Afghanistan at 170).∫∏ Attempts to use such measures, or country reports issued by the U.S. State Department to assess the degree to which women in non-Western countries possess rights thus use a profoundly flawed yardstick.∫π The ‘‘woman question,’’ once a marker of colonial and nationalist discourses, now stands literally as a signifier of the neoliberal economy, not only of the extent to which ‘‘developing nations’’ have successfully adopted structural adjustment development policies.

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conclusion

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Culture brings human-rights talk in South Asia into crisis in several ways. First, culture is gendered and violently masculinized such that particular countries or nation-states are marked by their crimes against women: to say India is to think dowry deaths, to say Pakistan is to think honor killing, to say Bangladesh is to think of acidthrowing disfigurement.∫∫ These forms of description do the work of characterizing weak states in a neoliberal economy, and as the cultural face of globalization both constitute and are constituted by human-rights discourses on the region. One has only to remember the call for the World Bank to undertake ‘‘rights-based development’’ to actualize this connection.∫Ω The mainstreaming of human-rights norms into multilateral lending institutions should give us pause. While the imposition of international human-rights norms on the global South may be appealing to many, such norms also mask the ways in which lending policies exacerbate or even help to create the social divisions implicated in the very human-rights violations international lending institutions seek to monitor.Ω≠ The link between domestic violence and globalization may not appear to be a direct one, but it is entirely possible that human-rights discourse works to obfuscate, if not sever that very linkage. As Vasuki Nesiah reminds us, the universalization of women’s oppression in feminist human-rights discourse works to mask global structural features.Ω∞ Feminist scholars have productively established that domestic vio210

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lence is not a private, familial matter, that it cannot be separated from an understanding of public attitudes toward women. In a like vein, violence against women cannot be separated from the violence of the international economy. ‘‘In a world in which women perform twothirds of the hourly labor and receive ten percent of the income and hold barely one percent of the property, disempowerment is clearly economic.’’Ω≤ It is thus important to understand domestic violence as part of the structural violence wrought by liberalization and structural adjustment policies. Liberalization has impoverished millions, and there are indications that structural-adjustment policies have hit women the hardest, with some evidence that women in urban and rural areas are working multiple jobs and two to three shifts per day.Ω≥ More work does not mean economic freedom—it means deepening subjection to already entrenched forms of male authority. Just as many theorists are now arguing that economic rights should be considered human rights, so, too, should domestic violence be understood as a part of the structural violence against women produced by the international economy.Ω∂ Finally, while one might expect the critique of gender essentialism to suggest that women cannot be partitioned from their communities, the discourse on women’s human rights forces a separation of women’s rights from community rights that reinstates gender as the primary determinant of women’s identity. What, then, does it mean when the language of gender asylum creates the conditions for women’s exile not only from her national origin, but her community of a≈liation? Does human-rights feminism as an instance of a universalizing discourse reenact a form of Cold War citizenship with hidden consequences for how we understand the process of claiming rights? What role does the South Asian diaspora play in redefining women’s rights on the subcontinent? What are the consequences for the feminist and civil-libertarian movements of South Asia when scholars, legal critics, and activists in diaspora resort to human-rights ‘‘instruments’’ that inevitably incite talk of negative cultural di√erence? I cannot claim answers to these questions. However, if one remembers that women are not only victims, but also agents with the capacity to e√ect political change, then the contradictions of gender asylum should teach us to pay more attention to feminist democratic politics in South Asia and on how one reflects on the relationship between the movement to end domestic violence in the United States and those movements in South Asia. I end with two questions. First, what would it mean to understand

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domestic violence in South Asia and its narrative production, as a product not only of culture, but of state-level policy and the neoliberal economy? Second, what would it mean to speak of a culture of violence against women in the United States, and to understand domestic violence in the United States as a human-rights issue?

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epilogue

¡ The Tra≈c in Social Movements Narmada, Bhopal, Texas

‘‘Gandhi isn’t from Texas!’’—formosa security official, to diane wilson, An Unreasonable Woman

In October 2003, Medha Patkar, one of the leaders of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement) and the head of the National Association of People’s Movements in India (napm), traveled to Austin, Texas, to meet with o≈cials at the Lower Colorado River Authority (lcra). Patkar’s visit was prompted by Suresh Prabhu, former Indian power minister and the chairman of the National Task Force on the Interlinking of Rivers, who claimed he had met with lcra and other Texas state o≈cials to help broker a deal for India’s National River Linking Project.∞ India’s river-interlinking scheme is designed to protect the country from drought by transferring, overland, the waters which annually flood the Ganga and Brahmaputra river basins. Its proponents also claim the scheme will generate 30,000 megawatts of hydroelectric power to meet India’s energy needs. The lcra is especially skilled in moving water through overland pipes; it is also internationally renowned for its river management—other countries regularly come to its o≈ces seeking technical advice and expertise. Still, the lcra o≈cial was puzzled by and annoyed with the small delegation that arrived at his o≈ce. Suresh Prabhu, it turned out, had only been given the standard tour of the facility. There was no water deal between the State of Texas and India. Earlier that year, in January, Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation shrimper, was arraigned in court for having chained herself, after a thirty-day hunger strike, to a seventy-foot chemical tower at the former Union Carbide Corporation chemical plant in Seadrift, Texas, now owned by the Dow Chemical Company.≤ Before she was arrested, Wilson had managed to hang from the tower a large banner proclaiming, ‘‘Dow: Responsible for Bhopal.’’ Wilson was referring

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to the malfunction at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, in December 1984, that released massive amounts of toxic gases, killing three thousand people on the spot and, over the next several months, another twenty thousand from toxicity-related illnesses. During the next twenty-odd years, another hundred thousand Bhopalis su√ered lingering, but severe, health problems. Wilson’s 2002 hunger strike, which a thousand women from the American feminist-action group Code Pink joined, resonates with what Derrida calls the ‘‘politics of friendship,’’ while the transnational formation of a community of survivors echoes the earlier forms of cross-race and cross-national organizing of ‘‘a√ective communities.’’≥ A history of corporate malfeasance in Texas led Wilson to her act of civil disobedience and solidarity with the people of Bhopal. The practices of the local chemical company had contaminated the air and groundwater systems, as well as the San Antonio, Matagorda, and Lavaca Bays, not only destroying Wilson’s livelihood as a shrimper, but causing birth defects and cancers among residents of her home town.∂ The four counties containing these chemical plants had the highest rates of lung cancer in Texas, rates that were also higher that the national average.∑ A late-night explosion at the ucc plant in Seadrift, in March 1991, killed one worker and injured thirty-two others. As a result, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (osha) reprimanded ucc for having ignored numerous safety audits urging preventative measures, and fined it $2.8 million—a slap on the wrist considering that osha had also determined that had the explosion occurred during the workday, the death toll could have approached four hundred.∏ Citizens Concerned About Carbide was formed in response to ucc’s failure to be forthcoming with the Seadrift community after the explosion. Although ucc became a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Chemical in 2001, Dow, which has assumed all ucc liabilities in the United States, has refused to assume ucc’s liabilities in India. Wilson, who is also a former ucc employee, and whose brother works for Dow/ ucc, saw her act of civil disobedience as a reminder of how corporations escape liability through an elaborate system of restructuring subsidiaries, holding companies, and sell-o√s.π Wilson, however, was prevented from justifying or even fully explaining her actions to the jury when the court passed a motion in limine during her trial, forbidding her to refer in any way to ‘‘Bhopal, India, the plant explosion there in 1984, or any other environmental crimes or claims of en214

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vironmental pollution by Dow Chemical Company or Union Carbide Corporation [that] have been committed in the past or may be committed in the future.’’∫ Wilson would spend several months in jail for her act of civil disobedience. A few months after Wilson’s arrest, in April 2003, Rashida Bee, Champa Devi Shukla, and Satinath Sarangi—all members of the Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Stationery Karmachari Sangh (Bhopal Gas-A√ected Women Stationery Employees Union)—traveled to Seadrift, Texas, to meet with Wilson and other a√ected members of her community. It was not the first time Rashida Bee, Champa Devi, and Satyu had visited Texas. In 1989, the three had traveled to a ucc shareholder’s meeting in Houston and were promptly arrested on charges of ‘‘criminal trespass’’ for handing out fact sheets on Bhopal.Ω After years of complicated legal action to decide whether the case could be heard in the United States or India, and struggling with the Government of India to dispense the meager compensation of $470 million paid by ucc in 1989, the Bhopal survivor’s organizations filed suit in New York. In a landmark decision, in 2001, the court recognized survivor claims of environmental damages.∞≠ In 2004, the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, Rashida Bee and Champa Devi won the Goldman Environment Prize, while students at the University of Michigan passed a resolution demanding that the university disassociate itself from the Michigan-based Dow Chemical, a polluter of the Tittabawassee River floodplain. In 2005, students at the University of California–Berkeley passed a resolution asking the university to divest itself of holdings in Dow Chemical. In 2006, a student resolution to prohibit the University of Texas–Austin from accepting donations from Dow Chemical failed by just one vote. It has become commonplace to note that as globalization produces shifts in the regime of neoliberal capital, it also produces shifts in the strategies of social movements. Activists and survivors of some of India’s worst environmental disasters—from big dams and industrial plants—form the backbone of the National Alliance of People’s Movements. In the last two decades, the survivors of dam displacement from the Narmada River Valley have come to support the Bhopal survivors as they press their case before the Supreme Court of India; so, too, have the Bhopal survivors allied themselves with the adivasis and farmers of the Narmada River Valley, joining them as they marched hundreds of kilometers to protest the construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam in Gujarat.∞∞ These survivors journey large distances as part of the practice of solidarity, and they have done so,

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not once, but many times, traveling always to the heart of the state, Delhi. It is thus unsurprising that they also traverse thousands of miles to visit corporate headquarters, chemical plants, and state water management o≈ces in Texas, that is, to institutions that have already damaged or still have the power to impact the course of their lives. Their travels are not marked as ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ and have thus far failed to transform social theory.∞≤ Or, rather, social theory has demonstrated its inability to apprehend the forms of political transformation that social movements represent.∞≥ Consider Partha Chatterjee’s important e√ort to distinguish civil society from what he terms ‘‘political society’’—the proper space of democracy.∞∂ One can appreciate Chatterjee’s skepticism of a neoliberal view of social institutions reflecting themselves in the tendency to see civil society as consisting of everything outside the state.∞∑ His desire to say something about the shape of sovereignty in contemporary Indian politics is also laudable. But in separating out political society from civil society, Chatterjee tends to leave the line between state and society intact. Chatterjee thus sees ‘‘civil society’’ as the normative form of sovereignty and political society (as a form of governmentality) to be its deformation.∞∏ In so doing, he misses the constitutive nature of the latter, as well as the residual properties of the former whereby ‘‘civil society’’ is produced as a state e√ect.∞π That elite and middle-class citizens of civil society both reflect and shape the state’s directives for modernization, viewing the poor as masses or populations to be administered and managed rather than as rights-bearing citizens, is unremarkable, except perhaps to note (as does Chatterjee) the weight of Foucault’s fleeting remark about the ‘‘etatization of society.’’∞∫ Yet he refers repeatedly to the ‘‘dark zones of political society,’’ and laments, ‘‘Populations of the urban poor had to be pacified and even cared for, partly because they provided the necessary labor and services to the city’s economy and partly because if they were not cared for at all, they could endanger the safety and well-being of citizens.’’∞Ω Chatterjee’s distinction between bourgeois civil society and ‘‘political’’ society tends to replicate the value structure of the former, assuming that the social movements which occupy political society are not concerned with morality or justice: ‘‘Political society constituted a field which lacked the clarity of moral language and legal concepts that were supposed to define the relations between states and civil society. It meant bending the rules, recognizing that the legal fiction of equal citizenship did not always apply, that the laws of property 216

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and contract might sometimes need to be overlooked.’’≤≠ Chatterjee’s description has some purchase, but tends to naturalize or take for granted what should otherwise be explained; for example, laws of property and contract are not simply ‘‘overlooked,’’ but are active sites of challenge and contestation. Chatterjee a≈rms civil society as the domain through which the bourgeois middle class exercises citizenship, while political society becomes the realm of populations who apply pressure in order to extract services from the state, often by extralegal means. Yet Chatterjee fails to see how the poor are often dispossessed of their land or other ‘‘entitlements’’ through the very rubric of law, and through extra-legal means such as fraud and force.’’≤∞ Perhaps we should more properly speak of the dark zone of the civil society–state nexus, with the first term providing the moral justification for excluding the poor from their rights and the latter providing the force of law. Still, the aim of many subaltern social movements in South Asia is precisely to claim for their members legal and citizenship rights from the state. They sometimes do this by breaking laws they consider unjust—the root of civil disobedience—but more often than not they are simply asking for existing laws to be enforced. Dipesh Chakrabarty has located in the politics of post-Independence India an apparent paradox: the forms of Gandhian civil disobedience considered optimal for crippling the colonial state might no longer be appropriate for sustaining the rule of law in the postcolonial state.≤≤ The inherent instability of such a contradiction is resolved through symbolic practices of humiliating the state through demands that its o≈cials apologize or promise redress. In Chakrabarty’s view the history of Indian nationalist politics encapsulated the prefiguration of a form of popular sovereignty that would both constitute and exceed state sovereignty, posing Indian democracy as a challenge for our understanding of the term. He thus reconfigures Chatterjee’s discussion of political society as one about sovereignty. When we turn to one of Chatterjee’s more compelling examples of the illegality of political society, he notes that the critical task of ‘‘politics on the ground’’ is to give the empirical form of a population group the moral attributes of a community as there ‘‘is no pre-given communal form,’’ for ‘‘the community, such as it exists, is built from scratch.’’≤≥ One agrees here with Chatterjee, although it almost seems as if he started from a more organicist conception of community based on language, ethnicity, or religion, for he seems surprised that the ‘‘trans-status subjects’’≤∂ of one particular squatter settlement

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don’t distinguish between residents from South, East, and West Bengal. ‘‘We have no other place to build our homes. We have collectively occupied this land for so many years. This is the basis of our claim to our own homes.’’≤∑ In an essay titled ‘‘Beyond Human Rights,’’ Giorgio Agamben holds that it is the refugee (and, one might add, the internally displaced person or ‘‘internal refugee’’) who exposes the fictions of citizenship. He argues, following Hannah Arendt, that in ‘‘the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state.’’≤∏ While the refugee is seen to occupy a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation, Agamben holds that the category of the refugee is also a ‘‘limit-concept that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state,’’ for advanced industrial societies contain masses of ‘‘noncitizens who do not want to be and cannot be either naturalized or repatriated.’’ Agamben thus envisions a community ‘‘in which the guiding concept would no longer be the ius (right) of the citizen but rather the refugium (refuge) of the singular.’’≤π The formation of community in Chatterjee’s railway-squatter settlement thus broaches what Agamben has called the ‘‘coming community,’’ where the state is unable to register ‘‘singularities that form a community without an identity,’’ places where ‘‘humans co-belong without any prior or representable conditions of belonging.’’≤∫ Jean Luc Nancy has referred to this existential configuration as ‘‘being in common.’’≤Ω Hardt and Negri have referred to it as ‘‘life in common’’: ‘‘The multitude is neither an identity, nor uniform (like the masses), the internal di√erences of the multitude must discover the common that allows them to communicate and act together. The common we share, is in fact, not so much discovered as produced.’’ They also argue that ‘‘becoming common presents the possibility of not only the equality of the various forms of labor [agricultural, industrial and immaterial] but also their free exchange and communication. Producing in common presents the possibility of the production of the common.’’≥≠ Chatterjee is right to see property and community as the mediating concepts of democratic theory.≥∞ But he is unable to see that social movements are radically reordering the relationship between the two. Social movements increasingly understand the emergence of private property through the world-historical enclosure of common 218

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lands as a form of theft, and understand community itself to emerge not solely through struggles with nation-states, but from practices of the common. The right to land is intertwined with the right to shelter, the right to food, and the right to livelihood that are at the center of social movements and citizen initiatives alike. While the state’s right to eminent domain is particularly contested by those displaced by large industrial or development projects—small farmers, Dalits, and adivasis—the response to the failure of land reforms in the era of Nehru was a rearticulation of these demands in every decade before, and after, the ‘‘green revolution.’’≥≤ For example, the statement of the People’s Movements Encounters, presented at the Asian Social Forum in Hyderabad in January 2003, asserts ‘‘the right of people to decide on [their] own food and agriculture policy founded on the right to land and productive resources including water, seeds, forests, our knowledge and skills.’’ The statement also calls for taking back Panchami (government) and other lands and distributing them to the landless and to women.≥≥ It is thus unsurprising that transnational social movements like Via Campesina (which include a number of South Asian peasant organizations) are focused on claims to land, challenging the privatization of public lands and the commercialization of resources shared in common.≥∂ While some social movements pursue their rights within the framework of the nation-state, others pursue transnational forms of a≈liative solidarity and organization, and some pursue both strategies at the same time. This is not properly a form of anti-citizen politics, ‘‘at once more particular and universal than citizenship,’’ but rather one of refiguring polities as communities delimited neither by national nor by strictly territorial space.≥∑ This emergent popular sovereignty might be called the ‘‘sovereignty of the commons,’’ a declaration of ‘‘we the people’’ less as a form of identity than as the connection and shared relations between peoples. Social movements (as opposed to ngos) rarely view themselves as performing the work of bourgeois civil society; they instead consider their work to be political in the deepest sense, in that it works to transform the very meaning of democracy, sometimes refusing the apparatus of electoral representation. As the people’s movements who met at the Asian Social Forum asserted, ‘‘No one else can speak for us. . . . We have our victories, our culture, our political agenda and our aspirations.’’≥∏ Similarly, the articles and editorials of the People’s Movement, the news magazine of the napm, continually challenge

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the ‘‘right to make people shelterless,’’ asking ‘‘whose state?’’ and ‘‘whose India is empowered?’’≥π The article ‘‘People’s Declaration,’’ which emerged from the National Convention on Development, Displacement and Rehabilitation held in Delhi in 2004, specifically a≈rmed its commitment to a ‘‘rights-based, people-centered approach to development’’ and to the principles of justice, equality, democracy and sustainability,’’ speaking, moreover, as ‘‘We the people,’’ not as a ‘‘population group.’’

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We the people a√ected by development projects—including dams, mines, sanctuaries and national parks, tourism projects, urban infrastructure, industries and others; social activists, researchers and others, asserting the Fundamental Rights, Directive Principles and other basic features of the Indian Constitution, noting the Government of India’s international legal obligations under the Universal Declaration of Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Labour Organization Convention 107, among other international conventions, we believe and assert that: There is certainly an alternative to the prevalent model of development that causes displacement, deprivation, and destitution in the guise of the ‘‘greater common good.’’≥∫

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Here we can see the trans-status subjects of Chatterjee’s demographic categories of political society—‘‘refugees, landless people, day laborers’’—enunciating claims to sovereignty and citizenship though an invocation of the commons, but also through the criticism of the Indian state’s misappropriation of ‘‘the greater common good.’’≥Ω Clearly, some (though not all) social movements in India see their mission as one of returning democracy to itself, and of doing so through Gandhian methods of nonviolent protest that paradoxically a≈rm the principles of a legal-constitutional framework. Yet social movements in other parts of the world may also seek to work outside of and challenge the liberal democractic framework itself, transforming the very idea of democracy. The Zapatista movement is, perhaps, the best-known of these movements.∂≠ As Walter Mignolo puts it, The Zapatistas have used the word democracy, although it has different meaning for them than it has for the Mexican government. Democracy for the Zapatistas is not conceptualized in terms of European political philosophy but in terms of Maya social organization

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based on reciprocity, communal (instead of individual) values, the value of wisdom rather than epistemology, and so forth. The Mexican government doesn’t possess the correct interpretation of democracy, under which the Other will be included. . . . However, the Zapatistas have no choice but to use the word that political hegemony imposed, although using the word doesn’t mean bending it to its mono-logic interpretation. Once democracy is singled out by the Zapatistas, it becomes a connector through which liberal concepts of democracy and indigenous concepts of reciprocity and community social organization for the common good must come to terms.∂∞

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David Harvey has astutely observed that a key feature of neoliberalism is continual ‘‘enclosure and the assignment of private property rights . . . considered the best way to protect against the so called ‘tragedy of the commons’ (the tendency for individuals to super exploit common property resources such as land or water).’’∂≤ It is thus no accident that a major impetus for the Zapatista uprising was the nullification (in preparation for nafta) of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution protecting rights to the village ejido, or common lands. Zapatista calls for recognizing the integrity of the Magna Carta (or Constitution) have also resulted in a revisiting of the English document by social historians interested in generating new understandings of the origins of democratic politics, such that five principles of the ‘‘commons’’ could be adduced in contemporary social movements: anti-enclosures, reparations, subsistence, neighborhood, and travel.∂≥ When the indigenous campesinos of the MoisesGandhi village (named in honor of two fallen comrades) joined with other communities, three years after the Zapatista uprising of 1994, to set up an autonomous zone called the Rebel Ernesto Che Guevara municipality, that act resonated with these principles of the commons, communicating something important about the relationship of neighborhood to travel: a local community taking on nomological markers of Christian and Gandhian principles of struggle, but engaged with militant traditions of resistance as well.∂∂ Social theory has yet to adequately describe the resilience of social movements, their practices of travel and solidarity. Over the past half century, international political movements—such as Pan-Islam, PanAfricanism, Non-Alignment, Pan-Indianism or Pan-Americanism— have posed challenges to social theory, and at the same time have been powerful rearticulations of feminism and socialism as forms of resistance to the march of capital. One of the demands issued by the

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Pan-African Congress of 1921 was ‘‘ancient common ownership of the land and its natural fruits and its defense against the unrestrained greed of invested capital.’’∂∑ The international indigenous-rights movement focused on the reclamation of common lands has formed a major impetus for a reconsolidated Pan-Americanism that has seen the election of indigenous leaders and socialist governments in Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru, but remains a challenge to that Pan-Americanism as well. PanIslam, read outside its Orientalist scriptings, can also be seen as a mobilizational force to protect the rights of Muslim minorities in Western societies, and as bringing into direct confrontation the diversity of practices and customs throughout the Muslim world so that new debates, especially about practices concerning women, are emerging within the Islamic world through such networks as Women Living Under Muslim Laws. Such movements, cutting across cultures, religions, and forms of secularity, are at once historical formations and emergent sites for the transnational negotiation of culture in a postcolonial world. The Bandung Conference of 1955, according to Indonesia’s president Sukarno, was the ‘‘first international conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind!’’∂∏ Richard Wright argued that for those marked by their past colonial relationship to the Western world, ‘‘this meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon the Western world!’’∂π While the Non-Aligned Movement strove to create an Afro-Asian power block in the Cold War era, perhaps the most powerful a≈rmation of an emergent Afro-Asian identity was the Du Boisian notion of an African diaspora that was not limited to the cultural history of Africa, but to a common history of exploitation.∂∫

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Since the 15th century these ancestors of mine and their other descendants have had a common history; have su√ered a common disaster and have one long memory. The actual ties of heritage between individuals of this group, vary with the ancestors that they have in common and many others. . . . But the physical bond is least and the badge of color relatively unimportant save as a badge; the real essence of this kinship is its social heritage of slavery; the discrimination and insult; and this heritage binds together not simply the children of Africa, but extends through yellow Asia and into the South Seas. It is this unity that draws me to Africa.∂Ω

Throughout his writing, Du Bois sought to extend the experience of racism from the situation of blacks in the United States to the 222

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experience of colonized peoples throughout the world. In Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace, written in 1945, at the close of the Second World War, Du Bois held that ‘‘colonies and the colonial system make the colonial peoples . . . the slums of the world.’’∑≠ Thus, Du Bois’s classic formulation of solidarities formed through analogous or shared histories of slavery or discrimination occupies a gap that has widened, rather than narrowed, between social theory and the experiences of social movements. Social movements, if we pay them su≈cient attention, seriously revise our understanding of identities as locally or nationally produced entities. Transnational forms of identity are produced through the physical processes of dislocation, relocation, and the struggle for solidarity; contemporary social and political movements also put into circulation through such processes lived notions of survivorhood. The identity of the survivor of accidental, but massive chemical pollution is formed as much through state inaction as through the practices of corporate malfeasance that unite groups of people in Bhopal, India, and Seadrift, Texas.∑∞ The production of such transstatus subjects in turn yields new forms of singularity or solidarity. Gustavo Esteva has argued that a ‘‘new commons’’ has emerged from the postwar era of industrial development and displacement, for ‘‘the people in these new spaces are the heirs of a diversified collection of commons, communities and even whole cultures destroyed by the industrial, economic form of interaction.’’∑≤ At the same time, the political restructuring of states, or more precisely, the reconfiguration of state sovereignty such that a number of its functions are outsourced to the ngo or for-profit development sectors also indexes the ways in which the globalization of capital creates both populations of displaced peoples and the (national and international) institutions that will administer them in relocation, resettlement and refugee camps.∑≥ Even as internationalist or transnational formations demand di√erent forms of history writing and intellectual work, the drive to reduce culture or community to a bounded entity, often in the interests of militant nationalism has accelerated rather than declined: the transnational diasporic production of Hindu nationalism is one of these paradoxical accelerations. The paradox is perhaps best explained by globalization torquing the state into new forms so that the nationstate can no longer monopolize definitions of national culture; in this process cultures also come to be redefined as transnations. The ‘‘return to culture’’ is thus both a product and symptom of globalization.

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Yet, as Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, attempts to claim adivasi, or tribal peoples, and Dalits through aggressive and sometimes violent practices of ‘‘reconversion,’’ India’s nuclear program has been in place since Nehru’s time, over the years dramatically impacting the adivasi groups in uranium-rich states like Jharkhand and Meghalaya.∑∂ In 2007, adivasi activists a√ected by prolonged radiation exposure from uranium mining in Jharkhand traveled to Window Rock, Arizona, to be a part of the Indigenous World Uranium Summit.∑∑ Such coalitions are indicative of how the Pan-Indianist or indigenous-rights movement now articulates the interests of India’s adivasis with native Hawaiians, American Indians, First Nation Peoples of Canada, and indigenous peoples throughout Latin America. Janadesh 2007, a month-long padayatra (march) of 25,000 landless adivasi and Dalit farmers in India, also had representation from First Nations peoples and indigenous activists from Brazil. Launched by the people’s movement Ekta Parishad, this mobilization, known as the ‘‘People’s Verdict,’’ built on longstanding and localized traditions of Gandhian land protest, but also deliberately sought to internationalize the agenda of indigenous land rights by including First Nations representatives from Canada as well as international observers from Kenya, Brazil, France, Scotland, and several other countries.∑∏ As a ‘‘new social movement,’’ Ekta Parishad sees itself neither as a trade union, a political party, nor an ngo, but as a mass-based social movement that works though allied networks across eight different Indian states. One observer has said of the movement’s emphasis on ‘‘rachana, sangharsh, aur bahishkar’’ (creation, struggle, and boycott) that ‘‘its ideological aspiration is to rediscover the radical in Gandhi’’ that was erased from the social memory of postIndependence India.∑π Thus, while Ekta Parishad can be considered a ‘‘new’’ social movement in terms of its organizational structure, its aspirations are drawn from older forms of Gandhian villagereconstruction work and Jayaprakash Narayan’s socialism; at the same time, it takes Vinobha Bhave’s Bhoodan Movement of the 1950s to be the model for redistributing illegally occupied bhoodan (gift) lands in states like Bihar.∑∫ While there is a considerable body of literature on ‘‘new’’ social movements, activist understandings of the causes of oppression and conceptualizations of social justice often draw on and reference histories that predate the current moment.∑Ω Thus, if one moves beyond the impact of globalization on culture or social movements, then the question shifts from whether globalization has produced an ‘‘inte224

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grated common culture’’ or fragmented it, to one of how cultural and social movements articulate a politics of alliance or disa≈liation.∏≠ All of these movements emerged as critiques of certain forms of universalism, but in so doing also enunciate themselves as singularities of the commons. It is in identifying and analyzing that tension that social-constructivist thought will perhaps make its strongest future contributions.∏∞ If some observers of the human sciences have correctly pointed to how social constructivism has emerged around a set of debates with social justice at their center, new work will elaborate the cultural stakes of such debates in which shared or interlocking resistance to the economic and political e√ects of globalization is a major axis of identity making in today’s world.∏≤ It has been forty years since Garret Hardin first adduced the ‘‘tragedy of the commons,’’ a concept much debated, albeit a mainstay of neoliberal economics.∏≥ In the interim, social theorists have generated new histories of the destruction of the commons, particularly evident in the work of Peter Linebaugh and essays in the Commoner. As the editors of a recent issue of the journal wrote, ‘‘There are no commons without the incessant activities of communing, or (re)producing. But it is through reproducing in common that communities of producers decide for themselves the norms, values and measures of things.’’∏∂ Linebaugh calls the commons ‘‘the theory that vests all property in the community and organizes labor for the common benefit of all’’—something that takes juridical form in a structure of rights, but also manifests itself on a day-to-day material basis.∏∑ In this formulation, Linebaugh’s notion of ‘‘commoning’’ sounds very much like what Kancha Ilaiah called ‘‘Dalitization’’: the ‘‘universalizing of principles of labor as life and democracy and equality as the aims of life’’; and a process of ‘‘living labor as life, relegating property to community ownership, wife and husband living as equal producers, equal consumers and equal child-rearers.’’∏∏ We should expect that commoning will also enunciate itself as cultural forms of singularity that are nonetheless part of the process of forming ‘‘cultures of the common.’’ It is in making ‘‘common cause’’ that social movements also seek to retrieve the ‘‘Commons’’ for something like a greater social good. This, then, is the expanded sense in which we might understand an emergent culture of the commons—as a way of life to be a≈rmed, as a form of struggle, as an emergent form of sovereignty—and speak of common cultures.

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introduction: un/common cultures 1 See Ravi Vasudevan, cited in Prathama Banerjee, ‘‘The Social Sciences in Post-1947 India,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, 19 April 2008, 22. 2 Foucault announces that his project is not to write a ‘‘history of the past in terms of the present’’ but to write ‘‘the history of the present’’ (Discipline and Punish, 30–31). 3 Foucault, The Order of Things, 342. 4 Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, 5. Derrida suggests, in a similar vein, that anthropology is born as a science at the historical moment when there is a displacement of European culture as its own site of reference, and is thus a dislocation in the history of metaphysics (see Writing and Di√erence, 282). According to Scott Michaelson and David Johnson, ‘‘Anthropology begins with . . . ‘metaphysics,’ begins with representation, begins with the opening of the horizon of thought itself—that is, Anthropology necessarily begins once one has crossed the threshold of what Derrida refers to as di√érance ’’ (Anthropology’s Wake, 10). 5 Roth, ‘‘Foucault’s History of the Present,’’ 36, 44. 6 I am thinking here of Foucault’s statement in ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’’ that ‘‘the isolation of di√erent points of emergence does not conform to the successive configuration of an identical meaning; rather they result from substitutions, displacements, disguised conquests, and systematic reversals’’ (151). 7 My understanding of genealogical method is not unrelated to how Arjun Appadurai understands ‘‘relations of disjuncture,’’ where ‘‘the paths or vectors taken by these kinds of things have di√erent speeds, axes, points of origin and termination, and varied relationships to institutional structures in di√erent regions, nations, or societies’’ (‘‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,’’ 5). It is also not dissimilar to what Donald Moore, Jake Kosek, and Anand Pandian have described as the Gramscian ‘‘terrain of the conjunctural,’’ whereby points of articulation are forms of enunciation (Race, Nature, and the Politics of Di√erence, 3). 8 Michaelson and Johnson note that the Foucauldian and Saidian ‘‘cri-

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tiques of anthropology sought to end Anthropology as such; to the extent that Said sketched out a future for anthropology, it was a future anthropology unlike anything which had come before and that might not merit the name ‘anthropology’ ’’ (Anthropology’s Wake, 4). Yet ‘‘through its signal idea, the culture concept, death-bed anthropology appears determined to carry on for some time’’ (ibid., viii). 9 Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias, 16. 10 On the limits of social-constructivist explanation, see Norris, Reclaiming Truth; Hacking, The Social Construction of What?; and Lukes, The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat. 11 On the correspondence between neoliberalism and ethological and sociobiological models of culture, see Balibar, ‘‘Is There a Neo-racism?,’’ 26. 12 See, respectively, Balibar, ‘‘Is There a Neo-racism?’’; Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim; and King, Culture, Globalization, and the World System, Chanock, ‘‘ ‘Culture’ and Human Rights,’’ and Aijaz Ahmad, ‘‘Globalization and Culture.’’ 13 Aijaz Ahmad, ‘‘Globalization and Culture,’’ 95. 14 Balibar, ‘‘Is There a Neo-racism?,’’ 21. 15 Ibid. 16 On geoculture, see Wallerstein, ‘‘The Creation of a Geoculture.’’ On global culture, see Featherstone, ‘‘Global Culture,’’ and Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson, Global Modernities. 17 Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson, Global Modernities, 60. 18 See Lee and Lipuma, ‘‘Cultures of Circulation.’’ 19 Marcus, ‘‘Ethnography in/of the World System.’’ 20 Balibar, ‘‘Is There a Neo-racism?,’’ 21. 21 Holmes and Marcus, ‘‘Refunctioning Anthropology.’’ 22 See Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition; Hale, ‘‘Neo-liberal Multiculturalism’’; and Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception. 23 The Annihilation of Caste is one of Ambedkar’s most famous political treatises. 24 See Sarker and Niyogi De, Trans-status Subjects. 25 Chandler’s essay, ‘‘The Possible Form of an Interlocution,’’ is discussed in chapter 5. 26 See Mazumdar, ‘‘Asian American Studies and Asian Studies,’’ and Dave et al., ‘‘De-Privileging Positions,’’ for thoughtful proposals on the relationship between area studies and ethnic studies. On area geography, see also Appadurai, ‘‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination’’; and Sarker and Niyogi De, Trans-status Subjects. 27 However, see Weigman, Women’s Studies on Its Own; and Kaplan and Grewal, ‘‘Transnational Practices and Interdisciplinary Scholarship.’’ 28 Arondekar, ‘‘Border/line Sex,’’ 238.

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29 See Huntington, ‘‘The Clash of Civilizations?’’; and Buruma and Margalit, Occidentalism. 30 Mamdani, Beyond Rights Talk and Culture Talk; Ahmad, ‘‘Globalization and Culture.’’ 31 Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, 17; Bilgrami, ‘‘Occidentalism, The Very Idea’’; and Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad, xii. 32 Abu-Lughod, ‘‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?’’ 33 See Robbins and Cheah, Cosmopolitics; Bhabha, ‘‘Unsatisfied’’; Clifford, Routes; Mignolo, ‘‘The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis’’; Pollock, ‘‘Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History.’’ 34 Pollock et al., ‘‘Cosmopolitanisms,’’ 582. 35 Ibid., 588. For a view of ‘‘common culture’’ that limits it to an understanding of ‘‘traditional society,’’ see Appiah, ‘‘Cosmopolitan Patriots.’’ Michael Featherstone, Scott M. Lash, and Roland Robertson employ a similar notion of ‘‘common culture’’ forged through day-to-day contact and possessing an integrated set of ‘‘core values’’ (Global Modernities, 52). 36 Appiah, ‘‘Cosmopolitan Patriots,’’ 619. 37 Gilroy, After Empire, 66. 38 See also Mignolo, ‘‘The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis.’’ 39 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 15. 40 Bardhan and Ray, The Contested Commons. 41 Gandhi, A√ective Communities.

1: wild west anthropology 1 Tibbles, Buckskin Blankets, 236.

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2 Elsie Clews Parsons’s fondness for seeing the country from horseback on her ethnographic tours was well known, and Fletcher referred to her allotment postings as the ‘‘wilderness.’’ See Hoxie and Mark, With the Nez Perces, xxxiv; Desley Deacon, ‘‘The Republic of the Spirit’’ and Elsie Clews Parsons. 3 See Parezo, ‘‘Anthropology’’; Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism. 4 See in Gacs et al., Women Anthropologists: Charlotte Frisbie, ‘‘Frances Densmore’’; Vimala Jayanti, ‘‘Erminnie Platt Smith’’; Nancy Parezo, ‘‘Matilda Cox Stevenson’’; Andrea Temkin, ‘‘Alice Fletcher’’; Christine Moon Van Ness, ‘‘Sara Yorke Stevenson.’’ 5 The public success of this group of women also earned them less flattering attention. Nuttal’s notoriety inspired D. H. Lawrence’s characterization of Mrs. Norris in his novel The Plumed Serpent, while the reformist zeal of Fletcher and Cox Stevenson garnered them epithets for their un-

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compromising positions. Fletcher was seen as ‘‘dreadfully opinionated,’’ and Cox Stevenson was variously described as ‘‘humorless,’’ ‘‘aggressive,’’ and ‘‘overbearing’’ (Lurie, ‘‘Women in Early American Anthropology,’’ 58– 59). In a Punch satire, Yorke Stevenson was more tamely referred to as ‘‘Philadelphia’s patriotic matron’’ (Meyerson and Winegrad, ‘‘Sara Yorke Stevenson,’’ 127), while Parsons’ male colleagues addressed her as ‘‘dear propagandist.’’ 6 Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 32–33. 7 Ibid., 38. 8 See Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism. 9 See Tylor, ‘‘How the Problems of American Anthropology Present Themselves to the English Mind,’’ 550. Still, Cox Stevenson was the only one to begin collecting ethnographic data by her husband’s side, though Zelia Nuttal’s entry into anthropology was probably also inspired by her marriage to the French ethnologist Alphonse Louis Pinart. In 1906 Parsons also held that women could aid ethnology because a ‘‘woman student would have many opportunities for observing the life of women that male ethnographers lacked’’ (Parsons, The Family, 198). Parsons was, however, the only one of this group who published specifically on women and children. But see Fletcher, ‘‘Glimpses of Child-Life among the Omaha Tribe of Indians.’’ 10 See Lurie, ‘‘Women in Early American Anthropology’’; and Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land. 11 Lurie, ‘‘Women in Early American Anthropology.’’ 12 Fletcher and Yorke Stevenson were among the first members of the Archeological Institute of America, founded in 1879. In 1885, Platt Smith became the first woman to be honored as a fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences, and one of the first women members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (aaas), serving as secretary of Section H (Anthropology). Yorke Stevenson was a founding member of the American Exploratory Society of Philadelphia. In 1895, Fletcher was elected vice-president of Section H of the aaas; in 1905, she was elected president of the American Folklore Society. 13 While Fletcher, Densmore, and Cox Stevenson all relied on the bae for their livelihoods, and while on more than one occasion Densmore and Cox Stevenson demonstrated anxiety over their Bureau of American Ethnology (bae) funding, Fletcher received heavy financial support from a number of society women (including a life fellowship at Harvard, gifted by Mary Copley Thaw), and both she and Cox Stevenson were well connected in Washington political circles. Parsons and Nuttal had the most contact with Franz Boas, as he actively solicited their wealth and patronage

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for various projects. Alice Fletcher, along with Yorke Stevenson and Nuttal, also lobbied Phoebe Apperson Hearst for financial support of various anthropological ventures. Frederick Putnam, writing of his e√orts to preserve an archaeological site in Ohio, said that they would ‘‘have come to naught if Miss Alice C. Fletcher meeting in Newport a few Boston ladies, had not taken the opportunity to appeal to them for assistance in the work. . . . Her earnest presentation of the subject had the desired e√ect. . . . Boston’s noble and earnest women issued a private circular. . . . Subscriptions were solicited to purchase Serpent Mound . . . and in June 1886 I was provided with nearly $6,000 with which to buy such land’’ (‘‘The Serpent Mound of Ohio,’’ 872). See also Lurie, ‘‘Women in Early American Anthropology’’; Parezo, ‘‘Welcoming Science’’; and Parmenter, ‘‘Glimpses of a Friendship.’’ 14 Parsons earned a doctorate in sociology from Columbia in 1892, and Yorke Stevenson was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Pennsylvania in 1894. Platt Smith and Cox Stevenson both studied geology: the former graduated, after two years of study, from the Freiburg School of Mines, and the latter pursued advanced course work in law and chemistry. Both Fletcher and Densmore worked as schoolteachers before turning to anthropology; Densmore had completed advanced music study. 15 Yorke Stevenson was one of the founders of the University of Pennsylvania Museum and at one point sought to recruit Franz Boas to establish a department of anthropometry there. Parsons established the Southwest Society to fund anthropological research, while Nuttal helped found the International School of American Archaeology and Ethnology in Mexico City, and was instrumental in the establishment of the anthropology department at Berkeley, as well. Fletcher’s role in establishing the School of American Archaeology (now the School of American Research in Santa Fe) over the objections of Frederick Putnam and Franz Boas meant that she was also seen as a formidable rival. 16 Joan Mark has made this point forcefully. In addition to supporting Platt Smith, Fletcher, and Nuttal, Putnam also encouraged the work of Cordelia Studley in physical anthropology (Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 35). 17 Several of Boas’s biographers suggest that it was Boas’s experience of antisemitism in Europe that led him to encourage women’s and African Americans’ initiative in the field. 18 A cursory glance at their biographies reveals a number of overlapping friendships and organizational memberships. Fletcher served as a mentor for both Nuttal and Densmore (see Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 1988; Densmore, Pawnee Music). Fletcher and Cox Stevenson

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worked together to make Mesa Verde a national park in 1887. Yorke Stevenson and Nuttal were good friends who were both admitted to the American Philosophical Society in 1895. Zelia Nuttal and Alice Fletcher were both mentored by Frederick Putnam, and both served as Putnam’s assistant at the Peabody Museum before Boas held that position, in 1893. It is likely that Putnam, a cousin of Platt Smith’s, introduced her to the aaas. Lewis Henry Morgan is said to have encouraged both Fletcher and Platt Smith, resulting in the latter’s earning a sta√ appointment at the bae, in 1880. Both Platt Smith and Cox Stevenson were trained by John Wesley Powell, and although Cox Stevenson focused on the ethnographic particular and did not consider herself a theorist, her findings supported the evolutionary schemas of Powell and W. J. McGee. Yorke Stevenson also had close ties to Daniel Brinton, an evolutionary anthropometrist at the University of Pennsylvania. 19 Scott, Gender and the Politics of History. 20 See Elizabeth Fee, ‘‘The Sexual Politics of Victorian Social Anthropology’’ and ‘‘Science and the Woman Problem.’’ 21 See Bederman, Manliness and Civilization. 22 See ibid., 122–27. 23 I am to some extent conflating ‘‘gender’’ with the category of ‘‘woman.’’ The emergence of woman as a universal category is of course problematic in feminist theory. For a discussion of its relationship to anthropology, see my ‘‘Histories of Feminist Ethnography.’’ 24 See Friedlander, ‘‘Elsie Clews Parsons’’; Lamphere, ‘‘Feminist Anthropology.’’ 25 See Howell, ‘‘The Beginnings of Anthropology in America’’; Hinsley, Savages and Scientists. 26 However, see Hinsley, ‘‘The World as Marketplace.’’ 27 See the following ‘‘popular’’ articles, all of which appeared in the Century: Henry King, ‘‘The Indian Country,’’ August 1885, 559–606; E. V. Smalley, ‘‘The New Northwest, First Paper: The Dakota Wheatlands, the Bad Lands, and the Yellowstone Country,’’ August 1882, 504–12; E. V. Smalley, ‘‘The New Northwest, Second Paper: Across the Rockies in Montana,’’ September 1882, 769–79; E. V. Smalley, ‘‘The New Northwest, Third Paper: From the Rockies to the Cascade Range,’’ October 1882, 863– 72; E. V. Smalley, ‘‘Features of the New Northwest,’’ November 1882, 529– 37; E. V. Smalley, ‘‘The New Orleans Exhibition,’’ May 1885, 3–14; and E. V. Smalley, ‘‘In and Out of the New Orleans Exhibition,’’ June 1885, 185–99. Also see the following anthropological essays in the Century: Frank Cushing, ‘‘My Adventures in Zuni,’’ 1882, 191–207; Frank Cushing, ‘‘My Adventures in Zuni, 2,’’ February 1883, 500–511; Frank Cushing, ‘‘My

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Adventures in Zuni, 3,’’ May 1883, 28–47; Frederick Putnam, ‘‘The Serpent Mound of Ohio,’’ 1890, 871–88; Alice Fletcher, ‘‘On Indian Education and Self Support,’’ 1883, 312–15; Alice Fletcher, ‘‘Personal Studies of Indian Life: Politics and Pipe-Dancing,’’ 1893 (vol. 45), 441–55; Alice Fletcher, ‘‘Indian Songs: Personal Studies of Indian Life,’’ January 1894, 421–31; Alice Fletcher, ‘‘Hunting Customs of the Omahas: Personal Studies of Indian Life,’’ September 1895, 691–702; Alice Fletcher, ‘‘Tribal Life among the Omahas: Personal Studies of Indian Life,’’ January 1896, 450–61. 28 Cited in Stocking, A Franz Boas Reader, 44. Boas was less successful in having his own work appear in the Century. Reacting to an article by Robert Bennett Bean, ‘‘The Negro Brain,’’ in a 1906 issue, Boas sought to have his reply to Bean’s argument on racial inferiority published the following year, but his article was rejected by the Century Magazine ’s editor. See Hyatt, Franz Boas, Social Activist, 91–94. 29 An abbreviated version of this account was first published as the introduction to Fletcher’s 1893 monograph, A Study of Omaha Indian Music, which was reissued in 1994 by the University of Nebraska Press. 30 Fletcher, ‘‘Indian Songs: Personal Studies of Indian Life,’’ Century 1894 (vol. 47), 421–31, p. 422. 31 Her notion that ‘‘if one would hear Indian music and understand it, one must ignore as he does, his manner of singing’’ was also cited by her protégée Frances Densmore in ethnomusicology. See Densmore, ‘‘What Intervals Do Indians Sing?’’; Ho√man, ‘‘Frances Densmore and the Music of the American Indian.’’ 32 Fletcher, however, did take an evolutionist view of Native American music. See Myers, Introduction. Densmore also emphasized the ‘‘primitive’’ tonal character of Native-American music, and in an early essay she attempted to account for the high tonal pitch of Native American song by noting that this is a feature of ‘‘love songs’’ within the animal kingdom, thus proving that there was an ‘‘emotional origin to the musical expression of the [Indian] race’’ (‘‘Scale Formation in Primitive Music,’’ 1–2, 5). 33 Stevenson, Maximillian in Mexico. 34 Nuttal, ‘‘Ancient Mexican Superstitions,’’ 265. 35 Ibid., 266. 36 Fletcher, in her popular writing for the Southern Workman, did contest stereotypes of Native Americans, but without reflection on the origin and function of such stereotypes. See Fletcher, ‘‘The Indian and the Prisoner,’’ ‘‘Flotsam and Jetsam from Aboriginal America,’’ and ‘‘Indian Speech.’’ In ‘‘Indian Characteristics’’ she mused, ‘‘At a lunch party, the conversation turned upon Indians, and such were the characteristics imputed to them that it was di≈cult to believe that at this late date they should still be so misunderstood. One of the ladies had spent several years

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on the frontier, and as she narrated her observations of the ‘savages,’ my mind reverted to some of my own experiences while staying in an Indian camp, where I had listened to similar comments among natives discussing my own race’’ (202). 37 Cox Stevenson, The Sia, 9. 38 Fletcher, Indian Story and Song from North America, 120. 39 Cox Stevenson, The Sia, 15. 40 Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 266. 41 See Fletcher, Indian Education and Civilization; Mark, ‘‘Alice Fletcher,’’ xxxviii. 42 See Mark, ‘‘Alice Fletcher,’’ 68. 43 Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 265. 44 Fletcher and La Flesche, The Omaha Tribe, 29. 45 Hoxie and Mark, With the Nez Perces, 49. 46 Ibid. 47 Gay editorialized that this might be a ‘‘hard idea’’ for Indians to grasp, remarking caustically, ‘‘The prospect of standing beside the white man is not a very brilliant one. The unadulterated Indian looks down upon the species of white men he knows anything about. As to the law, all they know about the law is, that it is some contrivance to get ponies and cattle and land out of the red man’s possession into that of the white man; it is a one-sided machine; it never brings back an Indian’s stolen horse, or takes the border ru≈an’s fence or his cattle of the Indian’s land’’ (ibid.). 48 Densmore, Chippewa Music, 88. 49 See Densmore, ‘‘Traces of Foreign Influences in the Music of the American Indians,’’ 108. 50 Hoxie and Mark, With the Nez Perces, 10–11. 51 Quoted in Lurie, ‘‘Women in Early American Anthropology,’’ 59. 52 Ibid., 34. 53 Cox Stevenson, The Zuni Indians, 253. 54 Ibid. 55 Though the wctu did not recognize alcohol on the reservations as an issue arising out of colonialism and political domination, it attempted in 1879 to contact chiefs of the Five Nations to persuade them of the importance of temperance, and pressure was put on the U.S. government to see that liquor laws were enforced on the reservations. Crusaders like Fletcher also found it more e√ective to point to examples of Native American selfregulatory temperance. Writing of the salutary e√ects of Christianization, Fletcher argued that missionary labor ‘‘has borne good fruit among the Omahas . . . due to the responsive influence of some of the leading Indian men who accepted Christianity as the standard of life and . . . industry and morality. It was largely the result of the energetic rule of head Chief La

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Flesche and his corps of soldiers or police, that 20 years ago intemperance was so severely punished that no man dared to risk the terrible flogging given the drunkard’’ (Historical Sketch of the Omaha Tribe of Indians in Nebraska, 11). See also Bordin, Woman and Temperance, 85. 56 Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 14. 57 Lurie, ‘‘Women in Early American Anthropology,’’ 37. 58 Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 16. 59 Hoxie and Mark, With the Nez Perces, xxix. 60 Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 258. 61 See Brumberg, ‘‘The Ethnological Mirror’’; Melman, Women’s Orients. 62 Melman, Women’s Orients, 167. 63 See Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, 25; Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors. 64 Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 269. 65 Mark, ‘‘Alice Fletcher,’’ 67. Fletcher (with Erminnie Platt Smith) was a member and later secretary of the pioneer women’s organization Sorosis, a professional club for aspiring writers and journalists; she also helped found the Association for the Advancement of Women in 1873. 66 Hoxie and Mark, With the Nez Perces, 49. 67 Cox Stevenson, The Zuni Indians, 380. 68 See Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 106; Parezo, ‘‘Anthropology.’’ 69 Lurie, ‘‘Women in Early American Anthropology,’’ 55. 70 Cox Stevenson, The Zuni Indians, 204. 71 Ibid., 406. 72 Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 106–7. 73 Ibid., 107. 74 See Densmore, The Plea of Our Brown Brother and Ke-wa-kun-ah. 75 Densmore, The Plea of Our Brown Brother, 1. 76 Ibid., 2. 77 Smalley, ‘‘The New Orleans Exhibition,’’ Century May 1985, 3–14, p. 13. 78 Fletcher, Historical Sketch of the Omaha Tribe of Indians in Nebraska, 12. In an article for the Southern Workman, however, Fletcher lamented somewhat contrarily, ‘‘The Indians are not represented at the Exposition among those who can exhibit proofs of their labor and education. They are present only in promise. Their story of struggle is set forth by the history of a single tribe, used as a type only to show how they are emerging from a past barren of results’’ (‘‘The New Orleans Exposition,’’ 79). 79 See Smalley, ‘‘In and Out of the New Orleans Exhibition,’’ Century June 1885, 185–99, pp. 188–89.

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80 Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 109.

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81 Cited in Meyerson and Winegrad, ‘‘Sara Yorke Stevenson,’’ 126.

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82 See Nuttal, ‘‘The Periodical Adjustments of the Ancient Mexican Calendar’’; Parmenter, ‘‘Glimpses of a Friendship’’; Weimann, The Fair Women, 437. 83 See Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 210. Fletcher was eventually appointed a member of Putnam’s sta√ and served as a member of the board of judges for Ethnology, but it was Boas’s Northwest Coast exhibit that dominated the Anthropology Building, while her collections of Nez Perce, Omaha, and Winnebago objects were among the smaller displays mounted by Putnam’s many assistants. Although Fletcher read papers for the Congresses on Music, Ethnology, and Religion, the success she had hoped for with ‘‘Love Songs of the Omaha’’ eluded her. W. H. Holmes, in his 1893 American Anthropologist report on ‘‘The World’s Fair Congress of Anthropology,’’ characterized her paper as ‘‘interesting’’ and accompanied by ‘‘vocal illustrations most pleasingly rendered,’’ but gave more attention to Fillmore’s paper, ‘‘Primitive Scales and Rhythms,’’ which had generated considerable discussion at the congress (426). 84 See Weimann, The Fair Women, 393. Also see Pohl, ‘‘Historical Reality or Utopian Ideal?’’ 85 See Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 33. 86 Among the objects on display were embroidery from the Nez Perce, Chippewa, Kiowa, and Haida; and Apache, Choctaw, Attacapa, Moki, Micmac, Eskimo, and Aleut baskets. One case consisted entirely of Navaho blankets, another of Eskimo skins and dolls; still others contained Kiowa and Sioux spoons, Eskimo and Haida dishes. Collections of Native American handicrafts from the states and territories supplemented the Smithsonian display. Alaska contributed 204 exhibits, and Colorado 28. South Dakota sent an altar cloth of embroidered white deerskin from the Pine Ridge Agency, and New Mexico sent a collection of artifacts as well as a blanket, commissioned by women in San Juan County, made by an ‘‘old weaver named Miranda.’’ The weaver was paid $150 and given a picture of the Woman’s Building showing the south window near which her blanket was to hang. However, the high point of the Woman’s Building exhibits turned out to be the lace collection of Queen Margherita of Italy, which was transported to the Woman’s Building in a gold-harnessed, horse-drawn carriage, accompanied by nineteen guards. The custodian of the Italian laces was the Countess di Brazza, the American wife of an Italian nobleman, who also arranged a musical drama called ‘‘The Seven Ages of Columbus,’’ which was presented in the assembly room on Columbus Day, 12 October 1893. Harriet Monroe wrote the verse, Zelia Nuttal played a court lady, and

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‘‘Colonel Cody lent twelve Indians’’ for the cast. See Weimann, The Fair Woman, 404, 406–7.87. Tenkotte, ‘‘Kaleidoscopes of the World.’’ 88 Quoted in Bordin, Woman and Temperance, 115. 89 Eventually six black women did address the congress. See Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood. 90 Wells et al., The Reason Why. 91 See Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 39–40. 92 Bordin, Woman and Temperance, 122. 93 Quoted in Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 63. 94 Bu√alo Bill’s ‘‘Wild West Show’’ also attracted four million visitors in a six-month period. See Tenkotte, ‘‘Kaleidoscopes of the World,’’ 18. 95 Somewhat ironically, given Fletcher’s failure to protest treatment of the Sioux at the exhibitions, she has been credited with understanding the Ghost Dance Movement as the Sioux response to the loss of bu√alo on the plains, being crowded onto barren tracts of land, and coping with their children’s being forced into English education. At her lecture on the ‘‘Indian Messiah’’ at a meeting of the American Folklore Society in December 1890, Franz Boas initially suggested that ‘‘crazes like these were probably nervous diseases and should not be attributed to any great extent to politics’’ (Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 209). 96 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 51. 97 Fletcher, Indian Story and Song from North America, preface. 98 Fletcher, ‘‘The Indian at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition,’’ 216–17. The Indian Congress opened with a parade of 150 Indians, with those on horseback waving hunks of a recently slaughtered cow, while Bu√alo Bill Cody headed another ‘‘ethnological parade’’ held in his honor. Fairgoers could wander through the Indian encampment at will, while mock battles between whites and Indians, or between groups of Indians themselves, were performed at scheduled times. Along with twenty-one other Apaches, Geronimo had been brought as a prisoner of war from Fort Sill; he would sell his autograph for ten cents at this fair, as at the Bu√alo and St. Louis fairs. Three Native Americans died while the exhibit was open, and one Indian woman attempted suicide. The bae ethnologist James Mooney protested faintly that the Indian Congress had degenerated into a ‘‘wild west show,’’ but he himself staged performances of the Ghost Dance and footraces designed to show the stamina of the Indians. In a later article for the American Anthropologist he detailed the ethnological characteristics of the Indians who participated in the exhibit, noting that the display had increased interest in anthropology. See Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 21, 51, 117. 99 Walter Williams, ‘‘Round the World at the World’s Fair,’’ 794. 100 By consulting with Boas and Ales Hrdlicka on setting up labs at the

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fair, McGee established an aura of scientific legitimacy, such that when the deaths of Filipinos being transported to the exposition were confirmed, Boas’s and Hrdlicka’s discussion of obtaining the corpses for study raised little objection. McGee also continued the emphasis on Native American progress from savagery to civilization, with a focus on ‘‘Indian school work.’’ See Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 163. 101 Ibid., 20. 102 Walter Williams, ‘‘Round the World at the World’s Fair,’’ 801. 103 See Lurie, ‘‘Women in Early American Anthropology,’’ 40; Densmore, ‘‘Scale Formation in Primitive Music.’’ 104 Densmore, ‘‘The Music of the Filipinos,’’ 611. 105 Ibid., 632. 106 See William Schneider, ‘‘Race and Empire.’’ 107 Fee, ‘‘The Sexual Politics of Victorian Social Anthropology.’’ 108 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 205. 109 Fletcher, ‘‘The Indian Woman and Her Problems,’’ 173. 110 Quoted in Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 203. 111 Ibid., 205–6. Much has been written of Boas’s contribution to the shattering of the evolutionary paradigm of the nineteenth century, but without attention to how he asserted the equivalence of women’s mental capacity with men’s to work against the theory of progressive racial types. Thus in his 1894 essay ‘‘Human Faculty as Determined by Race’’ Boas argued, ‘‘When men and women of the same stature are compared it is found that the brain of the woman is much lighter than that of the man. Nevertheless, the faculty of woman is undoubtedly just as high as that of man. This is, therefore, a case in which smaller brain weight is accompanied throughout by equal faculty. We conclude from this fact that it is not impossible that the smaller brains of males of other races should not do the same work that is done by the larger brain of the white race’’ (A Franz Boas Reader, 233). 112 Mason, Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture, 213. 113 Ibid., 205. 114 Fee, ‘‘The Sexual Politics of Victorian Social Anthropology,’’ 96–97. See also Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship. 115 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 207. 116 Cited in Weimann, The Fair Women, 393. 117 Fletcher, ‘‘The Indian Woman and Her Problems,’’ 175. 118 Watterson, ‘‘The Woman Question Once More,’’ 796. See also Kinnicutt, ‘‘The American Woman in Politics.’’ 119 Platt Smith, Myths of the Iroquois. 120 Weigle, Spiders and Spinsters. 121 Cox Stevenson, The Zuni Indians, 293.

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122 Parsons, Social Rule: A Study of the Will to Power, 44. 123 Fletcher, ‘‘On Indian Education,’’ 314. 124 Fletcher, ‘‘The Indian Woman and Her Problems,’’ 174. 125 Fletcher, ‘‘The Indian and the Prisoner,’’ 45. 126 My point here is not to dispute Parson’s feminism, but to ask why it does not occur to her to be one among the Zuni. The last sentence of the quotation that follows suggests Parson’s surprise that a Zuni woman would be subservient to men in ways similar ‘‘to [those of] the peoples of western civilization’’: ‘‘The first time was at Cochiti when late at night my tired and sleepy Indian hostess grumbled in the soft tone no Pueblo woman ever loses, grumbled because she had to sit up for the young husband who was spending the evening at the club. . . . ‘I’ll have to get him something to eat,’ she said, ‘no man here would ever cook for himself at home. They say if they did they would lose their sense of the trail.’ Rationalization of habit or desire is not confined to the peoples of western civilization’’ (‘‘Waiyautitsa of Zuni, New Mexico,’’ n.p.). The second time Parsons remembers she is a feminist is when she is asked to write an article on Zuni women, and she resists because she is working for the declassification of women. 127 See Parsons, ‘‘Zuni Conception and Pregnancy Beliefs,’’ ‘‘The Zuni La’mana,’’ ‘‘Nativity Myth at Laguna and Zuni,’’ ‘‘Mothers and Children at Laguna,’’ ‘‘Mothers and Children at Zuni, New Mexico,’’ and ‘‘Waiyautitsa of Zuni, New Mexico.’’ These essays have all been reprinted in Babcock, Pueblo Mothers and Children. See also Babcock’s introduction to Pueblo Mothers and Children, ‘‘Elsie Clews Parsons and the Pueblo Construction of Gender’’; and Pauline Turner Strong’s introduction to Parsons, Pueblo Indian Religion. 128 Parsons, ‘‘Higher Education of Women and the Family,’’ n.p. 129 Parsons, The Old Fashioned Woman, 24. 130 Parsons, Social Rule, 44. 131 Ibid., 53–54. 132 Ibid., 55. 133 Parsons, ‘‘Waiyautitsa of Zuni, New Mexico,’’ 443.

2: race and the culture of anthropology

2 See Rosaldo, ‘‘Whose Cultural Studies.’’ 3 Roseberry, ‘‘Multiculturalism and the Challenge of Anthropology,’’

843. 4 Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 71.

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1 Roseberry, ‘‘Multiculturalism and the Challenge of Anthropology,’’

848.

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5 Rabinow, ‘‘For Hire,’’ 60.

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6 However, see Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution and A Franz Boas

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Reader; Hyatt, Franz Boas, Social Activist. 7 See, for example, Mintz, Introduction; Sanjek, ‘‘The Enduring Inequalities of Race’’; Winant, Racial Conditions. 8 Stocking, A Franz Boas Reader, 213. 9 Herskovits, The American Negro, 52. 10 Stephan, The Hour of Eugenics, 160, 167. This period marks the rise of the Brazilian race-relations model in contrast to the American one of racial segregation. From the beginning of the twentieth century until 1940, black leaders from Booker T. Washington to W. E. B. Du Bois visited Brazil to verify whether blacks were treated better there (see Hanchard, Orpheus and Power, 51). 11 See Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution; Faye Harrison, ‘‘The Persistent Power of Race in the Cultural and Political Economy of Racism.’’ 12 Boas, ‘‘The Problem of the American Negro,’’ 395. A similar dynamic marked the thinking of Melville Herskovits, who wrote, in 1925, ‘‘The social ostracism to which [the Negro is] subjected is only di√erent in extent from that to which the Jew is subjected . . . But whether in Negro or in Jew, the protest avails nothing, apparently. All racial and social elements in our population who live here long enough become acculturated’’ (cited in Mintz, Introduction, xii). Herskovits, of course, would reverse this position with publication, in 1941, of the Myth of the Negro Past. 13 Boas, Race and Democratic Society, 41. 14 Boas, ‘‘Aryan and Semite,’’ 33. 15 Boas, Aryans and Non-Aryans, 3. He held that ‘‘Aryan’’ and ‘‘Semitic’’ were linguistic terms that had ‘‘nothing to do with race,’’ and that to speak of either as races was an ‘‘undemonstrable hypothesis’’ (ibid., 4, 8). 16 Ibid., 9. 17 Ibid., 11. 18 American Anthropological Association, ‘‘Resolution of December 1938,’’ 30. 19 Boas, Anthropology and Modern Life, 62; Boas, Race and Democratic Society, 7. 20 Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, 21. Hyatt, Franz Boas, Social Activist, 83. 22 Stocking, ‘‘The Turn-of-the-Century Concept of Race,’’ 4. 23 Ibid., 6, 11. 24 Ibid., 7. 25 Ibid., 6. 26 However, Du Bois’s own reflection on the character of the late nineteenth century illustrates Stockings’s description: ‘‘The world was divided

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into great primary groups with folk who belonged naturally together through heredity of physical traits and cultural a≈nity’’ (Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 100). 27 See Faye Harrison, ‘‘The Du Boisian Legacy in Anthropology.’’ 28 See Smedley, Race in North America. 29 In Stocking, A Franz Boas Reader, 226–27. 30 Ibid. Boas’s ‘‘Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants’’ appeared in the American Anthropologist in 1912, ‘‘Modern Populations of America’’ in 1915, and ‘‘Report on an Anthropometric Investigation of the Population of the U.S.’’ in 1922 (see Boas, Race, Language and Culture). The empirical materials for the study of immigrants were finally published in Boas, Materials for the Study of Inheritance in Man. 31 Allen, ‘‘Franz Boas’s Physical Anthropology,’’ 82. Though Boas throughout his work argued against the existence of ‘‘pure types.’’ See Apter, ‘‘Herskovits’s Heritage,’’ for reflections on how the notion of purity influenced Herskovits’s work, and Chandler, ‘‘The Economy of Desedimentation,’’ on the same issue in Du Bois’s work. 32 Allen, ‘‘Franz Boas’s Physical Anthropology,’’ 33; Lieberman, Stevenson, and Reynolds, ‘‘Race and Anthropology.’’ 33 Lowie, Culture and Ethnology, 27. 34 Kroeber, ‘‘The Superorganic,’’182–83. 35 Ibid., 183. 36 Sapir, ‘‘Culture Genuine and Spurious,’’ 222. 37 Herskovits, The American Negro, 67. 38 Benedict, Race, 18, 65. 39 Such argumentation is related to the view that race is the surface manifestation of deeper phenomena such as class conflict. Despite critiques by Omi and Winant (Racial Formations in the United States), Gilroy (Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack), and Roediger (The Wages of Whiteness), some cultural anthropologists have continued to argue for the reducibility of racism to class conflict; Verena Stolcke, for example, writes, ‘‘Racism has usually provided a rationalization for class prerogatives by naturalizing the socioeconomic inferiority of the underprivileged’’ (‘‘Talking Culture,’’ 4). Class may be analytically useful, but one should guard against reducing race to class positioning. The goal is to see how race structures the experience of class, gender, and sexuality, and to understand how class shapes the experiences of race, gender, and sexuality. 40 I am thinking of the tongue-in-cheek style Benedict deployed to debunk stereotypes: ‘‘The most obvious di√erences between apes and men is that between the hairy coat of the anthropoids and human skins. Of all human races the Mongoloids are the freest of body hair; the whites along with the Australian aborigines and some local tribes belonging to other

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races, are the hairiest. The anthropoids have thin lips, and the most contrastingly human ‘development’ is the full lips of the Negro; Whites have much more ‘primitive’ lips. Neither by the test of hairiness nor by the test of lips would the Whites belong to that branch of the human race anatomically farthest removed from the ancestral type’’ (Race, 67). 41 Harding, The Racial Economy of Science. 42 Melville Herskovits is the exception. He began his career, in 1928, with The American Negro, a Boas-sponsored study on the physical characteristics of black Americans. Though he began by assigning race to biology, by the end of the work he, like Montagu, had questioned the meaning of the word race, setting the stage for the sociohistoric conception that underlies his elaboration of the ‘‘Negro past’’ in his later work, The Myth of the Negro Past. 43 Montagu, ‘‘The Concept of Race,’’ 13. 44 ‘‘A cline is a continuous gradation over space in the form or frequency of a trait’’ (in Harding, The Racial Economy of Science, 133). See also Lieberman, Stevenson, and Reynolds, ‘‘Race and Anthropology’’; Keith and Kittles 1997 45 Smedley, Race in North America; Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. 46 Shipman, The Evolution of Racism; Lieberman, Lyons, and Lyons, ‘‘An Interview with Ashley Montagu’’; Brace, ‘‘On the Concept of Race’’; Montagu, ‘‘The Meaninglessness of the Anthropological Conception of Race.’’ 47 See Faye Harrison, ‘‘The Persistent Power of Race in the Cultural and Political Economy of Racism’’; Mukhopadhyay and Moses, ‘‘Reestablishing Race in Anthropological Discourse.’’ The period after the First World War until the end of the Second World War actually saw the production of a number of ‘‘ethnographies of race’’ or studies of race relations within anthropology: Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1938), Hurston’s Mules and Men (1939), Hortense Powdermaker’s After Freedom (1939), Allison Davis’s Deep South (1941), Melville Herskovits’s Myth of the Negro Past (1941), Ella Deloria’s Speaking of Indians (1944), St. Clair Drake’s and Horace Cayton’s Black Metropolis (1945), and Ruth Landes’s City of Women (1947). An examination of these texts awaits another paper. Su≈ce it to say that none of these texts, until quite recently, were taught as part of the canon of anthropology. See also Faye Harrison’s essay ‘‘The Du Boisian Legacy in Anthropology.’’ 48 Huxley and Haddon, We Europeans, 108; unesco, ‘‘Statement on Race, 1951.’’ 49 unesco, ‘‘Statement on Race,’’ 139.

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50 However, the new statement on race did admit that ‘‘because of the complexity of human history, there are also many populations which cannot easily be fitted into a racial classification’’ (‘‘unesco’s New Statement on Race,’’ 90). 51 unesco, ‘‘unesco on Race,’’ 139; ‘‘unesco’s New Statement on Race,’’ 91. 52 Stephan, The Idea of Race in Science, 172. 53 De Vore, ‘‘An Interview with Sherwood Washburn,’’ 422. 54 ‘‘As the life expectancy of the Whites increased from 48 to 62 to 67 years, that of the Negroes increased from 32 to 52 to 61 years. They died of the same causes, but they died at di√erent rates. Discrimination, by denying equal social opportunity to the Negro, made his progress lag approximately 20 years behind that of the White. Somebody said to me, ‘Well that’s only six years.’ But it depends on whose six years it is. There are about 19 million people in this country sociologically classified as Negroes. If they die according to the death rate given above, approximately 100 million years of life will be lost owing to discrimination’’ (Washburn, ‘‘The Study of Race,’’ 530). 55 De Vore, ‘‘An Interview with Sherwood Washburn,’’ 422. 56 unesco, Race, Science and Society, 357. This statement would not be modulated by the American Association of Physical Anthropology until twenty-two years later when the ‘‘aapa Statement on Biological Aspects of Race’’ was published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. It revised two key points (numbers 2 and 3 of thirteen) of the 1964 unesco statement on race, to read as follows:

2. Biological di√erences between human beings reflect both hereditary factors and the influence of natural and social environments. In most cases, these di√erences are due to the interaction of both. The degree to which environment or heredity a√ects any particular trait varies greatly. 3. There is great genetic diversity within all human populations. Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogenous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the past. 57 unesco, Race, Science and Society, 360.

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58 See ‘‘Four Statements on the Race Question,’’ also available on the unesco website. 59 See also Sanjek, ‘‘The Enduring Inequalities of Race,’’ 9. 60 See also Faye Harrison, ‘‘The Persistent Power of Race in the Cultural and Political Economy of Racism.’’ Again, the argument is not that

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‘‘ethnic group’’ is never useful as a concept, only to point to one more body of theory which subordinates race to another explanatory paradigm. 61 Michaels, ‘‘Race into Culture,’’ 681. 62 Gilroy, Small Acts, 65. 63 Hanchard, Orpheus and Power, 21. 64 Abu-Lughod, ‘‘Writing Against Culture,’’ 144. 65 Ibid., 143. 66 Stolcke, ‘‘Talking Culture,’’ 2. 67 See Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics. 68 Michaels, ‘‘Race into Culture, 684. 69 Appiah, ‘‘The Uncompleted Argument,’’ 36. 70 Faye Harrison, ‘‘The Persistent Power of Race in the Cultural and Political Economy of Racism.’’ 71 Appiah, In My Father’s House, 13. 72 Appiah, ‘‘Identity, Authenticity, Survival’’; David Schneider, American Kinship. 73 Appiah’s move to argue for nonessentialized racial identities by holding that while biological races do not exist, ‘‘racial identities,’’ which are socially constructed, certainly do is close to mine; clearly we disagree on whether it is important to speak of the social existence of race(s). See Appiah, ‘‘Identity, Authenticity, Survival.’’ 74 See Smedley, Race in North America. 75 See Giroux, ‘‘Post-colonial Ruptures and Democratic Possibilities.’’ As Hazel Carby puts it, ‘‘Multiculturalism is one of the current code words for race’’ (‘‘The Multicultural Wars,’’ 190), and one should not forget her trenchant critique of how this happens. 76 In the United States, cultural studies has sometimes been seen as the domain of white scholars; however, Cultural Studies, a volume edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, and the journal Cultural Studies have published the work of a number of scholars of color. See, among others, Chabram ‘‘Chicano/a Studies as Oppositional Ethnography.’’ Work in cultural studies, as it originated in the United Kingdom, emphasized the importance of developing a notion of culture within the Marxist tradition to sustain class-based analysis. See Hall, ‘‘Cultural Studies’’; but see also Hall, ‘‘Gramsci’s Importance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,’’ and Gilroy, Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, for the treatment of race and racism. 77 See Rosaldo, ‘‘Whose Cultural Studies?’’ Again, however, ‘‘ethnicity’’ and ‘‘culture’’ have been metonymically substituted for ‘‘race.’’ 78 Ibid., 526. 79 Faye Harrison, ‘‘The Persistent Power of Race in the Cultural and Political Economy of Racism.’’

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80 Work by scholars of color in the discipline such as Faye Harrison, Dorinne Kondo, and Renato Rosaldo (see also Gregory and Sanjek, Race), which highlight the production of racial identities, are exceptions. Angie Chabram’s and Lisa Lowe’s work in cultural studies and ethnic studies represent powerful accounts of the formation of racialized identities outside the discipline (Chabram, ‘‘Chicano/a Studies as Oppositional Ethnography’’; Lowe, Immigrant Acts). Sociologists and historians (Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters), strangely enough, have led the field in defining ‘‘whiteness’’ as a non-neutral, racialized category (but see Dominguez, White by Definition). 81 Omi and Winant, Racial Formations in the United States, 55. 82 Later in the essay, Du Bois says, ‘‘The forces which bind together the Teuton nations are, then, first their race identity and common blood; secondly, and more important, a common history, common laws and religion, similar habits of thought and a conscious striving together for certain ideals of life’’—apparently e√ecting a separation of ‘‘blood’’ from common history (‘‘The Conservation of Races,’’ 22). This has led some critics to conclude that Du Bois had a more ‘‘social-biological’’ notion of race in his early rather than later work (see Holt ‘‘The Political Uses of Alienation,’’ 308). See Anthony Appiah’s ‘‘Identity, Authenticity, Survival’’ for a divergent reading of Du Bois’s notion of race, which argues its general failure to overcome a scientific or biological reading, resulting in an insu≈ciently sociohistorical concept of race. 83 Du Bois, ‘‘The Study of the Negro Problems.’’ 84 Ibid.; Vernon Williams, ‘‘Rethinking Race.’’ 85 Herskovits, The American Negro, 17, 52. 86 Du Bois, ‘‘Miscegenation,’’ 101. 87 See Hall, ‘‘Gramsci’s Importance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.’’ 88 See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. 89 Gordon and Anderson, ‘‘Conceptualizing the African Diaspora.’’ 90 Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, 2–3. 91 Geertz, ‘‘Anti Anti-relativism,’’ 268. 92 Yengoyan, ‘‘Theory in Anthropology’’; Kahn, ‘‘Culture’’; Fox, ‘‘The Breakdown of Culture.’’ 93 See Geertz, ‘‘Anti Anti-relativism.’’

1 Lévi-Strauss and Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, 181. 2 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 247. See also Lévi-Strauss, ‘‘Jean Jacques Rousseau,’’ 35.

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3: the interventions of culture

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3 However, see Christopher Johnson’s ‘‘Structuralism, Biology and the Linguistic Model,’’ which considers the influence of structuralism and biology on Lévi-Strauss’s ‘‘Race and History.’’ I thank Robert Bernasconi for this reference. 4 Claude Lévi-Strauss, interview by author, Paris, 9 December 1997. See also Lévi-Strauss and Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, 61, 148–50. 5 For a slightly di√erent assessment of Lévi-Strauss’s relationship to the Annales school, see Hughes, ‘‘Structure and Society,’’ 41–42. Lévi-Strauss also fell in and out with various members of the Annales school at di√erent points in time. See Lévi-Strauss and Eribon, Conversations with Claude LéviStrauss, 62–64, 120–23. 6 Bloch and Febvre, ‘‘To Our Readers,’’ 33–34. 7 In the final chapter of The Savage Mind, ‘‘History and Dialectic,’’ Lévi-Strauss argues, ‘‘I regard Anthropology as the principle of all research, while for Sartre it raises a problem in the shape of a constraint to overcome or a resistance to reduce. And indeed, what can one make of people ‘without history’ when one has defined man in terms of dialectic, and dialectic in terms of history? Sometimes Sartre seems tempted to distinguish two dialectics: the true one which is supposed to be that of historical societies, and a repetitive, short-term dialectic which he grants the so-called primitive societies whilst at the same time placing it very near biology’’ (248). 8 See Lévi-Strauss, ‘‘History and Anthropology,’’ 23; see also LéviStrauss’s remarks in ‘‘The Scope of Anthropology’’: ‘‘The History of historians does not need defending, but it is no attack on it either to say (as Braudel admits) that next to a short-scale time span there exists a long-scale time span; that some facts arise from a statistical and irreversible time and others from a mechanical and reversible one; and that the idea of a structural history contains nothing which could shock the historian’’ (16). 9 ‘‘Race et histoire’’ was reprinted in English, as ‘‘Race and History,’’ as part of a unesco collection called The Race Question in Modern Science. The other essays in the collection include Juan Comas, ‘‘Racial Myths’’; Kenneth Little, ‘‘Race and Society’’; Harry Shapiro, ‘‘The Jewish People: A Biological History’’ and ‘‘Race Mixture’’; Michel Leiris, ‘‘Race and Culture’’; L. C. Dunn, ‘‘Race and Biology’’; G. M. Morant, ‘‘The Significance of Racial Di√erences’’; Arnold Rose, ‘‘The Roots of Prejudice’’; Otto Klineberg, ‘‘Race and Psychology’’; and Marie Jahoda, ‘‘Race Relations and Mental Health.’’ 10 See Marcel Hena√, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology, 254. 11 ‘‘The Scope of Anthropology,’’ 4.

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12 See Lévi-Strauss and Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss,

38. 13 Ibid., 148, 150. 14 Ibid., 147. 15 Lévi-Strauss, ‘‘Race and History,’’ 220. 16 Ibid., 221. 17 Ibid.

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18 ‘‘No great weight can be attributed to the earlier rise of civilization in the Old World, which is satisfactorily explained as a chance. In short, historical events appear to have been much more potent in leading races to civilization than their faculty, and it follows that achievements of races do not warrant us to assume that one race is more highly gifted than another’’ (Franz Boas, in Stocking, A Franz Boas Reader, 226–27). 19 Lévi-Strauss, ‘‘Race and History,’’ 251. 20 Ibid., 231. 21 Ibid. 22 See Charbonnier, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, 33: ‘‘I would say that in comparison with our own great society, with all the great modern societies, the societies studied by the anthropologist are in a sense ‘cold’ societies rather than ‘hot’ societies, or like clocks in relation to steam engines. They are societies which create the minimum of that disorder which the physicists call ‘entropy,’ and they tend to remain indefinitely in their initial state, and this explains why they appear to us as static societies with no history.’’ 23 Lévi-Strauss, ‘‘Race and History,’’ 231. 24 Lévi-Strauss’s essay ‘‘The Anthropologist and the Human Condition,’’ in The View from Afar, explicitly develops this theme. 25 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 256. 26 See Lévi-Strauss and Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, chap. 16, ‘‘Politics and Race’’ (esp. 148–49), and chap. 3, ‘‘Bohemian Life in New York.’’ 27 See unesco May Press Reviews, 1971, com / opi / pd.5, p. 6, Item 30, ‘‘Colloquium on Race at unesco.’’ I thank Jens Boel, chief of the unesco Archives, for help in locating this reference. 28 Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar, xiii. 29 Lévi-Strauss, ‘‘Race and Culture,’’ 24. 30 Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar, xiv. 31 Ibid., xv. 32 ‘‘The inadequacy of the traditional answers may explain why the ideological struggle against racism has proved ine√ective in practice. Nothing indicates that racial prejudices are declining; and after brief periods of local calm, everything points to their resurfacing elsewhere with greater

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intensity. Hence the need felt by unesco periodically to resume a struggle whose outcome appears uncertain at best’’ (Lévi-Strauss, ‘‘Race and Culture,’’ 19). 33 Ibid. 34 Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar, xv. 35 See Lévi-Strauss and Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, 150. 36 Ibid. 37 Lévi-Strauss, ‘‘Race and Culture,’’ 6. 38 Christopher Johnson argues that ‘‘Race and History’’ articulates an implicitly biological model (‘‘Structuralism, Biology and the Linguistic Model,’’ 137, 139, 147). I think, however, that this is apparent only in ‘‘Race and Culture’’ and is consistent with the public appearances LéviStrauss made with structuralist-minded biologists like Francois Jacob in 1968 and 1972. 39 Lévi-Strauss, ‘‘Race and Culture,’’ 6. 40 Lévi-Strauss himself considered the analogy between the study of race and the study of culture to be purely a formal one. Interview by author, Paris, 9 December 1997. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 For a somewhat divergent reading of Rousseau’s influence on LéviStrauss, see Shalvey, ‘‘Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss.’’ 44 In the last chapter of The Savage Mind, ‘‘History and Dialectic,’’ Lévi-Strauss admonishes Sartre: ‘‘He who begins by steeping himself in the allegedly self-evident truths of introspection never emerges from them. Knowledge of men sometimes seems easier to those who allow themselves to be caught up in the snare of personal identity. But they thus shut the door on knowledge of man: written or avowed ‘confessions’ form the basis of all ethnographic research. Sartre in fact becomes the prisoner of his Cogito: Descartes made it possible to attain universality, but conditionally on remaining psychological and individual; by sociologizing the Cogito, Sartre merely exchanges one prison for another. Each subject’s group and period now take the place of timeless consciousness. Moreover, Sartre’s view of the world and man has the narrowness which has been traditionally credited to closed societies. His insistence on tracing a distinction between the primitive and civilized with the aid of gratuitous contrasts reflects, in a scarcely more subtle form, the fundamental opposition he postulates between myself and others. Yet there is little di√erence between the way in which this opposition is formulated in Sartre’s work and the way it would have been formulated by a Melanesian savage, while the analysis of the practico-inert quite simply revives the language of animism’’ (249).

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45 Foucault’s critique of humanism seems to have been most fully elaborated in his (1966) Les mots et les choses, published in English as The Order of Things in 1973. However, the seeds of his critique of humanism are arguably also found in his published dissertation of 1954, ‘‘Maladie mentale et psychologie,’’ the basis of what would become ‘‘Historie de la folie’’ or Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in and Age of Reason, published in 1961. I thank Bettina Bergo for these references. 46 ‘‘The Three Humanisms’’ was reprinted in Structural Anthropology, Volume 2, as the first section to the essay ‘‘Answers to Some Investigations.’’ 47 The first English edition, translated by John Russell for Criterion Press in 1961, was titled A World on the Wane. 48 See Lévi-Strauss, A World on the Wane; Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (New York: Atheneum, 1965). Also see the frontispiece to the 1973 edition of Tristes tropiques. 49 Lévi-Strauss, though himself radically a√ected by the racism of the Second World War, was characteristically oblique in referring to it in later interviews. See Lévi-Strauss and Eribon, Conversations with Claude LéviStrauss, 155–65; Cohen-Solal, ‘‘ ‘Claude L. Strauss’ in the United States.’’

4: on louis dumont 1 Dumont, Essays on Individualism, 9. 2 Dumont, ‘‘A Comparative Approach to Modern Ideology,’’ 3.

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3 On the reception of Homo Hierarchicus, see Berreman, ‘‘The Brahminical View of Caste’’; Khare, ‘‘Encompassing and Encompassed’’; Leach, ‘‘Hierarchical Man’’; Kolenda, ‘‘Review of Homo Hierarchicus ’’; Marriot, ‘‘Review of Homo Hierarchicus ’’ and ‘‘Interpreting Indian Society’’; Tambiah, ‘‘Review of Homo Hierarchicus ’’; Yalman, ‘‘De Tocqueville in India.’’ With regard to the Contributions to Indian Sociology symposium, see Madan, ‘‘On the Nature of Caste in India’’; Das and Uberoi, ‘‘The Elementary Structure of Caste’’; Heesterman, ‘‘Priesthood and Brahminism’’; Kantowsky, ‘‘The Problem of Sponsored Change’’; Leach, ‘‘Espirit in Homo Hierarchicus ’’; Khare, ‘‘A Theory of Pure Hierarchy’’; Singer, ‘‘Modernization or Traditionalization’’; Von Furer-Haimendorf, ‘‘Tribes and Hindu Society.’’ With regard to the Journal of Asian Studies symposium, see Richards and Nichols, ‘‘Symposium on the Contribution of Louis Dumont’’; Barnett, Fruzetti, and Ostor, ‘‘Hierarchy Purified’’; Kolenda, ‘‘Seven Kinds of Hierarchy in Homo Hierarchicus.’’ 4 The exceptions were Das and Uberoi, ‘‘The Elementary Structure of Caste,’’ and Das, Structure and Cognition, which did not dispute Dumont’s Indological focus, but claimed his Indology lacked method.

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5 See Srinivas, ‘‘Some Reflections of the Nature of Caste Hierarchy’’; Appadurai, ‘‘Is Homo Hierarchicus?’’ and ‘‘Putting Hierarchy in Its Place’’; Dirks, ‘‘Castes of Mind’’; Collins, ‘‘Louis Dumont and the Study of Religions.’’ 6 Exceptions are Yalman, ‘‘De Tocqueville in India’’; Barnett, Fruzetti, and Ostor, ‘‘Hierarchy Purified’’; Berreman, ‘‘The Brahminical View of Caste’’; Tambiah, ‘‘Review of Homo Hierarchicus.’’ 7 McKim Marriot, in ‘‘Review of Homo Hierarchicus,’’ and Nur Yalman, in ‘‘De Tocqueville in India,’’ tag the Weberian influence as one among many. Edmund Leach, in ‘‘Espirit in Homo Hierarchicus,’’ and Detlef Kantowsky, in ‘‘The Problem of Sponsored Change,’’ point to the introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as the source of Weberian influence on Dumont. 8 Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx, vii. 9 Dumont’s ‘‘The Anthropological Community and Ideology’’ contains a further elaboration of the term ‘‘distinctive opposition.’’ 10 Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx, 4. 11 There have been two major responses to the arguments of Dumont and Imtiaz Ahmad (whose work on caste among Muslims I discuss in chapter 5). One has been to work from Frederick Barth’s ethnography of the Swat Pathan, wherein the existence of caste-like organization is argued in the absence of Hindu presence in the region. Charles Lindholm argues, further, that caste-like features also mark the social organization of Muslim groups in the Middle East, concluding that ‘‘the aspects of South Asian Muslim life Ahmad and his colleagues see as deriving from Hindu influence, may instead be seen as characteristic features of the Middle East’’ (‘‘Caste in Islam and the Problem of Deviant Systems,’’ 457–58). Akbar Ahmed, an ethnographer of the Pakhtun groups studied by Lindholm and Barth, has also argued that the social organization of South Asian Muslims is best understood as part of a Middle Eastern pattern, but the contiguous category is that of ‘‘tribe,’’ rather than of caste. See Ahmed, ‘‘The Arab Connection’’; Ahmed and Hart, From the Atlas to the Indus. This second response to Dumont and Ahmad shares something in common with that of the Pakistani sociologist Hamza Alavi, who also rejects caste as the meaningful unit of analysis, in favor of the term biraderi (brotherhood, lineage, or clan) as the defining feature of Muslim organization in the West Punjab —an area certainly coextensive with Hindu influence (‘‘The Two Biraderies’’). In other work he has used more frequently the terms class and ethnicity (‘‘Pakistan and Islam’’; ‘‘Formation of the Social Structure of South Asia under the Impact of Colonialism’’). See also, for a class-based analysis, Saghir Ahmad, ‘‘Social Stratification in a Punjabi Village’’; on the

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use of patrilineal lineages (biraderis), rather than caste as descriptive of Hindu communities, see Heesterman, ‘‘Caste, Village and Indian Society.’’ 12 The four varnas, in order, are Brahmin (priest), Kshatriya (king, warrior), Vaisya (trader, merchant), Sudra (craftsmen). ‘‘Untouchables,’’ alternately called ‘‘Harijans’’ or ‘‘Dalits,’’ are seen to be outside the varnic order. 13 See Dumont, ‘‘On Putative Hierarchy and Some Allergies to It.’’ 14 Dumont, ‘‘A Comparative Approach to Modern Ideology,’’ 9. 15 Ibid., 11–12. 16 See also Faye Harrison, ‘‘The Du Boisian Legacy in Anthropology’’; Lewis, Introduction. Harrison also discusses Du Bois’s influence on Caroline Bond Day, a physical anthropologist, and Irene Diggs, who worked in Latin America, and co-founded the journal Phylon with Du Bois. 17 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 303. 18 Du Bois, ‘‘The Negro Citizen,’’ 461. 19 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 243, 253, 296. 20 Du Bois, Color and Democracy, 85. 21 Ibid., 71. 22 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 88–89. While many sources claim 1905 as the date of the Niagara Movement’s Declaration of Principles, Du Bois gives the date as 31 January 1906. 23 See also ibid., 55. 24 This passage also appears verbatim in ‘‘The Legacy of John Brown,’’ the last chapter of Du Bois’s biography of John Brown ( John Brown, 165). I thank Nahum Candler for this observation. 25 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 253. 26 Ibid., 96. 27 Immerwahr, ‘‘Caste or Colony?,’’ 277. 28 See, for example, Raper and Reid, Sharecroppers All, which also points to slavery producing a ‘‘rigid class and caste organization’’ (218), refers to ‘‘caste principles’’ (81) and ‘‘caste barriers’’ (82), and in general uses caste and class as co-signifiers (216, 218, 222, 245). 29 Park and Burgess 1924, 205–6. Park is, of course, either celebrated or reviled for having trained a whole generation of black sociologists. See Watts, ‘‘On reconsidering Park, Johnson, Du Bois, Frazier and Reid.’’ 30 Park, ‘‘The Bases of Race Prejudice,’’ 11. 31 Kroeber, ‘‘Caste,’’ 254. 32 Lloyd Warner, ‘‘American Caste and Class,’’ 234. 33 Ibid., 236. 34 Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 63. 35 Ibid., 71–72.

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36 Ibid., 62. 37 Warner and Davis, ‘‘A Comparative Study of American Caste,’’ 231–

32. 38 Ibid., 232. 39 Davis and Dollard, Children of Bondage, xxii. 40 Ibid., 4. 41 Ibid., xxii. 42 Ibid., 41. 43 Ibid., 18–19. 44 Davis, ‘‘Retrospect, 1965,’’ 343. 45 Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 1:xxxv.

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46 See ibid., 2:680; this passage appears in my chapter 5.

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47 In fact, the correspondence points painfully to the relationship of black scholarship to structures of patronage. When, on 3 May 1939, Myrdal sent to Du Bois another long memorandum, making it clear that the much younger Ralph Bunche, who had written a patronizing review of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, would become part of the sta√ administering the study, and that Charles Johnson, one of Du Bois’s rivals, had played a key role in recommending black scholars for the study’s several components, Du Bois wrote back, on 19 May, ‘‘I congratulate you on the assistance which you have promised and have no suggestions’’ (Du Bois, The Papers Microform of W. E. B. Du Bois, reel 50, frame 596). The following month, Du Bois sent Myrdal a copy of his essay ‘‘The Negro Scientist,’’ just published in the American Scholar, in which he describes the e√ects of segregation on black scientists in physics and chemistry, and concludes by reflecting on the impact of discrimination on his own career as a social scientist and his inability to raise su≈cient funds to keep the Atlanta Studies going: ‘‘To my great disappointment the work had to be given up. We asked only $5,000 a year for its continued pursuit and out of that was paid my salary of $1,200. The work was not of first-rate importance. It was handicapped by lack of funds, lack of trained personnel and faulty scientific method’’ (319). Du Bois laments the poor quality of the Atlanta Studies and that for twenty-five years he had had to turn his ‘‘attention to a career of propaganda’’ (320)—a theme he would return to in a more extended reflection on the Atlanta Studies in ‘‘My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom.’’ Nahum Chandler has analyzed the Du Bois–Myrdal correspondence in greater detail. In a note dated 30 June 1939, Myrdal thanks Du Bois for sending him the article, remarking, ‘‘I appreciate deeply the pathos between your dispassionate lines and even share in your feeling of damage to culture and to individual personality which has been and is part of the situation’’ (Du Bois, The Papers Microform of W. E. B. Du Bois, reel 50, frame 597). Du Bois had in fact earlier appealed to the Carnegie Foundation for

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funds to support a major undertaking for the study of black social life in the United States, but had been turned down (see Chandler, ‘‘The Atlanta Project’’). The Carnegie Foundation had, however, requested Du Bois to do a study, ‘‘Economic Cooperation among the Negro Americans,’’ which was published as one of the Atlanta Studies in 1907. The foundation also awarded him a total of $1,250 to finish the manuscript of Black Reconstruction in America during the lean Depression year of 1934 (Lewis, Black Reconstruction in America, xxix–xxx). 48 See Du Bois, The Papers Microform of W. E. B. Du Bois, reel 50, frames 587–88. I am indebted to Nahum Chandler for pointing me to this correspondence. 49 See memorandum from Gunnar Myrdal to Keppler, President of the Carnegie Foundation, 28 January 1939, p. 23 (ibid., reel 50, frames 555–86). 50 Davis, Gardner, and Gardner, Deep South, 44. 51 Ibid., 22–23. 52 ‘‘Enforced deference, for example, is a prominent feature of both systems. Lack of deference from low castes is not contaminating but it is promptly punished, for it implies equality. The essential similarity lies in the fact that the function of the rules in both cases is to maintain the caste system with institutionalized inequality as its fundamental feature’’ (Berreman, ‘‘Caste in India and the United States,’’ 5). 53 Davis, Gardner, and Gardner, Deep South, 48–49. See also Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 2:677–78. 54 Davis, Gardner, and Gardner, Deep South, 527–28. 55 Charles Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt, 325. See also Charles Johnson’s ‘‘The Conflict of Caste and Class in an American Industry,’’ wherein he argues that the tobacco industry in its ‘‘early period . . . had all the features and limitations of a caste,’’ but that a ‘‘modern industry is too complex and changes too rapidly to sustain a caste system,’’ because ‘‘class struggle is implicit in the free competition on which capitalism and the capitalistic organization of industry is based’’ (58). 56 Charles Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt, 325. 57 Ibid. Du Bois’s essay ‘‘The Negro Citizen’’ was included in Charles Johnson’s edited volume, The Negro in American Civilization (1930). In this essay, Du Bois again defined color caste, this time in the light of social research: ‘‘There is a system of color caste in the United States, based on legal and customary race distinctions and discriminations, having to do with separation in travel, in schools, in public accommodations, in residence and in family relations. There is discrimination on the kind and amount of public school education and in civil rights of various sorts and in courts, jails and fines. There is disenfranchisement of voters by means of

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various tests, including restrictions as to registration, voting in primaries and the right of summary administrative decisions, and finally there is lynching and mob violence’’ (461). 58 Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 775. 59 Ibid., 237. 60 See introductory note to Clark, Prejudice and Your Child. 61 See Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 1:xii. 62 See Frazier, The Negro in the United States, xii. 63 Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 2:667. 64 Ibid., 676–77. 65 Frazier, The Negro in the United States, 673. 66 See Mody, ‘‘Brown Footnote Eleven in Historical Context.’’ 67 Clark, Dark Ghetto, 22. 68 Davis, ‘‘Retrospect, 1965,’’ 339. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 342–43. 71 Berreman, ‘‘Caste in India and the United States,’’ 9–10. 72 Ibid., 8. 73 Cox, Caste, Class and Race, 538. 74 Buell Gallagher, for example, described caste as both a sociological description and a moral judgment, tracing its usage to the American missionary movement of the nineteenth century. See Immerwahr, ‘‘Caste or Colony?,’’ 280. 75 Both Johnson (‘‘Shadow of the Plantation’’; ‘‘The Conflict of Caste and Class in an American Industry’’) and Davis (Deep South, ‘‘Retrospect, 1965’’), among others, identified a feudal economic structure in the plantation system of the Old South which put rural Southern blacks in positions of peonage. 76 Cox, Caste, Class and Race, 544. 77 See Dumont, ‘‘Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification,’ ’’ 254–55, 421, 423. Cox himself continued to insist on the essential unchangeability of the Indian caste system. In a reply to Gerald Berreman’s essay ‘‘Caste in India and the United States,’’ Cox wrote that the main di√erence between the American South and India was ‘‘the absence of any tendencies toward radical social change in the caste system which is of consequence. There has been no progressive social movement for betterment among outcaste castes in Brahmanic India’’ (‘‘Berreman’s Caste in India and the United States,’’ 15). 78 See Dumont, ‘‘Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification,’ ’’ 248–49. 79 See ibid., 249–51. 80 Weber, ‘‘Class, Status and Party,’’ 194. 81 Weber, Religion of India, 30, 40, 42–43. 82 Ibid., 30.

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83 Weber, ‘‘Class, Status and Party,’’ 188–89. 84 Nahum Chandler has analyzed Weber’s travels to the United States

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and his correspondence with Du Bois in great detail (see ‘‘The Possible Form of An Interlocution’’). While Du Bois seems to have sat in on classes with Weber when he studied in Germany, Weber was only four years senior to Du Bois and had just joined the faculty as a very junior lecturer. Chandler correctly points out that the student-teacher relation between the two has been too readily assumed by Du Bois’s biographers, rather than adduced from available evidence, which suggests that the two were contemporaries who held each other in mutual high regard. Weber’s esteem for Du Bois can be seen in the transcript of an exchange that took place at the German Sociological Society, in Frankfurt, on 21 October 1910: ‘‘I wish to state that the most important sociological scholar anywhere in the Southern United States of America, with whom no white scholar can compare, is a Negro— Burckhardt Du Bois’’ (‘‘Max Weber, Dr. Alfred Ploetz, and W. E. B. Du Bois,’’ 308). 85 See Du Bois, ‘‘Die Negerfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten,’’ 243. 86 Dumont, ‘‘Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification,’ ’’ 259. 87 Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 16. 88 Dumont, ‘‘Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification,’ ’’ 262. 89 Ibid., 263. 90 Arendt, ‘‘Race-Thinking before Racism, 158. 91 Ibid., 177. Arendt’s larger argument in the essay is actually that the turn toward race-thinking in Europe is not prominent until the latenineteenth-century ‘‘scramble for Africa.’’ Still, she sees race-thinking as an intrinsic feature of European nationalism, first emerging in the eighteenth century as a means by which the French aristocracy could establish class di√erences, but eventually leading to internal division and thus ‘‘civil war,’’ such that race-thinking came to be understood as an ‘‘anti-national’’ sentiment. Arendt contrasts this development with the German and British cases, in which race-thinking evolved into positive national sentiment and as a means to galvanize a population for external or ‘‘foreign’’ wars. 92 Drake, Black Folk Here and There, 227–303. See also Stannard, ‘‘Appendix 2,’’ 269–81. 93 Drake, Black Folk Here and There, 302. 94 Myrdal, quoted in Dumont, ‘‘Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification,’ ’’ 264. One may ignore, for the moment, the first Constitution of the United States, which explicitly prohibited citizenship for those who were not white and not men. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid., 265. 97 Dumont, ‘‘A Comparative Approach to Modern Ideology, 12.

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98 Ibid. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid. 101 Uday Mehta, ‘‘The Essential Ambiguities of Race and Racism,’’ 235.

notes to chapter 5

5: india in south afric a

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1 Seven of the faculty responded to the hss invitation with a collective letter that condemned recent statements of Sudarshan and the rss. 2 Deshpande, Contemporary India; Vivek Kumar, ‘‘Situating Dalits in Indian Sociology.’’ 3 Viswanathan, ‘‘Durban and Dalit Discourse.’’ 4 Nicholas Dirks, in ‘‘Castes of Mind,’’ charts a ‘‘Nationalist Sociology of India’’ growing out of nineteenth-century colonial anthropology, wherein race and caste had quite di√erent valences than the ones described in this essay. 5 Dumont and Pocock, ‘‘For a Sociology of India,’’ 9. 6 Uberoi, ‘‘Science and Swaraj,’’ 120. 7 Ibid., 119–20. 8 Lévi-Strauss, ‘‘The Work of the Bureau of American Ethnology and Its Lessons,’’ 55. 9 Uberoi, ‘‘Science and Swaraj,’’ 123. 10 Deshpande, Contemporary India, 123. On caste as a form of colonial sociology, see for example, Dirks, Castes of Mind; and Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians. 11 Deshpande, Contemporary India, 108. M. N. Srinivas was himself keenly aware of the problem: ‘‘I am not trying to be cynical but I cannot help wondering how many of those who have of late started publicly speaking in favour of a casteless and classless society really mean what they say. . . . Most of us—not only our politicians but our intellectuals as well— are bamboozled into agreeing with something merely because we are afraid to be mistaken for being ‘reactionary.’ Even discussion of the subject is taboo. In the case of caste, this disease has proceeded so far that there is a great danger that our talk and our policy will leave reality far behind. Secondly, coupled with the widespread fear of being dubbed a reactionary, there is also a shrewd if somewhat cynical appreciation of facts. I know what I say may seem a contradiction, but really it is not so. Agreeing to progressive resolutions satisfies our consciences and tells us that nothing serious is going to be done by anyone, and that caste will continue to remain what it is. The best of both the worlds are [sic] secured by taking such a course’’ (‘‘A Note on Sanskritization and Westernization,’’ 71).

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12 Deshpande, Contemporary India, 101. S. K. Thorat has discussed the paucity of empirical studies documenting caste discrimination and summarized them in his essay ‘‘Hindu Social Order and Human Rights of Dalits.’’ 13 See also K. G. Kannabiran, ‘‘We the Other People,’’ Hindu, 9 June 2001. 14 Dipankar Gupta, ‘‘Caste, Race, Politics.’’ 15 See Thirumaavalavan, Talisman; Shah, Dalit Identity and Politics; Sainath, Everybody Loves a Good Drought. 16 Hancock, ‘‘Unmaking the ‘Great Tradition.’ ’’ 17 Cited in M. N. Srinivas, ‘‘Practicing Social Anthropology in India,’’ 15–16. 18 McKim Marriot, ‘‘Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization,’’ 191. 19 Ibid., 193. 20 Ibid., 197. 21 Ibid., 200. 22 Hancock, ‘‘Unmaking the ‘Great Tradition.’ ’’ 23 Srinivas, ‘‘The Dominant Caste in Rampura.’’ 24 Srinivas, Caste in Modern India, 42–43. 25 Srinivas, ‘‘The Cohesive Role of Sanskritization,’’ 56. 26 Ibid., 56. Srinivas acknowledges that Chatterjee’s essay, ‘‘Kirata– Jana–Krti–The Indo Mongoloids, Their Contribution to the History and Culture of India,’’ appeared in print, in 1950, before his own dissertation, which, though written in 1948, was published in 1952. 27 Srinivas, ‘‘The Cohesive Role of Sanskritization,’’ 56. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 69. 30 Ibid., 57. In some regions of India, Dalits have vocally protested caste oppression by Other Backward Castes (obc), as they are known, specifically the Sudra or Bahujan groups. I therefore use a hyphen in DalitBahujan to signify a tentative alliance of thought and political mobilization, while other writers see ‘‘Dalitbahujan’’ as a political achievement and still others refer only to ‘‘Dalit’’ to mark a separation from obc politics. 31 Ilaiah, ‘‘Towards the Dalitization of the Nation,’’ 274. 32 See Raj Gowthaman in Pandian, ‘‘Stepping Outside History?,’’ 302. Also see Sikand, Islam, Caste, and Dalit-Muslim Relations in India, 77. 33 Selvam, ‘‘Sociology of India and Hinduism,’’ 169. 34 Hiltebeitel, Draupadi among Rajputs, Muslims and Dalits; Mayaram, Against History, Against State; Narayanan, ‘‘The Ramayana and its Muslim Interpreters.’’ 35 Hancock, ‘‘Unmaking the ‘Great Tradition.’ ’’

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36 Srinivas, ‘‘The Cohesive Role of Sanskritization,’’ 58. 37 Imtiaz Ahmad, ‘‘For a Sociology of India,’’ 172. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 175. 40 Ibid., 174. 41 Ibid., 177. 42 Imtiaz Ahmad, Caste and Social Stratification among the Muslims,

xxiii. 43 Ibid., xxvii, xxv.

notes to chapter 5

44 ‘‘Some acculturative influence of Hinduism was thus inevitable. But

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if caste among the Muslims owed itself entirely to Hindu influence, then the Islamisation of Muslim groups over the centuries should have resulted in the slow and gradual elimination of caste principles and ideology. However, such evidence as is available suggests that Islamisation serves to reinforce rather than weaken or eliminate caste distinctions. Consequently, the question whether there are some elements in Islam which support caste distinctions becomes irrelevant’’ (ibid., xxix–xxx). 45 Imtiaz Ahmad, ‘‘For a Sociology of India,’’ 176–77. 46 Ibid. 47 Zarina Bhatty, ‘‘Status of Muslim Women and Social Change’’ and ‘‘Social Stratification among Muslims in India.’’ 48 Sikand, Islam, Caste, and Dalit-Muslim Relations in India, 20. 49 Ibid., 21. 50 See also Hiltebeitel, Draupadi among Rajputs, Muslims and Dalits; Narayanan, ‘‘The Ramayana and Its Muslim Interpreters’’ and ‘‘Tolerant Hinduism.’’ 51 Shiv Viswanathan puts it more starkly: ‘‘One can read 20 years of Contributions to Indian Sociology and think that Mandal, Narmada, Bhopal or the turmoil in Punjab were all events that have not touched our imagination’’ (‘‘Durban and Dalit Discourse,’’ 3123). 52 Ilaiah, ‘‘Towards the Dalitization of the Nation’’; Guru, ‘‘The Dalit Movement in Mainstream Sociology’’; Selvam, ‘‘Sociology of India and Hinduism.’’ 53 Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu, 291, 285. See also Iliah, ‘‘Towards the Dalitization of the Nation.’’ 54 Lal, ‘‘Asprashyeekaran—Dalitisation.’’ 55 Srinivas, ‘‘The Cohesive Role of Sanskritization, 23. 56 Gerald Berreman, ‘‘Sanskritization and Female oppression in India.’’ 57 Sharmilla, Rege, ‘‘A Dalit Feminist Standpoint’’ in Gender and Caste, Anupama Rao ed., (London: Zed Press, 2003), 92–3. 58 Rege, ‘‘A Dalit Feminist Standpoint,’’ 94. 59 Thakur, ‘‘Feminism’s Caste.’’

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60 As one outcome of the sociology-for-India debate, some called for an ‘‘indigenous’’ social science based on Hindu concepts (Saran, ‘‘Review of Contributions to Indian Sociology ’’), while others lamented that ‘‘the e√ort at social enquiry . . . had found so little nourishment’’ in ‘‘the long tradition of Brahminical thought in India’’ (Satish Saberwal, ‘‘For a Sociology of India,’’ 313). Veena Das, a student of Srinivas continued an Indological focus with her Structure and Cognition (1977). Patricia Oberoi, Satish Deshpande, and Nandini Sunder remark admiringly of ‘‘the apparent ease with which [the generation of Indian anthropologists in late-colonial, early-Independence India] related to the heritage of Sanskrit learning,’’ now rarely found (‘‘Introduction,’’ 36). Therefore, ‘‘few of them found it necessary to expressly argue for the synthesis of Indology and sociology, as Louis Dumont and David Pocock were later to do in a foundational programmatic essay in Contributions to India–Sociology (1957), or as McKim Marriott outlined in his prolegomenon to the sociology of India ‘through Hindu categories’ ’’ (ibid.). 61 As Ilaiah puts it, ‘‘Brahminical communist nationalism’’ was as much a problem as liberal-secular nationalism. ‘‘The entire written or spoken discourse on secularism and communalism in India did not and does not take a stand on brahminism, and no secularist school has constructed a systematic critique of brahminism or examined its implications for the secularist notions of life’’ (‘‘Towards the Dalitization of the Nation,’’ 287). 62 Deshpande, Contemporary India, 104–5. See also Ilaiah ‘‘Towards the Dalitization of the Nation.’’ 275. 63 Srinivas, ‘‘The Cohesive Role of Sanskritization,’’ 71. 64 Similar worries might also attach to foundational work describing a transregional Sanskrit cosmopolitanism. Sheldon Pollock, while adroitly comparing Sanskritic civilization with the Latinate imperium, risks certain methodological di≈culties with regard to its spatial and temporal dimensions, namely, that the horizontal circulation and spread of Sanskrit knowledge coexisted with, or was even predicated on, deeply vertical forms of social and political exclusion. See Pollock, ‘‘The Sanskrit Cosmopolis, A.D. 300–1300,’’ ‘‘Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,’’ and The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. 65 As Thomas Blom Hansen observes, ‘‘The vhp [Vishwa Hindu Parishad] is probably the a≈liate of the rss in which a strategy of ‘nationalist sanskritization’ within the Sangh Parivar is most clearly articulated. The syncretic platform, the recruitment of the religious establishment, and the paternalistic reconversion strategies all point to the equation of a brahminical ‘great tradition’ seeking to heal up and cover over the many disparate, contradictory and fragmented ‘little traditions’ of dispersed Hindu pratices under a simplified ‘thin’ national Hinduism, largely defined in terms of

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sanskritized practices. . . . The sankritization strategy is clearly articulated in vhp publications that report the teaching of Sanskrit to poor and backward people’’ (The Sa√ron Wave, 107). 66 Savarkar, Hindutva, 100–101. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 101. 69 Shiv Viswanathan, ‘‘Durban and Dalit Discourse.’’ 70 Beteille, ‘‘Race, Caste and Gender,’’ 34. 71 However, for a dissident opinion that caste is worse than racism, see the statement made by T. K. Oommen, former president of the International Sociology Association and professor of anthropology at Jawaharlal Nehru University; Ambrose Pinto, executive director of the Indian Social Institute New Delhi; and others (‘‘Durban Conference Must Discuss Caste Issue,’’ 12 May 2001, available on the web site for Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, www.ambedkar.org/ [accessed 17 September 2002]). 72 Béteille, ‘‘Race, Caste and Gender,’’ 33, 18. See also ‘‘Race, Caste, and Ethnic Identity.’’ 73 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 153. 74 Ibid., 117. 75 Ibid. 76 See Robb, The Concept of Race in South Asia. 77 See Ja√relot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics. 78 Bamshad et al., ‘‘Genetic Evidence on the Origins of Indian Caste Populations’’; Bamshad et al., ‘‘Female Gene Flow Stratifies Hindu Castes’’; Cordaux, et al., ‘‘Independent Origins of Indian Caste and Tribal Paternal Lineages’’; Cordaux, et al., ‘‘The Northeast Indian Passageway’’; QuintanaMurci et al., ‘‘Where West Meets East.’’ 79 Kivisild et al., ‘‘Genetic Heritage of Earliest Settlers Persists Both in Indian Tribal and Caste Populations’’; Kivisild et al., ‘‘Deep Common Ancestry of Indian and Western-Eurasian Mitochondrial dna lineages’’; Underhill et al., ‘‘The Phylogeography of Y Chromosome Binary Haplotypes and the Origins of Modern Human Populations’’; Underhill et al., ‘‘Y Chromosome Sequence Variation and the History of Human Populations.’’ See also the web site for the South Asia Faculty Network for other documents related to the controversy. 80 Omvedt, ‘‘Caste, Race and Sociologists–1.’’ 81 See Berreman’s ‘‘Caste in India and the United States’’ (1960), ‘‘Race, Caste and Other Invidious Distinctions’’ (1975), and ‘‘Social Barriers: Caste, Class and Race in Cross-Cultural Perspective’’ (1977). Reprinted in Berreman, Caste and Other Inequities. See also Michael, Dalits in Modern India. 82 Berreman, ‘‘Caste in India and the United States,’’ 17.

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83 Berreman, Caste and Other Inequities, 190–91. 84 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 130–31. This passage would have a pro-

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found e√ect on Gunnar Myrdal, who cited it in An American Dilemma and, twenty years later, in his foreword to Kenneth Clark’s study, Dark Ghetto. 85 These two passages are also cited in S. D. Kapoor’s essay, ‘‘B.R. Ambedkar, W.E.B. Du Bois and the Process of Liberation.’’ 86 Phule, Slavery in the Civilised British Government under the Cloak of Brahmanism, xlv. The ‘‘cruel hardships’’ slaves faced are enumerated on the preceding page: ‘‘The slave owners used to kick them routinely as if they were brutes. Sometimes they used to yoke them to ploughs and make them plough the lands in the burning sun. If they shirked a bit, they were whipped mercilessly. They did not care or feed them properly. Many times they had to starve. The meager food that was served to them was most unsatisfactory and insu≈cient to their needs. Sometimes even this was not served to them. The slaves were compelled to put in hard work throughout the day till they broke down completely and were condemned to the stables for their nightly rest. They would lay down their tired limbs on the insanitary [sic] floors of the stables half dead. Even the sweet balm of sleep was denied to them. How could they sleep there? They were in terror of the call of the slave owner at any time (in the night). Sleep eludes empty stomachs. Their bodies used to ache from the whip-lashes rained on them by day and they tossed from side to side. To make matters worse, the very thought of their dear and near ones whom they were so cruelly torn apart wrung ‘tears of molten lead’ from their tired eyes. In this helpless plight they used to pray to the Almighty to take pity on them and to deliver them from this hell on earth.’’ 87 Immerwahr, ‘‘Caste or Colony?’’ 88 Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, 177. 89 See, for example, Ambedkar’s note ‘‘Gandhi Lacks Vision’’: ‘‘Gandhi’s attitude towards the minorities was the same as Lincoln had adopted towards the Negro problem. Passionately devoted to the Union, Lincoln issued the Proclamation of Freedom for the slaves in 1862 to earn the help of the Negroes for the Northern states. Similarly Gandhi wanted freedom but also Chaturvarna Dharma. If a constitution accepted by all parties could be drafted, Gandhi could see the British Prime Minister as the single and solitary representative of India’’ (Gandhi and Gandhism, 12). 90 In ‘‘B. R. Ambedkar, W. E. B. Du Bois and the Process of Liberation,’’ Kapoor makes the case for Ambedkar’s familiarity with Du Bois’s work based on his graduate work at Columbia and proximity to Harlem. 91 Du Bois, The Papers Microform of W. E. B. Du Bois, reel 58, frame 000-467.

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92 See also Carol Anderson, ‘‘From Hope to Disillusion,’’ 548–49.

notes to chapter 5

93 Du Bois, The Papers Microform of W. E. B. Du Bois, reel 58, frame

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000-467. 94 Between 1944 and 1947, members of the National Negro Congress (nnc) and the naacp petitioned the United Nations to have racial discrimination in the United States treated as a human-rights issue. Though ultimately unsuccessful (Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the un Commission on Human Rights threatened to resign from the Board of the naacp), Indian members of the unhrc helped bring the petition to the General Assembly, and India publicly endorsed it. See Plummer, Rising Wind, 179; Carol Anderson, ‘‘From Hope to Disillusion.’’ 95 See Immerwahr, ‘‘Caste or Colony?’’ In Ambedkar’s text, Charles S. Johnson is incorrectly identified as Charles C. Johnson, but passages from The Negro in American Civilization are cited at length in Ambedkar’s essay ‘‘Which Is Worse? Slavery or Untouchability?’’ 96 See Lala Lajpat Rai, Unhappy India, chap. 10 (‘‘Less than the Pariah’’) and 113. 97 Lala Lajpat Rai, The United States of America, 88. 98 Lala Lajpat Rai, Unhappy India, 139. 99 Ibid., 139–40. 100 Ibid., 140. 101 Ibid., 141. 102 Ambedkar, Speeches and Writings, 5:9. 103 Ibid., 5:5–18, 75–88. 104 Ibid., 5:15. 105 Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste, 65. 106 Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, 197. 107 Ibid., 194. 108 ‘‘We have . . . now come in possession of a booklet in which there are certain paragraphs which do not find place in Vol No. V chapter 3 & 8. The material reproduced here when read together, makes consistent and complete reading. We have also no reason to doubt the genuineness of the material as the publisher of the said booklet Shri Devi Dayal was associated with Dr. Ambedkar during 1943–47’’ (editor’s note, Ambedkar, Speeches and Writings, 5:741). 109 Ibid., 742. 110 Ibid., 743. 111 Ibid., 752. 112 Ibid., 749–51. 113 Ibid., 752.

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114 Ibid., 753. 115 See Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘‘The American Dream,’’ which was

delivered 4 July 1965 (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., 131). Immerwahr notes that this passage of King’s sermon was likely drawn from passages of his mentor Benjamin May’s visit to a South Indian school (‘‘Caste or Colony?,’’ 297). 116 Immerwahr, ‘‘Caste or Colony?,’’ 295–96. 117 ‘‘Caste reservation’’ refers to the principle of reserving a certain number of seats in the colonial electorate or, after Independence, for government jobs, educational institutions, and local panchayat (municipal) elections. The principle of reservation has also been extended to women’s representation in local and state elections. 118 On black nationalism, see Immerwahr, ‘‘Caste or Colony?,’’ 298– 300. 119 Raj Gowthaman, in Pandian, ‘‘Stepping Outside History?,’’ 305. On Dalit writers and the Harlem Renaissance, see Waghmare, ‘‘Black Literature and Dalit Literature.’’ 120 Rajasekhar, Apartheid in India, 4. 121 Ibid., 49. 122 Rajasekhar, Dalit, 35. 123 Prashad, ‘‘Afro-Dalits of the World, Unite!’’ 124 Ibid. 125 Duster, ‘‘Individual Fairness, Group Preferences and the California Strategy,’’ 45. 126 See Parikh, The Politics of Preference; Weisskopf, A≈rmative Action in the United States and India. 127 See Forbes, Black Africans and Native Americans; Menchaca, ‘‘Chicano Indianism.’’

6: legacies of culture, l anguages of the state

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1 Tariq Ali, ‘‘Getting Used to the Idea of Double Standards.’’ Independent, 15 September 2001. 2 Menon and Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries; Butalia, The Other Side of Silence; Das, ‘‘National Honour and Practical Kinship.’’ 3 Cited in Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 1. 4 Clastres, Society against the State, 159–60. 5 Geertz, Negara, 159. 6 Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States; Barkey and Parikh, ‘‘Comparative Perspectives on the State.’’

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notes to chapter 6

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7 Alonso, ‘‘The Politics of Space, Time and Substance’’; Nagengast, ‘‘Violence, Terror and the Crisis of the State’’; Hansen and Stepputat, States of Imagination. 8 Foster, ‘‘Making National Cultures in the Global Ecumene’’; Gupta, ‘‘Blurred Boundaries’’; Mitchell, ‘‘Society, Economy, and the State E√ect.’’ 9 Breckenridge and Van der Veer, Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, 2. 10 Geertz, ‘‘After the Revolution,’’ 239–40, emphasis added. 11 Kapferer, Legends of People, Myths of State, 90. See also Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec; Spencer, Sri Lanka. 12 Geertz, ‘‘After the Revolution,’’ 234. 13 Ibid., 238. 14 Geertz wrote five essays on the new states: ‘‘Ideology as a Cultural System,’’ ‘‘After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States,’’ ‘‘The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States,’’ ‘‘The Politics of Meaning,’’ and ‘‘Politics Past, Politics Present: Some Notes on Anthropology in Understanding the New States.’’ See Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures; ‘‘The Integrative Revolution’’ also appears in Old Societies and New States, edited by Geertz. 15 See Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State. 16 See Chatterjee, Wages of Freedom and The Politics of the Governed. 17 Chatterjee, Wages of Freedom, 12–13. 18 Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States. 19 Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 221. 20 Ibid., 221–22. 21 Ibid., 315. 22 Shils, ‘‘On the Comparative Study of the New States,’’ 222. 23 Geertz, Old Societies and New States, 109. 24 Ibid., 111. 25 Ibid., 114. 26 Ibid., 112–13. 27 Geertz, After the Fact, 3–4. 28 Geertz, Old Societies and New States, 106. 29 Nehru, cited in Selig Harrison, ‘‘Hindu Society and the State,’’ 291. 30 Ibid. 31 Another new-nations commentator, Selig Harrison—author of an alarmist, but bestselling book, India: The Most Dangerous Decades (1960)— warned of the Hindu basis of the Indian state. For a collection written in 1963 by the American Universities Field Sta√, Harrison penned ‘‘Hindu Society and the State: The Indian Union.’’ The essay apparently seeks to destabilize an opposition between ‘‘Chinese this-worldliness’’ and ‘‘Hindu other-worldliness’’ through a Weberian reading of The Religion of India. Yet

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Harrison’s intervention is to conclude that ‘‘from the outset the Hindu tradition had a strong ‘this-worldly’ streak. It accorded a definite place to statecraft in the general scheme of things. What it failed to do was define in unambiguous terms the basis of the legitimacy of the state’’ (268). 32 Geertz, After the Fact, 111. 33 Ibid., 112. 34 Shils and Fallers were already senior. Shils had translated and written introductions to the works of Karl Mannheim and Max Weber in the 1940s, publishing his study The Intellectual between Tradition and Modernity: The Indian Situation in 1961. Fallers was already well known for his ethnography Bantu Bureaucracy, which appeared in 1950. Fallers would go on to write Buganda on the Eve of Independence (1964), and Shils would publish Political Development in the New State (1965). Apter came out with The Gold Coast in Transition in 1959, The Political Kingdom of Uganda in 1961, and Ghana in Transition in 1963. Geertz’s first monographs also appeared at about this time: Agricultural Involution and Peddlars and Princes in 1963, and The Social History of an Indonesian Town in 1965. 35 Geertz, After the Fact, 113. 36 Ibid., 103–4. 37 Ibid., 100. 38 Ibid., 103. 39 Geertz writes, ‘‘For the first five years at the University I was wholly on the Committee budget; for the last five, independently supported. . . . But over the whole period I had, as well, an appointment in the anthropology department, and became almost immediately deeply engaged . . . with the more restless of my colleagues there in what turned out, after awhile, to be an extremely influential (and extremely controversial) e√ort to redefine the ethnographic enterprise whole and entire, [k]nown most generally as ‘symbolic anthropology’ ’’ (ibid., 114). The influence of Harvard social relations can be seen in ‘‘After the Revolution,’’ where Geertz confesses to wielding a Parsonian notion of culture. 40 Geertz, Old Societies and New States, v. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., vi. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Richard Wright, The Color Curtain, 12. 46 Gupta, ‘‘Song of the Nonaligned World,’’ 65. 47 Steedley, Hanging Without a Rope, 444. 48 Abdel-Malek, ‘‘The East Wind,’’ 4. 49 Geertz, ‘‘After the Revolution,’’ 243. 50 Ibid., 241–43.

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51 Geertz, Old Societies and New States, 110.

notes to chapter 6

52 Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States, 11, emphasis added. Also

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quoted in in Geertz, Old Societies and New States, 110. 53 Geertz, Old Societies and New States, 111. 54 Urdu and Hindustani were spoken by Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims alike before partition. The region was marked by considerable linguistic continuity and overlap. 55 Aijaz Ahmad, ‘‘In the Mirror of Urdu,’’ 208. Mulk Raj Anand, one of the founders of the Progressive Writers Movement, whose manifesto argued for Hindustani to be the national language of literature, was later (in 1990) to write the preface to Ambedkar’s The Annihilation of Caste. 56 Ibid. 57 Myrdal, The Asian Drama, 1:84. See also Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism. 58 Report of the States Reorganization Commission, February 1954 to September 1955 (Delhi: GI, Ministry of Home A√airs, 1955). 59 On the ‘‘logic of the minority’’ in Ambedkar’s writing, see Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed. 60 Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States, 44–45. 61 Ambedkar, oddly, anticipates the writing of the new-state theorists by situating the divide between old and new, traditional and modern, as one between North and South India: ‘‘There is a vast di√erence between the North and the South. The North is conservative. The South is progressive. The North is superstitious, the South is rational. The South is educationally forward, the North is educationally backward. The culture of the South is modern. The culture of the North is traditional’’ (Thoughts on Linguistic States, 21). These assertions are, of course, arguable. 62 As a remedy to the consolidation of the North, Ambedkar called for the division of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh into smaller units, and was ignored. However, he was once again vindicated when the new states of Uttaranchal Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Chattisgargh were carved out of these areas decades later. 63 Nehru, An Autobiography, 138. 64 Myrdal’s view of language politics in India—perhaps because, like Ambedkar, he was a social scientist who was also a politician—is much closer to Ambedkar’s. He outlines a series of political choices and consequences of a language policy for national unity (see The Asian Drama, 1:83–89). 65 However, see Sivaramakrishnan and Gidwani, ‘‘Circular Migrants and Rural Cosmopolitanism in India.’’ 66 Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed. 67 Ambedkar, Thoughts on Pakistan, 14–15.

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68 Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States, 15. 69 Narayanan, ‘‘The Ramayana and Its Muslim Interpreters’’; Asani,

‘‘The Khojahs of South Asia’’; Hitelbeitel, Draupadi among Rajputs, Muslims and Dalits; Mayaram, Against History, Against State; Hyder, Reliving Karbala.

7: gendered states 1 See Martin Charnock’s ‘‘ ‘Culture’ and Human Rights’’ for an analysis

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of this phenomenon with regard to Africa. 2 Spivak’s original phrase is ‘‘White men saving brown women from brown men’’ (Can the Subaltern Speak?, 297). 3 Nesiah, ‘‘Toward a Feminist Internationality.’’ See also Inderpal Grewal, Women’s Rights as Human Rights: Feminist Practices, Global Feminism, and Human Rights in Transnationality, 3 Citizenship Stud. 337 (1999). 4 Engle, ‘‘The Females Subjects of Public International Law.’’ 5 See Narayan, Dis-locating Cultures. 6 Okin, ‘‘Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?,’’ 22. 7 Ibid., 19. 8 Barbara Crossette, ‘‘unicef Opens a Global Drive on Violence Against Women,’’ New York Times, 9 March 2000, A, 8. 9 ‘‘[The Women’s Action Forum] would like to use this opportunity to build public awareness on the issue of state violence and the role of the military in 1971. At the same time there is the need to focus on the systematic violence against women, particularly the mass rapes. While we try to focus the nation’s attention towards a period in our history for which we stand ashamed, Women’s Action Forum, on its own behalf, would like to apologise to the women of Bangladesh that they became the symbols and targets in the process of dishonoring and humiliating people’’ (‘‘Women’s Action Forum Apologises to Women of Bangladesh,’’ 7). By one estimate, more than 200,000 Bengali women were raped by West Pakistani soldiers, and some were held in military brothels. See Catherine N. Niarchos, Women, War, and Rape: Challenges Facing the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, 17 Hum. Rts. Q. 667 (1995); Saikia, ‘‘Beyond the Archive of Silence’’; D’Costa, ‘‘Coming to Terms with the Past in Bangladesh’’; Mookherjee, ‘‘Muktir Gaan.’’ 10 See Dasgupta and Dasgupta, Journeys. 11 Compare with Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders. 12 Hardt and Negri, Empire. See See Madhavi Basnet, South Asia’s Regional Initiative on Human Rights, 4 Hum. Rts. Brf. (1997).

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13 See Sassen, ‘‘Globalization or Denationalization.’’

notes to chapter 7

14 See Deborah Anker, Refugee Law, Gender and the Human Rights

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Paradigm, 15 Harvard Hum. Rts. Rev. 135 (2002). 15 See Ryan Goodman, The Incorporation of International Human Rights Standards into Sexual Orientation Asylum Claims: Cases of Involuntary ‘‘Medical’’ Intervention, 105 Yale L. J. 255 (1995); Timothy Wei and Margaret Sattherwaite, Symposium, Shifting Grounds for Asylum: Female Genital Surgery and Sexual Orientation, 29 Colum. Hum. Rts. Rev. 467, 505–6 (1997). 16 Deborah Anker, Refugee Law, Gender and the Human Rights Paradigm, 15 Harvard Hum. Rts. Rev. 135 (2002). 17 See Cathleen Caron, Asylum in the United States: Expedited Removal Process Threatens to Violate International Norms, 6 Hum. Rts. Brf. (1999). 18 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, adopted 18 December 1979, G.A. Res. 34/180, un gaor, 34th Sess., Supp. No. 46, un Doc. a /34/46 (1980), 1249 U.N.T.S. 13, entered into force 3 September 1981. 19 For a di√erent formulation of this point, see Deborah Anker, Refugee Law, Gender and the Human Rights Paradigm, 15 Harvard Hum. Rts. Rev. 135 (2002). 20 Recent changes to the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, 103d Cong., 2nd sess., 29 September 1994, under the reauthorization of vawa of 2000, Violence Against Women Act of 2000, 106th Cong., 2nd Sess., Rep. 106–891, 20 July 2000, created two new visa categories: the T visa and U visa, which maybe granted to women victims of domestic violence regardless of marital status. 21 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, adopted 28 July 1951, un Doc. a / conf.2/108 (1951), 189 U.N.T.S. 150, entered into force 22 April 1954; Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, signed 31 January 1967, 19 U.S.T. 6223, T.I.A.S. No. 6577, 606 U.N.T.S. 267, entered into force 4 October 1967 (entered into force for United States 1 November 1968). 22 See Audrey Macklin, Refugee Women and the Imperative of Categories, 17 Hum. Rts. Q. 213–77 (1995). 23 See Agarwal, ‘‘Surat, Sarvarkar and Draupadi’’; Bhutalia, ‘‘Muslims and Hindus, Men and Women.’’ 24 Catherine N. Niarchos, Women, War, and Rape: Challenges Facing the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, 17 Hum. Rts. Q. 350 (1995); Todd Salzman, Rape Camps as a Means of Ethnic Cleansing: Religious, Cultural and Ethical Responses to Rape Victims in the Former Yugoslavia, 20 Hum. Rts. Q. 348–78 (1998); Judith Gardham and Hilary Charlesworth, Protection of Women in Armed Conflict, 22 Hum. Rts. Q. 148–66

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(2000); Christine Strumpen-Darrie, Rape: A Survey of Current International Jurisprudence, 7 Hum. Rts. Brf. 2 (2000). 25 ins Memorandum, Considerations for Asylum O≈cers Adjudicating Asylum Claims from Women (‘‘ins Gender Guidelines’’), 26 May 1995, available on the web site of unhcr (printed-out web pages on file with author). 26 See Thomas and Gossman, Double Jeopardy: Police Abuse of Women in Pakistan, 47–94; Audrey Macklin, Refugee Women and the Imperative of Categories, 17 Hum. Rts. Q. 230 (1995). 27 See Human Rights Watch, World Report (2000). Here one might also note that Iran and Pakistan have absorbed the vast majority of Afghan refugees, yet the asymmetry of the world system means that the refugeeselecting countries of the north, where asylum law operates, are in a position to formulate both international and national laws, while refugeereceiving countries are not; witness U.S. instructions to Pakistan to reopen its borders to Afghan refugees when the bombing of Afghanistan began on 7 October 2001. For analysis of Afghan women refugees in Pakistan, see Khattak, ‘‘In/Security’’ and ‘‘Violence and Home.’’ 28 See, for example, Patricia Seith, Escaping Domestic Violence: Asylum as a Means of Protection for Battered Women, 97 Colum L. Rev. 1804 (1995). ‘‘Since men are generally not persecuted by means of rape, domestic violence or [female genital mutilation], biases against (recognizing) such forms of violence exist among adjudicators’’ (Id. at 1824). 29 See Ryan Goodman, The Incorporation of International Human Rights Standards into Sexual Orientation Asylum Claims: Cases of Involuntary ‘‘Medical’’ Intervention, 105 Yale L. J. 255 (1995); Timothy Wei and Margaret Sattherwaite, Symposium, Shifting Grounds for Asylum: Female Genital Surgery and Sexual Orientation, 29 Colum. Hum. Rts. Rev. 467, 505–6 (1997). According to one assessment, in 1997, the United States has accepted over a hundred applications for sexual-orientation asylum since 1994; in 1996 the number of successful applications for sexual-orientation asylum was fiftyseven. See Tracy J. Davis, Opening the Doors of Immigration: Sexual Orientation and Asylum in the United States, 6 Hum. Rts. Brf. (1999). 30 Matter of Acosta, 19 I & N. Dec. 211233 (bia 1985), revised in part on other grounds by In re Mogharrabi, 19 I & N. Dec. 439 (bia 1987). 31 See Binder, Gender and the Membership in a Particular Social Group Category of the 1951 Refugee Convention, 10 Colum. J. Gender & L. 167 (2001) at 179; In re Fauziya Kasinga, Int. Dec. 3278 (bia 1996). 32 Interestingly, it has informed the recent House of Lords decision in R. v. Immigration Appeal Tribunal and another, ex parte Shah of 1999; see Deborah Anker, Refugee Status and Violence Against Women in the ‘‘Domes-

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tic’’ Sphere: The Non-State Actor Question, 15 Georgetown Immigration L. J. 391–402 (2001). 33 See Tracy J. Davis, Opening the Doors of Immigration: Sexual Orientation and Asylum in the United States, 6 Hum. Rts. Brf. (1999). 34 The conflict between sexual orientation being seen as primarily about either identity or conduct is mirrored in other sexual-orientation legislation in the United States. See Sonya Katyal, Exporting Identity, 14 Yale J. L. and Feminism 97–176 (2002). 35 The First, Second, and Seventh Courts of Appeal apply ‘‘particular social group’’ in a way that mirrors Acosta. The Eighth and Ninth Circuit Courts construe ‘‘particular social group’’ to require a ‘‘voluntary associational relationship’’ among members. The Second Circuit Court has adopted a variation that includes external perceptions, immutability, and voluntary associations. See Tracy J. Davis, Opening the Doors of Immigration: Sexual Orientation and Asylum in the United States, 6 Hum. Rts. Brf. (1999). 36 Anjana Bahl, Home Is Where the Brute Lives: Asylum Law and GenderBased Claims of Persecution, 4 Cardoza Women’s L. J. 33 at 58 (1997). 37 Consider, for example, the case of a Tajik Afghan woman who detailed the extensive violence she faced as a Shia. Yet the immigration judge, citing Kasinga, emphasized her membership in a social group of women who were badly a√ected by the Taliban. See the web site for the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies. There are many other ironies in the processing of Afghan women’s asylum applications: a number were granted to women who were members of the Communist Party or Najibullah government, a shift in the application of asylum to those fleeing from communist regimes from the 1950s through 1980s. 38 See Deborah Anker, Refugee Status and Violence against Women in the ‘‘Domestic’’ Sphere: The Non-State Actor Question, 15 Georgetown Immigration L. J. 391–402 (2001). 39 See Mahmood, ‘‘Asylum, Violence, and the Limits of Advocacy’’; Gilad, ‘‘The Problem of Gender-related Persecution’’; Waldon, ‘‘Anthropologists as ‘Expert Witnesses’ ’’; Charles Piot, ‘‘Representing Africa in the Kasinga Asylum Case.’’ In a 1993 appeal, a young Iranian woman who claimed that her feminist beliefs and her unwillingness to veil would put her at risk if she were deported for Iran was considered ineligible for asylum because, though she was a member of a particular social group (which included supporters of the former Shah), and her feminism qualified as a political opinion, she had not demonstrated that she would be harmed solely because of her gender. Still, the case did show that ‘‘an applicant who could demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution on

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account of her (or his) beliefs about the role and status of women in society could be eligible for refugee status on account of political opinion’’ (ins Memorandum, Considerations for Asylum O≈cers Adjudicating Asylum Claims from Women [‘‘ins Gender Guidelines’’], 26 May 1995, 11, [on file with author]). 40 Human Rights Watch, Crime or Custom? Violence against Women in Pakistan (August 1999), available at the web site of Human Rights Watch. 41 See Linda Cipriani, Gender and Persecution: Protecting Women under International Refugee Law, 7 Georgetown Immigration L. J. 513 (1993). 42 See Susan Musarrat Akram, Orientalism Revisited in Asylum and Refugee Claims, 12 Int’l J. Refugee L. 7–40 (2000). 43 In Bangladesh, where, according to one analysis, state-sponsored women’s development programs are linked to a backlash against women and to a rise in Islamist sentiment, mixed marriages or non-Muslim marriages are subject to attack. In the context of explicitly Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party rule in India, which has been hostile to its Christian, Muslim, Dalit, and tribal communities, intercaste and interfaith marriages have also been vulnerable to criticism and attack. 44 See Peters and Wolpers, Women’s Rights/Human Rights; Coomaraswamy, ‘‘Reinventing International Law.’’ See also Anne Gallagher, Ending the Marginalization: Strategies for Incorporating Women into the United Nations Human Rights System, 19 Hum. Rts. Q. 283–333 (1997); Avronne Fraser, Becoming Human: The Origin and Development of Women’s Human Rights, 21 Hum. Rts. Q. 853–906 (1999). 45 See Leti Volpp, Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior, 12 Yale J. L. and Humanities 89–116 (2000); Leti Volpp, Feminism Versus Multiculturalism, 101 Colum. L. Rev. 1181–1218 (2001). 46 See Honig, ‘‘My Culture Made Me Do It,’’ 12. 47 Anita Sinha, Domestic Violence and U.S. Asylum Law: Eliminating the Cultural Hook for Claims Involving Gender-Related Persecution, 76 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1562–98 (2001); Razack, Looking White People in the Eye, 88, 92. See also Sonya Katyal, Exporting Identity, 14 Yale J. L. and Feminism 97–176 (2002) for an analysis of the Hernandez-Montiel sexual-orientation asylum case. 48 See Melanie Randall, Refugee Law and State Accountability for Violence against Women: A Comparative Analysis of Legal Approaches to Recognizing Asylum Claims Based on Gender Persecution, 25 Harv. Women’s L. J. 284 (2002). 49 See Timothy Wei and Margaret Sattherwaite, Symposium, Shifting Grounds for Asylum: Female Genital Surgery and Sexual Orientation, 29 Colum. Hum. Rts. Rev. 517–18 (1997).

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50 See Narayan, Dis-locating Cultures.

notes to chapter 7

51 Ignatie√, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, 68.

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52 See Agnes, Law and Gender Inequality; Kapur, Feminist Terrains in Legal Domains; Kapur and Brenda Crossman; Menon, ‘‘Rights, Bodies and the Law’’; Nair, Women and Law in Colonial India; Parashar, Women and Family Law Reform. 53 Here, however, the metonymic identification of women with community is not automatically altered. The rape of women may be seen as the defining mode of a community’s subjection, as in the mass abductions and rapes of women during partition, or through the detention of Panjabi Sikhs by the Indian state over the last twenty years. 54 The family lawyer Geeta Ramaseshan made exactly this point to me when she reviewed one of my expert testimonies in Chennai during the summer of 1996. See also David Kennedy, The International Human Rights Movement: Part of the Problem?, 3 Eu. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 245–67 (2001) for a similar observation. 55 For recent accounts of feminist movements in India, see Radha Kumar, A History of Doing; Shah and Gandhi, Issues at Stake; Basu, The Challenge of Local Feminisms; Kannabiran and Kannabiran, ‘‘Looking at Ourselves’’; Sangtin Writers and Richa Nagar, Playing with Fire. For Pakistan, see Mumtaz, Women of Pakistan; Jalal, ‘‘The Convenience of Subservience’’; Rouse, ‘‘Gender, Nationalisms and Cultural Identity’’; Mumtaz, ‘‘Identity Politics and Women’’; Jamal, ‘‘Transnational Feminism as Critical Practice.’’ For Bangladesh, see Karim, ‘‘Democratizing Bangladesh’’; Thakurtha, ‘‘Women Negotiating Change’’; Feldman, ‘‘(Re)Presenting Islam’’; Sobhan, ‘‘National Identity, Fundamentalism and the Women’s Movement in Bangladesh’’; Kabeer, ‘‘The Quest for National Identity.’’ For Afghanistan, see Sunita Mehta, Women for Afghan Women; Moghadam, ‘‘Nationalist Agendas and Women’s Rights.’’ 56 Ong, ‘‘Sisterly Solidarity.’’ For related critiques see Nesiah, ‘‘Toward a Feminist Internationality’’; John, Discrepant Dislocations. Susan Moller Okin’s ‘‘Feminism, Women’s Human Rights, and Cultural Di√erences’’ productively marks the disjuncture between the theoretical critique of gender essentialism by ‘‘Third World feminists’’ and of universalizing tendencies of feminist human-rights discourse, but mistakenly holds that the former was confined by its postmodern excesses to the academy while the latter was better realized through the politics of grassroots ngos. 57 See Rao, ‘‘The Politics of Gender and Culture in International Human Rights Discourse.’’ 58 Moallem, ‘‘Violence of Protection.’’ 59 See Adamantia Pollis, Cultural Relativism Revisited: Through a State

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Prism, 18 Hum. Rts. Q. 316–44 (1996). In one of the few attempts to analyze the place of the state in human-rights discourse, Polis criticizes human-rights scholars for failing to develop ‘‘a conceptual framework within which to analyze whether a state’s claim’s of cultural distinctiveness are consistent with that culture’s conceptions of rights, dignity and justice, or whether it is a wanton exercise of power by the elites’’ (id. at 323). While her points are well taken, they are less relevant for plural societies, which contain a number of cultures. They also illustrate the degree to which culture and state are too frequently collapsed. 60 See Alavi, ‘‘The State in Post-Colonial Societies.’’ 61 See Cammack, ‘‘Gender Relief and Politics during the Afghan War.’’ 62 See Human Rights Watch, Crime or Custom? Violence against Women in Pakistan (August 1999), 3, available at the web site of Human Rights Watch. 63 See Amnesty International, Refugees from Afghanistan: The World’s Largest Single Refugee Group, ai Index asa 11/016/1999. 64 Amnesty International, Afghanistan: Women in Afghanistan: Pawns in Men’s Power Struggles, ai Index asa 11/011/1999. Amnesty International, Refugees from Afghanistan: The World’s Largest Single Refugee Group, ai Index asa 11/016/1999. 65 See Moghadam, Modernizing Women, 207–48; Moghadam, ‘‘Nationalist Agendas and Women’s Rights.’’ Two exceptions are notable: a Human Rights Watch report does mention the formation of the Women’s Action Forum in 1981, as does a September 1999 Amnesty Public Statement. See Human Rights Watch, Crime or Custom? Violence against Women in Pakistan (August 1999), available at the web site of Human Rights Watch; Amnesty International, Pakistan: Afghan Women’s Day Protesters Must Be Protected, ai Index asa 11/05/1999. The latter report also calls for protection of women activists in the Revolutionary Association of Women (rawa) at International Women’s Day protests. For more information on feminist organizing in Pakistan, see Mumtaz, Women of Pakistan; Jalal, ‘‘The Convenience of Subservience’’; Rouse, ‘‘Gender, Nationalisms and Cultural Identity’’; Mumtaz, ‘‘Identity Politics and Women.’’ For feminist interventions on law in Pakistan, see Jilani and Ahmed, ‘‘Violence Against Women.’’ 66 See Jacqueline Bhabha, Internationalist Gatekeepers? The Tension Between Asylum Advocacy and Human Rights, 15 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 155–81 (2002); Deborah Anker, Refugee Law, Gender and the Human Rights Paradigm, 15 Harvard Hum. Rts. Rev. 152 (2002). 67 See, for example, Alison Dundes Renteln, The Unanswered Challenge of Relativism and the Consequences for Human Rights, 7 Hum. Rts. Q. 514

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(1985); Renteln, ‘‘Relativism and the Search for Human Rights’’; Renteln, International Human Rights; Ann-Belinda Preis, Human Rights as Culture Practice: An Anthropological Critique, 18 Hum. Rts. Q. 286–315 (1996); Eva Brems, Enemies or Allies? Feminism and Cultural Relativism as Dissident Voices in Human Rights Discourse, 19 Hum. Rts. Q. 136–64 (1997); Annette Marfording, Cultural Relativism and the Construction of Culture: An Examination of Japan, 19 Hum. Rts. Q. 431–48 (1997); Michael J. Perry, Are Human Rights Universal? The Relativist Challenge and Related Matters, 19 Hum. Rts. Q. 461–509 (1997); John J. Tilley, Cultural Relativism, 22 Hum. Rts. Q. 501–47 (2000). 68 This issue has also been raised in regard to the partition of India. See Das, ‘‘National Honor and Practical Kinship’’; Menon and Bhasin, ‘‘Abducted Women, the State and Questions of Honor.’’ 69 See Mahmood, ‘‘Asylum, Violence, and the Limits of Advocacy.’’ Inderpal Grewal’s ‘‘Gendering Refugees’’ emphasizes how asylum o≈cers elicit narratives of sexual trauma and abuse from Sikh women asylum applicants. 70 Amnesty International, International Women’s Day—Fifty Years of Women’s Rights? (news release), 6 March 1998 (on file with author). 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Amnesty International, Pakistan: Women’s Human Rights Remain a Dead Letter, ai Index asa 33/007/1997. ‘‘No Progress Towards the Realization of Women’s Rights After the Ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women,’’ Amnesty International Special Report, 1997. 74 President Carter signed the treaty in 1980, but the U.S. Senate failed to ratify the treaty in 1994 and again in 2002. See Lester Munson, cedaw : It’s Old, It Doesn’t Work and We Don’t Need It, 10 Hum. Rts. Brf (2003). 75 See Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, adopted 18 December 1979, G.A. Res. 34/180, un gaor, 34th Sess., Supp. No. 46, un Doc. a /34/46 (1980), 1249 U.N.T.S. 13, entered into force 3 September 1981. The government of India issued a declaration stating that it would follow a policy of non-interference in the personal a√airs of di√erent communities when implementing these provisions. The wording of the declarations and reservation for India is as follows: With regard to articles 5 (a) and 16 (1) of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Government of the Republic of India declares that it shall abide by and

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ensure these provisions in conformity with its policy of non-interference in the personal a√airs of any Community without its initiative and consent. With regard to article 16 (2) of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Government of the Republic of India declares that though in principle it fully supports the principle of compulsory registration of marriages, it is not practical in a vast country like India with its variety of customs, religions and level of literacy. Reservation: With regard to article 29 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Government of the Republic of India declares that it does not consider itself bound by paragraph 1 of this article.

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See the un web site for a listing of reservations to cedaw by country. 76 See Savitri Goonesekere’s Violence, Law and Women’s Rights in South Asia for a discussion of country reservations to cedaw in South Asia. See Agnes, ‘‘Redefining the Agenda of the Women’s Movement within a Secular Framework,’’ 136; Menon, ‘‘Women and Citizenship’’; Rajan, ‘‘Women between Community and State.’’ 77 See Sircar, ‘‘Can the Women Flee?’’ 78 Article 12 of Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, adopted 18 December 1979, G.A. Res. 34/ 180, un gaor, 34th Sess., Supp. No. 46, un Doc. a /34/46 (1980), 1249 U.N.T.S. 13, entered into force 3 September 1981; Elaboration of a Draft Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Draft Report of the Open-ended Working Group, un escor, Commission on the Status of Women, 40th Sess., Agenda Item 5, un. Doc. e / cn.6/1996/wg / l.1 and Add.1 (1996). 79 See Human Rights Watch, Crime or Custom? Violence against Women in Pakistan (August 1999), 5, available at the web site of Human Rights Watch. 80 National Victim Center and Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center, Rape in America: A Report to the Nation, 23 April 1992 (on file with author). Another estimate from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice, Uniform Crime Reports for that year held that a woman was raped every five minutes, resulting in 105,120 rapes per year (on file with author). Revised estimates from the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice put the number of sexual assaults against women at 500,000 for 1992 and 1993, including 170,000 rapes and

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140,000 attempted rapes (on file with author). These numbers would mean that a woman was sexually assaulted almost every minute during 1992–93. See ‘‘Survey Questioning Changed, fbi Doubles Its Estimates of Rape,’’ New York Times, 17 August 1995, A, 18. 81 Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, National Crime Victimization Survey (1997). 82 Ibid. 83 National Victim Center and Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center, Rape in America: A Report to the Nation, 23 April 1992 (on file with author) 84 Abuses against women in American prisons, however, have been the subject of special investigations. Also, see Andrea Smith’s ‘‘Beyond the Politics of Inclusion’’ for an elaboration of a human-rights approach to domestic violence among American communities of color. 85 In addition to the domestic violence document, the site also at one time included a document on sexual violence that read, ‘‘Women everywhere are sexually assaulted, and their primary attackers are granted impunity,’’ with the primary examples being Russia, India, and Pakistan (printed-out web pages on file with author). 86 See United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 1995, 155–57, table 1. 87 See Clair Apodaca, Measuring Women’s Economic and Social Rights Achievement, 20 Hum. Rts. Q. 139–72 (1998). Also see Steven C. Poe, Dierdre Wendel-Blunt, and Karl Ho, Global Patterns in the Achievement of Women’s Human Rights to Equality, 19 Hum. Rts. Q. 813–35 (1997). 88 For a critique of representations of dowry, see Narayan, Dis-locating Cultures. For an analysis of ‘‘honor crimes’’ in Pakistan and other parts of the Muslim world, see Welchman and Hossain, Honor. For an analysis of acid violence in Bangladesh, see Chowdhury, ‘‘Contesting Narratives of the Campaign Against Acid Violence in Bangladesh.’’ 89 See, for example, Korinna Horta, Rhetoric and Reality: Human Rights and the World Bank, 15 Harvard Hum. Rts. J. 228–43 (2002); Dana Clark, The World Bank and Human Rights: The Need for Greater Accountability, 15 Harvard Hum. Rts. J. 205–26 (2002). For a critique of ‘‘second generation’’ human rights and the World Bank in Africa, see Charnock, ‘‘ ‘Culture’ and Human Rights.’’ 90 See, for example, Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights. This volume explores ‘‘the conditions under which international human rights norms are internalized in domestic practices’’ and develops a series of models to understand nation-state ‘‘instrumental adaptation to pressures’’ (1, 12). 91 Nesiah, ‘‘Toward a Feminist Internationality,’’ 18–19.

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92 Gayle Binion, Human Rights: A Feminist Perspective, 17 Hum. Rts. Q. (1995). 93 See Bharati Sadasivam, The Impact of Structural Adjustment on Women: A Governance and Human Rights Agenda, 19 Hum. Rts. Q. 630–65 (1997). See also the essays ‘‘Neo-liberal Agendas and Rural Women’s Concerns,’’ ‘‘Globalization and Women’s Work in the Non-agricultural Sector,’’ and ‘‘Liberalization, Communalism and Struggle against Violence’’ in Karat, Survival and Emancipation. 94 See Wesley Milner et al., Security Rights, Subsistence Rights and Liberties: A Theoretical Survey of the Landscape, 21 Hum. Rts. Q. 403–43 (1999); Craig Scott, Reaching Beyond (without Abandoning) the Category of ‘‘Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,’’ 21 Hum. Rts. Q. 633–60 (1999).

epilogue: the traffic in social movements

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1 Shobha Warrier, ‘‘nris Keen on River Linking Project,’’ 25 June 2003, available at www.redi√.com (accessed on 15 October 2007). 2 See Wilson, An Unreasonable Woman. Wilson also joined the Bhopalis in solidarity hunger strikes on 20 June 2004 and 13 April 2006. 3 As Leela Gandhi puts it, the ‘‘spirit of transnational collaboration’’ emerged with the First International ‘‘through the slow socialist revival of the 1860s, articulating itself in gestures of solidarity from British labor toward the aspirations of the Italian Risorgimento, the Polish uprising of 1863, and the abolitionist North during the American Civil War. The subsequent network of alliances, between domestic and migrant workers, between socialism and struggles for national liberation, and (more guardedly) between white workers and the mass of black American slaves was finally gathered and formalized within the structure of the First International’’ (A√ective Communities, 8). See also Derrida, The Politics of Friendship. 4 ‘‘Texan Fisherwoman’s Bhopal Protest Ends in Criminal Case: Dow Chemical Making ‘A Mockery of the Law,’ ’’ 26 January 2004, available on the web site of Common Dreams (accessed on 15 October 2007). See also Wilson, An Unreasonable Woman, 36–37, 93, 187. 5 Wilson, An Unreasonable Woman, 75. 6 Lepkowski, ‘‘The Restructuring of Union Carbide since Bhopal,’’ 26. 7 From 1989–1991, ucc sold o√ its major assets in the United States. It distanced itself from Union Carbide India Limited, first by calling it an ‘‘unconsolidated a≈liate,’’ then by attempting to sell o√ its 50.9 percent of the company. See Lepkowski, ‘‘The Restructuring of Union Carbide since Bhopal.’’ 8 The motion in limine document reads as follows:

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Jan 16, 2004. State of Texas vs. Diane Wilson . . . no. 03-cr-o45 . . . in the County Court at Law Number One, Calhoun County Texas Motion in Limine Now comes the State of Texas in the above styled and numbered cause and moves this Court before trial in limine for an order instructing the Defendant, Diane Wilson, her representatives and witnesses, to refrain from making any direct or indirect reference whatsoever, at trial before the jury to any of the following matters: I The State of Texas moves to exclude all extraneous evidence concerning a 1984 chemical plant explosion in Bhopal, India, or that Dow Chemical Company or Union Carbide Corporation perpetrated such conduct, that this evidence is not relevant to a material issue in the case and that its probative value outweighs its potential for prejudice. In this case, such evidence includes, but is not limited to the following: any reference to Bhopal, India, the plant explosion there in 1984, or any other environmental crimes or claims of environmental pollution by Dow Chemical Company or Union Carbide Corporation have been committed in the past or may be committed in the future.

notes to epilogue

II If the Defendant or her attorney is allowed to allude to, comment upon, inquire about, or introduce evidence concerning any of the above matters, ordinary objections during the course of the trial, even sustained and including proper instructions to the jury, will not remove the harmful e√ect of same in view of their highly prejudicial content. Wherefore, premises considered, the state of Texas prays that this court order and instruct the county attorney, her representatives and witnesses, not to elicit or give testimony respecting, allude to, cross-examine respecting, mention, or refer to any of the above matters until a hearing has been held outside the presence of the jury at which time this Court can determine the admissibility of these matters. (Motion on file with the author.)

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9 Satinath Sarangi, ‘‘Noxious Gases,’’ March 2001, available on the web site of India Together (accessed on 15 October 2007). See also Lepkowski, ‘‘The Restructuring of Union Carbide since Bhopal,’’ 31. 10 Sajida Bano et al. v. Union Carbide Corporation and Warren Anderson, 273 F.3d 120 (2d Cir. 2001). These claims were sent back to the trial court and subsequently dismissed, in 2003, on grounds that the plainti√ ’s personal-injury claims had expired; however, the court did not rule on whether ucc had caused the environmental damage. Another suit filed, in

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2004, on behalf of plainti√s a√ected by contaminated water from the ucc site in Bhopal was dismissed by the district court and overturned on appeal on 3 November 2008. See ‘‘Bano v. Union Carbide Case History,’’ 2 February 2006, available at the web site of EarthRights International (accessed on 20 December 2008). 11 Arundhati Roy’s essay ‘‘The Greater Common Good’’ is perhaps the best-known account of this struggle, but Sanjay Sangvai’s The River and Life and Dilip D’Souza’s The Narmada Dammed also provide moving inside accounts of the Narmada Bachao Andoian (nba) struggle. 12 For a critique of the absence of social movements from Jürgen Habermas’s conception of the public sphere, see Leila Devriese, ‘‘Negotiating Feminist Praxis in the Arabian Gulf.’’ For work that attempts to take into account the impact of social movements on social theory, see Craig Calhoun, Social Theory and the Politics of Identity. 13 ‘‘One can read 20 years of Contributions to Indian Sociology and think that Mandal, Narmada, Bhopal or the turmoil in Punjab were all events that have not touched our imagination’’ (Viswanthan, Durban and Dalit Discourse, 3123). 14 Chatterjee, Wages of Freedom and The Politics of the Governed. 15 Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, 39. See also Comaro√ and Comaro√, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. 16 Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, 38. 17 Mitchell, ‘‘Society, Economy, and the State E√ect,’’ 176. 18 Foucault, cited in Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, 103. See Chatterjee, Wages of Freedom, 12–13. 19 Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, 50, 74, 135. 20 Chatterjee, Wages of Freedom, 17. 21 The whole issue of compensation for displaced peoples is especially fraught. See Roy, ‘‘The Greater Common Good’’; Sangvai, The River and Life; D’Souza, The Narmada Dammed. 22 See Chakrabarty, ‘‘ ‘In the Name of Politics.’ ’’ In fact this process is not unique to India. As Rajeev Patel notes of the betrayal of the shackdwellers movement in Durban: ‘‘The arts of citizenship, engagement, debate and iconoclasm learned and practiced under the anti-apartheid struggle were systematically denigrated by the government. Instead the state extolled the virtues of patience, and of faith in authority’’ (‘‘Electing Land Questions: A Methodological Discussion with Reference to Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Durban Shackdweller Movement,’’ April 2007, available at the web site of Abahlali baseMjondolo [accessed on 1 January 2008]). 23 Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, 57. 24 Sarker and Niyogi De, Trans-status Subjects. 25 Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, 57.

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notes to epilogue

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26 Agamben, ‘‘Beyond Human Rights,’’ 19–20. See also the revised version of the essay in Agamben, Homo Sacer, 126–35. 27 Agamben, ‘‘Beyond Human Rights,’’ 23. 28 Agamben, The Coming Community, 85. 29 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 1999. 30 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, xv, 228. 31 Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, 49, 74–75. 32 The Subaltern Studies collective and a range of Marxist scholarship has documented the long history of peasant struggles for land in colonial India. Despite the success of modest land reforms in West Bengal, recent land struggles in Nandigram and Singur have contested the state’s rights to eminent domain. See Swati Chattopadhyay, ‘‘A Tryst With Capital,’’ 9 October 2007, available on the web site for the Subaltern-Popular Workshop, on its Citation: Occasional Papers web page (accessed 1 January 2009). See Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments, on land reforms and the green revolution in Uttar Pradesh. 33 People’s Movements, ‘‘End Imperialist Globalisation, Fundamentalism and War,’’ 276. 34 See the web site for La Via Campesina; the briefing paper ‘‘Land Struggles,’’ edited by Rebeca Leonard, Shalmali Guttal, and Peter Rosset, 23 October 2007, available at the web site for the Land Research Action Network (accessed 1 January 2009); and Rosset, Patel, and Courville, Promised Land: Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform, the network’s comparative study on global land reforms. 35 Comaro√ and Comaro√, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism, 14. 36 People’s Movements, ‘‘End Imperialist Globalisation, Fundamentalism and War,’’ 276. 37 In July 2005, the name of the magazine was changed to the Movement of India, for legal reasons. See Medha Patkar, ‘‘Right to Make People Shelterless?’’; the editorial ‘‘Whose State?’’; and Sangvai, ‘‘Whose State Is Empowered?’’ 38 National Convention on Development, Displacement and Rehabilitation, ‘‘People’s Declaration,’’ 1, 37. 39 Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, 59. 40 Esteva, ‘‘Oaxaca.’’ 41 Mignolo, ‘‘The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis,’’ 742. 42 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 64. 43 Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 245. See also Hardt and Negri, Multitude. 44 I thank Vivian Newdick for uncovering the history behind the nam-

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ing of Moises Gandhi village. Paul Farmer has also described the connections between Haiti and Chiapas in ‘‘Lessons From Chiapas.’’ 45 Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 265. 46 Sukarno, quoted in Richard Wright, The Color Curtain, 151. 47 Richard Wright, The Color Curtain, 10. 48 Jones and Singh, ‘‘Guest Editors’ Introduction’’; Vergès, ‘‘Writing on Water.’’ 49 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 117. 50 Du Bois, Color and Democracy, 17. 51 Kim Fortune’s ethnography of the Bhopal event, Advocacy After Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders, fruitfully explores the tensions and links between communities of advocacy in India and the United States, with regard to the Bhopal issue. 52 Esteva, ‘‘Development,’’ 20. 53 See also Greenhouse, ‘‘Introduction’’; Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia. 54 Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed. 55 See ‘‘Indigenous World Uranium Summit and Nuclear Future Award,’’ available at the web site of the Southwest Research and Information Center (accessed 12 December 2007); ‘‘Declaration of the Indigenous World Uranium Summit,’’ 4 December 2006, available at the web site of the U.N. Observer (accessed 12 December 2007). The documentary Buddha Weeps in Jadugoda, directed by Shriprakash Prakash, in Hindi and Santhali, covers the extensive history of the impact of uranium mining and longterm radiation exposure on the health and livelihoods of the adivasi miners in the Jadugoda mine owned by the Uranium Corporation of India Limited. 56 Sonu Jain, ‘‘25,000 Farmers on a Non-violent March,’’ 17 October 2007, available at the web site of the Indian Express. 57 See Rahul Ramagundam, ‘‘Ekta Parishad,’’ available at the web site for Intercultural Resources. 58 See T. K. Rajalakshmi, ‘‘Land Rights and Wrongs in Bihar,’’ Frontline 18 (27 October–9 November 2001), available at the web site for the Hindu. 59 It is also less clear that such movements are really distinct in their characteristics from ‘‘old’’ social movements. See Calhoun,’’ New Social Movements of the Early Nineteenth Century.’’ My reading of Leela Gandhi’s work also draws parallels between the socialist internationals of the nineteenth century and the transnational movements of the twentieth century and the twenty-first. 60 Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson, Global Modernities, 61.

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ˇ zek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. 61 Butler, Laclau, and Ziˇ 62 Hacking, The Social Construction of What? 63 Hardin, ‘‘The Tragedy of the Commons.’’ 64 Holden and Shukaitis, ‘‘Guest Editors’ Introduction,’’ 1. 68 Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 6. 69 Ilaiah, ‘‘Why I Am Not a Hindu,’’ 291, 285. See also Ilaiah, ‘‘To-

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¡ Index Abdel-Malek, Anouar, 179 abolitionist movement in U.S.: Indian views on, 153–59 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 66–67 Addams, Jane, 33 adivasi activism (India), 224 a≈liative interdisciplinarity: culture and, 4–6; intellectual formations and, 11–14; transnational social movements and, 219–25 a≈rmative action, 162–63 Afghanistan: women’s rights abuses in, 189, 196, 200, 205, 269n27, 270n37 Africa: transnational social movements in, 220–21; women’s rights abuses in, 199–200 African Americans: anthropological research and, 23; caste school of racism and, 110–25, 160–63; civilization theory challenged by, 22; cultural anthropology and, 54–59, 242n42; Dalits compared with, 159–63; expository feminism and, 40, 237n89; Herskovits’s study of, 242n42; Indian views of, 153–59; kinship and slavery among, 70–72; race scholarship by, 118–22, 252n47 African diaspora, 11, 222–23 Afro-Asian unity: postcolonialism and, 175–77; transnational social movements and, 222 Afro-Dalit literature, 162 After Empire (Gilroy), 6 After Freedom (Powdermaker), 115

After the Fact (Geertz), 172 ‘‘After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States’’ (Geertz), 167–68 Agamben, Georgio, 218 Ahmad, Aijaz, 7–8, 183, 266n55 Ahmad, Imtiaz, 140–45, 250n11 Ahmed, Akbar, 250n11 Alavi, Hamza, 250n11 alcohol on reservations, 31–32, 234n55 Algeria, 110 All India Sikh Student Federation, 200 allotment policy: evangelical ethnography and, 34–37; Native American resistance to, 29–31; Native American women and, 47–49 Ambedkar, B. R., 6, 162–63, 167, 262n108, 266n55; caste studies of, 11–12, 152–60, 266n55; on Indian statehood, 181–88, 266nn61–62; logic of the minority and, 183–84 American Anthropological Association, 20, 55, 64–65 American Anthropologist (journal), 23, 42–43 American Association for the Advancement of Science, 33, 230n12 American Association of Physical Anthropology, 243n56 ‘‘American Caste and Class’’ (Warner), 115

index

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American Caste and the Negro College (Gallagher), 115 American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, An (Myrdal), 117–19, 122–23, 128, 176–77, 261n84 Americanist anthropology, 56–59 American Negro, The (Herskovits), 70, 242n42 American South: caste school of racism and, 114–25; Dumont’s discussion of, 127–30; Indian studies of, 153–59; Weber’s discussion of, 126, 255n84 Amnesty International, 189, 192, 205, 207 Anand, Mulk Raj, 266n55 Ancient Society (Morgan), 44–45 Anderson, Benedict, 165 Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale (journal), 75–76 Annales school of historiography, 75, 246n5 Annihilation of Caste, The (Ambedkar), 157 Anthony, Susan B., 40–41 Anthropological Society of Washington, 19–20 anthropology: averaging in, 61–62; caste school of race relations and, 114–25, 163; cultural studies and, 68–72; ethnic studies and, 12–14; Foucault’s discussion of, 2, 227n4; gender and, 18–24; Indian national sociology and, 134–35; multiculturalism and, 52–59; new culturalism and, 8– 11; postcolonial revisions to, 166–71; physical anthropology, 56–59, 62–72, 241n31; racism and, 2–6, 8, 52–73, 227n8; Rousseau’s influence on, 90–96; of states, 165–71; women anthropologists and Indian masculinity, 29–32

320

‘‘Anthropology and Colonialism’’ (Gough), 166 Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (Asad), 166 ‘‘Anthro-Socio’’ (video installation, Nauman), 1–2 anti anti-relativism, 73 anti-immigration sentiment, 66 anti-positivities, 3 antisemitism: Boas’s experience with, 21, 53–59, 231n17, 240n12; race theory and, 62–68 Apartheid in India: A Document for Foreigners (Rajasekhar), 161 Appadurai, Arjun, 163, 165, 227n7 ‘‘Appeal to the World, An’’ (naacp), 161 Appiah, Anthony, 15–17, 244n73 Apter, David, 172–75, 265n34 Apthekar, Herbert, 153–54 Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und sozialpolitik (journal), 126 Ardis, Ann, 33 area studies: paradigms of, 12– 14; postcolonial revisions to, 175–77 Arendt, Hannah, 127, 218, 255n91 ‘‘Are the Jews a Race?’’ (Boas), 54 Arnold, Matthew, 164 Aryanism: Indian sociology and, 137–40, 150 Aryans and Non-Aryans (Boas), 54–55 Asad, Talal, 166 Asian Americans: discrimination against, 71–72 Asian culture: expansion of humanism and study of, 93–96; hierarchy in, 104, 109–10; LéviStrauss’s discussion of, 100–102 Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (Myrdal), 176 Asian Racial and Minorities Conference, 161 Asian Social Forum (2003), 219–20

asprashyeekaran, 144 assimilation, 53–59 asylum: cultural practices and state sovereignty and, 202–8, 269n27; political vs. gendered, 200; for women, 190–96 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, 41 Atlanta Studies program, 252n47 Aztecs, 27–28

321

index

Bachofen, Johann, 43 Bahujan caste, 257n30 Bali, 177–79 Balibar, Etienne, 7–8 Bandung Conference, 175–77, 222 Bangladesh: intercaste/interfaith marriages in, 201; rape as political weapon in, 194, 200, 267n9; women’s rights issues in, 189, 191, 205, 207–10 Barth, Frederick, 250n11 Beals, Ralph, 133 Bean, Robert Bennett, 233n28 Bederman, Gail, 22 Bee, Rashida, 215 Benedict, Ruth, 58–62, 67, 87, 241n40 Berreman, Gerald, 124–25, 144, 151, 159, 253n52, 254n77 Beteille, Andre, 145, 147–49, 151 ‘‘Beyond Human Rights’’ (Agamben), 218 Bhasin, Kamla, 164 Bhatty, Zarina, 142–45 Bhopal disaster, 213–15, 277nn7– 8, 278n10, 281n51 Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Stationery Karmachari Sangh (Bhopal Gas-A√ected Women Stationery Employees Union), 215 Bhutan, 207 Bilgrami, Akeel, 14 biology: Lévi-Strauss on, 86–90, 248n38; race and racism and, 56–

68, 72–73, 77–78, 148–50, 242n42, 243n54, 243n56 Black Metropolis (Cayton/Drake), 121–22 black nationalism: caste-race paradigm and, 161–63 Black Reconstruction in America (Du Bois), 154–59, 252n47 Bloch, Marc, 75–76 blood: race and racism and, 56–59, 69–72 Boas, Franz: anthropological research and, 20–21, 230n13, 231n15, 231n17; caste school of race relations and, 122, 132–33; cultural studies research and, 68– 72, 86, 167; ethnographic research by, 16, 24, 37, 233n28; on Ghost Dance Movement, 237n95; Lévi-Strauss influenced by, 75–78, 82–83, 103; multiculturalism of, 52–59; popular anthropology and, 23–24, 237n100; racial views of, 6, 54– 63, 67–69, 72, 148–50; research on immigrants, 76–77, 241n30; women anthropologists supported by, 238n111; world’s fair exhibits and, 38–39, 236n83 Bosnia: rape as political weapon in, 194–95 Boston Literary Society, 19 Bougle, Celestin, 116 Brace, C. Loring, 64 Brahminization: in Indian sociology, 140–45, 259n61; social mobility through, 138 Brazilian race-relations model, 240n10 Breckenridge, Carol, 166 Brown v. Board of Education, 111, 123 Bruner, Jerome, 174 Buddha Weeps in Jadugoda (film), 281n55

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index

Bunche, Ralph, 118, 122, 252n47 Bureau of American Ethnology (bae), 230n13, 237n98 Bureau of Immigration Appeals, 197 Bureau of Indian A√airs: criticism of, 37; land distribution policy of, 28–29 Bush, George W., 189 Butalia, Urvashi, 164

¡

Cahiers internationaux de sociologie (journal), 110 Callois, Roger, 76 Canada: First Nation activism in, 224; gender asylum policies in, 195, 201 Carnegie Foundation, 118–19, 172, 252n47 Caste, Class and Race (Cox), 124–25 ‘‘Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification’: Reflections of a Social Anthropologist’’ (Dumont), 105, 108, 110–11, 125–30 Caste and Class in a Southern Town (Dollard), 115, 119 Caste and Social Stratification Among the Muslims (Ahmad), 142 ‘‘Caste in India and the United States’’ (Berreman), 124, 253n52 ‘‘Caste or Colony? Indianizing Race in the United States’’ (Immerwahr), 160–61 caste school of race relations, 114– 30, 159 caste system: Du Bois’s discussion of, 111–14, 153–54; Dumont’s research on, 104–11; in Europe, 114–15; Indian Muslims and, 141–45; Indian sociology and, 131–35, 151–59, 256n11; political movements against, 159–63, 263n117; reservation principle,

322

263n117; Sanskritization and, 138–40; scholarship on, 11–14; South African Indians and, 147–50 Catt, Carrie Chapman, 40–41 Cayton, Horace, 121–22 ‘‘Center and Periphery in Anthropological Theory’’ (Appadurai), 163 Center for Advanced in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford University), 173 Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, 200 Century (magazine): Fletcher’s articles in, 24–27, 233n28; matriarchical/matrilineal anthropological research and, 45; on popular expositions and world’s fairs, 37, 42; Yorke Stevenson’s work in, 27 Century of Dishonor, A (Jackson), 37 Césaire, Aimé, 166 Chabram, Angie, 245n80 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 217 Chandler, Nahum, 12, 252n47, 255n84 Chatterjee, Partha, 169–71, 216–20 Chatterjee, S. K., 138 Chicago Daily News (newspaper), 83 Chicago School of Sociology, 114, 151 Chicago World’s Fair,, 38–43, 236n86 Chicana studies: caste-race paradigm and, 163 children: e√ects of racism on, 117, 123–25 Children of Bondage (Davis and Dollard), 117–18, 123 China, 113 Chippewa tribe, 30, 46 Christianity, 107–8 Christianization of Native Americans, 234n55

47, 256n4; Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of, 98–102; racism and, 71– 72, 160–63; renaissance humanism and, 95–96; world’s fairs and promotion of, 41. See also imperialism Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (Du Bois), 223 color-blind cultural ideology, 162– 63 Columbian Exposition, 39 Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations, 172–75 Commoner (journal), 225 commons: cultures of, 14–17; transnational social movements and, 218, 223–25 ‘‘Comparative Approach to Modern Ideology and to the Place within It of Economic Thought, A’’ (Dumont), 129 comparative sociology: caste school of race relations and, 115– 25; Dumont’s research as, 104, 108–9; symbolic anthropology and, 179–86 ‘‘Comparative Study of American Caste, A’’ (Warner/Davis), 116, 121 compassion, 91–96 Confessions (Rousseau), 91–96, 99– 100 conflict: race and, 59–61; women’s rights and, 191–92 ‘‘Conflict of Caste and Class in an American Industry, The’’ (Johnson), 121, 253n55 Congress of Musicians, 41–42 Congress of Representative Women, 40 ‘‘Conservation of Races, The’’ (Du Bois), 69–72 Considerations for Asylum O≈cers Adjudicating Asylum Claims from Women (ins), 195

323

index

Citizens Concerned About Carbide, 214 civilization: Boas on rise of, 247n18; feminist and African American views of, 22; LéviStrauss’s discussion of, 80–83, 247n18; matriarchal/matrilineal societies and, 44–49; Native American culture of, 38; race and history and, 77–83; Sanskritization and Indian paradigm of, 131–35, 146–47; scientific study of, 136 Civil Rights Act of 1866, 160 civil-rights movement: caste school of race relations and, 110–14, 123–25; Indian sociologists’ impressions of, 160 civil society paradigm: new states formation and, 169–71, 181–86; transnational social movements and, 216–25, 279n22; women’s rights and, 192 Civil War, 154 Clark, Kenneth, 117–18, 122–23 clash of civilizations, 101–2 class: caste school of racism and, 115–25; cultural studies and, 244n76; race and, 57–59, 112– 14, 241n39; transnational social movements and, 216–25 Clastre, Pierre, 165 cline concept, 64 Clinton, William J., 196 coalition of cultures, 8, 81–83 Code Pink, 214 Cody, Bu√alo Bill, 237n98 ‘‘Cohesive Role of Sanskritization, The’’ (Srinivas), 137, 141, 145– 46 colonialism: anthropological research and, 166–71; culture and, 164; ethnographic research and influence of, 27–32; Indian sociology and, 116, 133–35, 146–

¡

index

¡

Contributions to Indian Sociology (journal), 104, 110, 130, 133– 35, 258n51, 259n60; coverage of Indian violence in, 279n13; South Asian Muslim research in, 143–45 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (cedaw), 193, 207–8 cosmopolitanism: culture and, 15– 17; in gender asylum policies, 204–8; Sanskritization and, 259n64 Cox, Oliver Cromwell, 116, 124– 25, 254n77 Cox Stevenson, Mathilda, 16, 19– 20, 229n5, 230n9, 230n13, 231n14, 231n18; matriarchical/ matrilineal anthropological research and, 45–46, 48–49; Native American research of, 28, 31–35; popular anthropology exhibits and, 37–38, 42–43 Crime or Custom? Violence Against Women in Pakistan (Human Rights Watch), 199 Crisis (Du Bois), 118 Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre), 75, 92 Cullen, Countee, 70 cultural essentialism, 66–68 culturalist racism, 66 cultural relativism: ethnographic research and, 48–49; race and, 77–83, 103 culture: of anthropology, 52–73; caste and, 148–50; class conflict and, 57–59, 241n39; comparative analysis of, 179–86; feminism and, 51; gender asylum policies and, 197–208, 210–12; Indian nationalist sociology and, 145–47; language and, 183–86; Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of, 75–

324

76, 83–90, 97–102, 248n38, 248n40; nationalism and, 16–17, 168–71; performative staging of, 3–4; race and, 1–17, 53–72, 148– 50, 244n76, 245n80; racism and rearticulation of, 1–17, 53–68; relativist concepts of, 3, 6–11, 72–73, 83–90; sociobiology vs., 72–73; state and, 164–71; transnational social movements and, 218–25; white dominance in studies of, 244n76; women’s rights and, 189–212 ‘‘Culture and Race’’ (Lowie), 57–59 Cushing, Frank, 20, 24–27, 37 Dalitbahujan elite, 257n57; feminism and, 144–45; Sanskritization and, 139–40 Dalit Panthers, 161 Dalits: in caste hierarchy, 251n12; King’s identification with, 159– 60; persecution of, 154–59, 224; political activism of, 3, 5–6, 11– 12, 16, 123, 150, 161–63, 187– 88, 257n30; sociological research on, 131–33, 143–45, 148–50; transnational social movements and, 224–25 Dalit: The Black Untouchables (Rajasekhar), 162 Dalit Voice (newspaper), 161 Daly, Mary, 190 Dark Ghetto (Clark), 118, 123 Dark Princess (Du Bois), 161 Das, Veena, 164, 259n60 Daughters of Aesthetics, 19 Davis, Allison, 116–25, 254n75 Davis, Elizabeth, 119 Dawes Act, 29 Day, Caroline Bond, 251n16 Deep South (Davis, Gardner, and Gardner), 119–21, 123–25 democracy: postcolonial national-

‘‘Dominant Caste in Rampura, The’’ (Srinivas), 136 Douglass, Frederick, 40, 114 Dow Chemical Company, 213–15 dowry marriage: Indian sociology and, 144–45 Drake, St. Clair, 121–22, 127–28 Dravidian movement in India, 140 Du Bois, W. E. B.: on African diaspora, 11, 222–23; Boas and, 53; Brazilian race-relations model and, 240n10; on castes, 11–12, 105, 111–14, 116, 121, 125, 151, 161, 253n57; cultural studies of race and, 68–72, 245n82; imperialism critiqued by, 161; influence on anthropology of, 251n16; Myrdal influenced by, 118–19, 252n47; on race, 56–57, 128, 149–50, 240n26; Rai and, 155– 56, 159; on segregation, 149–50, 152–53, 159, 161; Weber and, 126, 255n84 Dumont, Louis, 6, 16, 74, 95, 102– 11, 169; caste school of race relations critiqued by, 125–30, 151, 163; critical responses to, 159, 250n11; homo aequalis, 106; on ideology, 105–8; Indian sociology and, 133–36, 140–41, 147 Durban (South Africa): Indian race and caste practices in, 3, 147–50; social movements in, 279n22 Durkheim, Emile, 2 Dusk of Dawn (Du Bois), 69–72, 116, 118, 150, 251n22, 261n84 Duster, Troy, 162 Eastern philosophy: Lévi-Strauss on, 89–90 Eckert, Rinde, 1–2 economic structure: caste system of race relations and, 254n75; transnational social movements and, 216–25

325

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ism and, 176–77; racism and, 110–11; transnational social movements and, 216–25 Densmore, Frances, 19, 230n13, 231n14, 231n18, 233nn31–32; evangelical ethnography and, 33, 35–37; expositions discussed by, 42–43; matriarchical/matrilineal anthropological research and, 46; Native American music research by, 30 dépaysement (estrangement), 94– 97, 99–100 dependency theory, 204–5 deracialization, 71–72 Derrida, Jacques, 214, 227n4 Deshpande, Satish, 135, 256n11 developmentalist paradigm, 168– 71 di Brazza, Countess, 236n86 ‘‘Die Negerfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten’’ (The Negro Problem in the United States) (Du Bois), 126 di√erentialist racism, 8, 13–14 Diggs, Irene, 251n16 Dirks, Nicholas, 256n4 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 2, 227n1 Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality (Rousseau), 90–96 dispute resolution practices, 192 diversity: problem of, 79–83, 97– 102 Dollard, John, 115–19, 123 domestic violence: globalization and, 210–12; immigration status and, 193–96; language and cultural issues of, 206–8, 269n28; state sovereignty and policies against, 200–208; in United States, 202–10, 275n80; women as social group and laws against, 196–99

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Ekta Parishad, 224 El Salvador, 194 Emancipation Proclamation, 113 Engels, Friedrich, 44 Enlightenment: race and caste and, 128–30; state formation and, 165 environment: race and, 57–59 epochalism, 179–86 equality: hierarchy vs., 109–10; as pathology of democracy, 110– 11; racism and, 128–30; in Western society, 104 Eribon, Didier, 76–77, 85 essentialism: cultural, 66–68; Geertz on, 179–86; gender asylum policies and, 190–91, 196–99, 203–8, 211–12 Esteva, Gustavo, 223 ethnic groups: conquest narratives and, 28; Indian sociology and, 140–45; persecution of, 198–99; research paradigms of, 12–14; as substitute for race, 63–68, 243n60 ethnocentrism, 80–83 ethnography and ethnology: caste school of racism and, 115–25; colonial intervention’s influence on, 27–32; cultural studies and, 68–72, 245n80; evangelical ethnography, 32–37; gender and, 18–19; institutional ethnography and state creation, 166–71; nation-states and, 165; new culturalism and, 9–10; popular ethnography, 24–27; race studies and, 242n47; Rousseau’s influence on, 90 eugenics, 63–72 European Union (eu), 192 evolutionary anthropology: matriarchical/matrilineal societies and, 43–49; racism and, 57–59, 103; structuralist view of, 75–76 ‘‘Evolution of the Race Problem, The’’ (Du Bois), 112

326

Expansion of Society and Its Cultural Implications, The (Singer), 136 expository feminism: midway ethnology and, 37–43 Fair, Brian, 163 Fallacy of Race, The (Montagu), 148 Fallers, Lloyd, 173, 264n34 Fanon, Frantz, 167 fascism, 130 Febvre, Lucien, 75–76 Fee, Elizabeth, 22 feminism: anthropology and, 49–51, 191–92; civilization theory challenged by, 22; domestic violence research and, 210–12; evangelical ethnology and, 23–24; expository feminism and midway ethnology, 37–43; human rights and, 189– 212, 272n56; Native American women excluded from, 49–51, 239n126; nativist politics and, 40– 41; patriarchal state and, 165–66; racism and, 71–72; state anthropology and, 164–65; universal vs. culture-specific values and, 5, 203– 8; Women’s Christian Temperance Union and, 18–19 fieldwork ethic: anthropological research and, 23–27; evangelical ethnography and, 33–37 Filipinos, 42–43, 237n100 First International, 277n3 Five Nations, 234n55 Fletcher, Alice, 15–16, 18–20, 229n2, 229n5, 230nn12–13, 231nn14–15, 231n18; allotment work by, 29–31; Bureau of Indian A√airs land distribution policy and, 28–29; evangelical ethnography and, 33–37; feminism and, 51; Ghost Dance Movement and, 237n95; matriarchical/matrilineal anthropological research and, 43, 45–49;

popular anthropology exhibits and, 37–43, 236n83; research on Native Americans by, 24–27, 233nn31–32, 233n36, 234n55, 235n78; Victorian maternalism of, 33; organizations founded or joined by, 230n12, 235n65 folklorist studies: colonialism research and, 27–28 Forbes, Jack, 163 Ford Foundation: Indian sociology and, 136, 139–40 Foucault, Michel, 2, 92, 227n1, 227n4, 227n6, 249n45; critique of humanism, 248n45; on etatization of society, 216; on governmentality, 166 France: gender asylum in, 206 Frazier, E. Franklin, 122–23, 125 French Revolution, 106–7 Freyre, Gilberto, 54 Friends of the Indian, 29 From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (Dumont), 105–6

index

Gallagher, B. G., 115, 254n74 Gandhi, Leela, 17, 277n3, 281n59 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 111, 154– 55, 157, 159–63, 167, 179, 224, 261n89 Gardner, Burleigh, 119–20 Gardner, Mary, 119–20 Garrison, William Lloyd, 114 Gay, Jane, 29–31, 34, 234n47 Geertz, Cli√ord, 6, 73, 265n34, 265n39; on Balinese state formation, 177–79; comparative analysis of, 179–86; new states concept of, 167–77 gender: anthropological research and, 18–24, 49–51, 232n23; culture and, 5–6; evangelical ethnography and, 32–37, 48–49; racial positioning and, 29–30;

sexual inequality and, 49–51; social group definitions of, 196–99, 269n29; South Asian human rights issues and, 189–212. See also sexuality; women gender asylum, 191–96; immigrant rape or domestic violence and, 202–8, 211–12; social group definitions and, 196–99; state sovereignty and, 199–208 genealogical method, 3–7, 227n7 General Agreement on Tari√s and Trade (gatt), 192 genetics: intelligence and, 72–73; isolated populations and, 87–90; race and, 59–68, 72–73, 241n40, 242n42 genital mutilation: cultural and state sovereignty issues and, 200; as persecution, 197 Geronimo, 237n98 Ghost Dance Movement, 41, 237n95, 237n98 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 22 Gilroy, Paul, 6, 15, 66, 241n39 Glissant, Édouard, 166 globalization: cultural hybridity and, 5, 8–11, 188; domestic violence and, 210–12; minority cosmopolitanism and, 15–17; transnational social movements and, 215–25; women’s rights issues and, 192–212 Goldman Environment Prize, 215 Greeley, Horace, 114 Growing Up in the Black Belt (Johnson), 121 Guidelines for the Protection of Refugee Women (unhcr), 195–96 Guidelines on Women Refugee Claimants Fearing Gender-related Persecution, 195 Gupta, Dipankar, 135, 149 Guru, Gopal, 143

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Haddon, A. C., 63 Hancock, Mary, 139–40 Handbook of unhcr, 195 Hansen, Thomas Blom, 259n65 Hardin, Garret, 225 Hardt, Michael, 192, 208 Harlem Renaissance, 161 Harrison, Faye, 245n80, 251n16 Harrison, Selig, 264n31 Harvard University, 167, 173–74, 265n39 Harvey, David, 221 Hazara ethnic minority, 198–99 health organizations, 192 Hearst, Phoebe Apperson, 230n13 heredity, 55–59 Hernandez-Montiel, Geovanni, 197 Herskovits, Melville, 53–54, 57– 59, 70, 72, 122, 240n12, 242n42 hierarchy: in Asian society, 104; Dumont’s discussion of, 126–30; structural analysis of, 105–8 Hinduism (Hindutva): Ambedkar’s discussion of, 152–59; caste system and, 104–5, 107–8, 130, 250n11, 258n44; cultural dominance in India of, 141–45, 187–88, 264n31; Dalit persecution and, 155–59; Dharmasastras and, 136; Dumont’s analysis of, 104, 151; Indian sociology and, 136–45, 259n60; language politics and, 182–86; nationalism and, 10–11, 145–47, 223–24, 259n65, 264n31; Sanskritist scholarship and, 131–33, 136– 40; South African Indians and, 150; women’s rights abuses under, 200 Hindu Law, 187–88 Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (hss), 131 Hispanics, 71–72 Historical Sketch of the Omaha Tribe

328

of Indians in Nebraska (Fletcher), 38 history: culture and, 2–6, 227n6; Foucault’s critique of, 2, 227n4; humanism and, 93–96; history of the present, 2–4, 14: race and, 75–83, 98–102, 246n8; new culturalism and, 7–11; theater state and, 178–79 ‘‘History and Anthropology’’ (Lévi-Strauss), 76 holisms, 103, 106, 109–10 Holmes, D., 9–10 Holmes, W. H., 236n83 Homans, George, 174 Homo Hierachicus (Dumont), 16, 104–10, 126–30, 169; critical reception of, 159, 249nn3–4 homophobia, 202–3 homosexuality: social group definitions and asylum policies, 197– 99, 201, 269n29, 270n34 honor killings of women, 189, 196, 200 Howe, Julia Ward, 38, 41 Hudood Ordinances (Pakistan), 196 Human Development Index, 210 ‘‘Human Faculty as Determined by Race’’ (Boas), 57, 77–78, 238n111 humanism: geographical exploration and, 93–96; Foucault’s critique of, 92, 249n45; Rousseau and, 90–96; structural anthropology and, 75–83, 88–90 human rights: gender issues and, 189–212; international law on, 192–93; relativist concepts of culture and, 3; transnational social movements and, 218–25; universal vs. culture-specific values and, 202–8; women’s rights, 192–93, 202–8, 269n27, 270n39

Human Rights Watch, 192, 205, 208, 273n65 Huxley, Julian, 63 Hymes, Dell, 166

329

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‘‘Ideology as a Cultural System’’ (Geertz), 169–71, 178 Ignatie√, Michael, 203 Ilaiah, Kancha, 139, 143, 147, 225, 259n61 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, 193 Imagined Communities (Anderson), 165 Immerwahr, Daniel, 160–61 Immigration and Naturalization Service (ins), 195 immigration policies: cultural fundamentalism and, 66–67; domestic violence and, 202–8; gendered asylum and, 192–96; Muslims in U.S. and, 13–14 imperialism: anthropology of culture and, 4–6; caste system and, 113–14; racism and, 160–63. See also colonialism India: African American relations with, 159–63; American caste system compared with, 116–17, 124–25, 254n77; caste system in, 104–11, 125–30, 177; Dalit persecution in, 154–59; Du Bois’s discussion of, 113–14; epochalism vs. essentialism in analysis of, 179–86; gender asylum in, 206; Hinduness and sociology in, 136–40; intercaste/interfaith marriages in, 201; international social science and sociology in, 133–35; land rights movement in, 216–25, 280n32; language politics in, 181–86; LéviStrauss’s discussion of, 100–102; Muslims in, 13–14, 141–45; na-

tionalist sociology in, 145–47; National River Linking Project in, 213; otherness and sociology in, 140–45; pan-Indian movement and, 223–25; partition of, 183–88, 266n54, 266nn61–62; post-independence violence in, 171–72; race and culture in, 6; social movements in, 159–63, 213–25; sociological research in, 131–33, 256n4; South African Indians and, 147–50; state formation in, 10–11, 176–77, 264n31; women’s rights issues in, 189, 195–96, 200, 204–5, 207–10, 274n75 Indian Congress, 237n98 Indian Education and Civilization (Fletcher), 29 Indian question, 5–6 Indigenous World Uranium Summit, 224, 281n55 individualism, 109–10 ‘‘Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiment and Civil Politics in the New States’’ (Geertz), 171, 181 intellectual formation: a≈liative interdisciplinarity and, 11–14 international institutions: culture and, 6, 80–90; gender asylum and state sovereignty issues for, 198–99, 272n54, 276n91; Indian sociology and, 133–35, 162–63; transnational social movements and, 221–25; women’s rights and, 191–96, 276n91 International Monetary Fund (imf), 192 ‘‘International Research Problems’’ (Beals), 133 International School of American Archeology and Ethnology, 231n15 International Year of Action to

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International Year (cont.) Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination, 83 Interpretation of Cultures, The (Geertz), 179 Iran: Afghan refugees in, 269n27; women’s rights abuses in, 200, 270n39 Iroquois tribe: matriarchical/matrilineal anthropological research and, 56 Islam: caste system and, 107–8, 250n11, 258n44; culturalist representations of, 13–14; gender asylum policies and, 198–99; in India, 131, 187–88; language politics in Pakistan and, 182–86; racialization of, 13–14; Sanskiritzation in India and, 141–45; transnational social movements and, 221–25; women’s rights issues and, 196, 199–200, 205

index

Jackson, Helen Hunt, 37 Japan, 113 Jenks, Jeremiah W., 53 Jewish Academy of Arts and Sciences, 54 Jim Crow laws. See segregation John Brown (Du Bois), 112, 251n24 Johnson, Charles, 116, 119, 121– 23, 125, 155, 158, 252n47, 253n55, 254n75, 262n95 Johnson, Christopher, 248n38 Johnson, David, 4, 227n4, 227n8 juridical formation, 192

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Kapferer, Bruce, 168 Kasinga, Fauziya, 197 Kelly, Robin, 11 Kenya, 176–77 King, Martin Luther Jr., 111, 124, 159–60, 163, 263n115 kinship ties: slavery and, 70–71

330

Kipling, Rudyard, 37 Kluckhohn, Clude, 174 Kondo, Dorinne, 245n80 Kosek, Jake, 227n7 Kroeber, Alfred, 58–59, 115, 125 Ku Klux Klan, 154 labor migration: from India to U.S., 10–11 La Flesche, Francis, 19 Lake Mohank Conferences, 29 Lal, Shyam, 143–44 land rights: transnational social movements and, 216–25, 280n32 language: in feminism and human rights, 189; Geertz on essentialism and epochalism and, 179– 86; human rights policies and, 206–8; partition of India and, 183–88, 266n54, 266n64; race and culture and, 56, 58–59; Sanskritization of India and, 140 Latin America: transnational social movements in, 219; women’s rights abuses in, 200, 207–8 Lawrence, D. H., 229n5 Leach, Edmund, 164–65 Le Monde (newspaper), 83 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 9–10 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 2, 6, 8, 16, 74–102, 110; on disappearing societies, 134; on distinctive opposition, 106, 250n9; on Islam, 100–102; Malthusian economics and, 88–90, 102; on man and nature, 77–83, 94–96, 246n8, 247n22; on organic evolution, 88–90; racism in Second World War and, 249n49; Rousseau’s influence on, 74, 90–96; on travel and equality, 96–102, 117 Lewis, Oscar, 9 Lincoln, Abraham, 154, 261n89 Lindholm, Charles, 250n11 Linebaugh, Peter, 225

Linguistic Provinces Committee, 171–72 linguistic states: nationalism and creation of, 183–86 Livingstone, Frank, 62, 64 Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, 42, 237n100 Lowe, Lisa, 245n80 Lower Colorado River Authority (lcra), 213 Lowie, Robert, 57–58 Lubbock, John, 22, 43 lynchings, 120

331

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machismo culture, 200 Madan, T. N, 143 Mamdani, Mahmood, 14 Mandal Commission, 135, 258n51 manifest destiny: gender stereotypes and, 18–19 Marcus, George, 9–10, 165 marriage: anthropologists’ view of miscegenation and, 53–54; communalization of, 201; matriarchal/matrilineal societies and, 44–47; Sanskiritization in Indian sociology and, 144–45 Marriot, McKim, 136–38, 147, 173 Marxist sociology, 145–47 Mason, Otis, 39, 44–45 matriarchical/matrilineal societies, 22, 43–49 Matter of Acosta, 197 Maximillian in Mexico (Yorke Stevenson), 24, 27 May, Benjamin, 263n115 Mayo, Katherine, 155–56 McGee, W. J., 42, 231n18, 237n100 McLennan, John, 43–44 ‘‘Meaninglessness of the Anthropological Conception of Race, The’’ (Montague), 77 Médecins San Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), 192 Mehta, Uday, 130

Memmi, Albert, 166 Menchaca, Martha, 163 Menon, Ritu, 164 Mexico: French intervention in, 24; Nuttal’s research on, 27–28 Michaels, Walter Benn, 67 Michaelson, Scott, 4, 227n4, 227n8 midway ethnology: expository feminism and, 37–43 Mignolo, Walter, 220–21 Mind of Primitive Man, The (Boas), 52, 57, 77 minority cosmopolitanism, 14–17 minority group status: asylum policies and, 200–201 miscegenation: anthropologists’ view of, 53–59; caste school of race relations view of, 121, 123 Moallem, Minoo, 204–5 modernization, 136–40; New States theory of, 3 Mohanty, Chandra, 190 Montagu, Ashley, 59, 61–68, 77, 148–50, 242n42 Montgomery bus boycotts, 124–25 Mooney, James, 237n98 Moore, Donald, 227n7 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 43–45 Morgan, Robin, 190 Mother India (Mayo), 155–56 multiculturalism: Boasian relativism and, 52–59; cultural studies of race and, 68–72; Indian state failure and, 10–11 Murray, Henry, 174 Muslims. See Islam ‘‘My Adventures in Zuni’’ (Cushing), 24–27 Myrdal, Alva, 176, 183 Myrdal, Gunnar: postcolonial studies of India by, 169, 176–77, 266n64; race research by, 117–20, 122, 124–25, 128, 252n47, 261n84 Myth of the Negro Past (Herskovits), 122, 240n12

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Nancy, Jean Luc, 218 Nandy, Ashis, 6–7 Narayan, Uma, 191 Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement), 213, 215, 279n11 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 175 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), 53, 118, 155, 161, 262n94 National Association of People’s Movements in India (napm), 213, 215, 219–20 national character studies: new culturalism and, 9–11 nationalism: culture and, 16–17, 167–71; Dalit persecution and, 154–59; ethnic identity and, 165; Indian sociology and, 133–35, 138–40, 145–47; language and, 180–86; Myrdal’s research on, 175–77; postcolonial state formation and, 167–71, 175–77; Sanskritization in India and, 145–47, 259n65; state creation and, 165–66 National Negro Conference, 112 National Negro Congress, 154–55, 262n94 National River Linking Project (India), 213 National Task Force on the Interlinking of Rivers, 213 Native Americans: caste-race paradigm and, 163; colonialism’s influence on research about, 27– 32; concepts of law and, 234n47; on display at world’s fairs and exhibitions, 37–43, 236n86, 237n98; evangelical ethnography and romanticization of, 34–37; Fletcher’s research on, 23–29, 233nn31–32, 233n36; Gay’s discussion of, 234n47; Indian mas-

332

culinity and women’s anthropological research on, 29–31; music of, 24–27, 41–42, 236n83, 245nn31–32; racial terror against, 71; stereotypes of, 233n36; transnational social movements and, 224–25 nativist politics: feminism and, 40–41 Nauman, Bruce, 1–2 Nazi Germany: Boas’s views on, 54– 55; Dumont’s critique of, 129–30; Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of, 80– 83; racism in, 60–61, 70 Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-century Bali (Geertz), 177–79 Negri, Antonio, 192, 218 ‘‘Negro Citizen, The’’ (Du Bois), 253n57 Negro in American Civilization, The (Johnson), 155, 158, 262n95 Negro in the Civil War, The (Apthekar), 153–54 Negro in the United States, The (Frazier), 122–23 Negro problem: caste school of race relations and, 122–25; culture and, 5–6, 54–59; Du Bois’s discussion of, 112–14, 118; Indian sociologists’ view of, 154– 59, 261n89 ‘‘Negro Scientist, The’’ (Du Bois), 252n47 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 160, 167, 171, 175, 179, 181, 186, 219, 224 neoliberalism: new culturalism and, 7, 10–11; transnational social movements and, 216–25 Nepal: women’s rights abuses in, 200, 207–8 Nesiah, Vasuki, 190–91, 210–12 new culturalisms, 6–11 New Orleans Industrial Exhibition, 37

new states concept: language and, 179–86; postcolonialism and, 168–77; theater states and, 178– 79 New York Times (newspaper), 19, 191 Nez Perce tribe, 29–31 Niagara Movement, 111–12, 118, 251n22 ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’’ (Foucault), 227n6 noble savage, 96–97 Non-Aligned Movement, 175, 186, 222 non-governmental organizations (ngos): women’s rights and, 192 North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta), 192, 221 ‘‘Note on Sanskritization and Westernization, A’’ (Srinivas), 137 Notes of a Racial Caste Baby: Color Blindness and the End of A≈rmative Action (Fair), 163 Nuremburg human-rights jurisprudence, 193 Nuttal, Zelia, 19–20, 229n5, 230n9, 230n13, 231n15, 231n18; ethnographic research on colonialism by, 27–28; popular anthropology exhibits and, 38, 41, 236n86

Pakistan: Afghan refugees in, 269n27; Ambedkar’s support for, 187–88; feminist organizations in, 267n9, 273n65; language politics in, 182–86; in Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, 97–98; U.S. relations with, 164, 205; women’s rights issues in, 189, 191, 196, 199–200, 205–8 Pakistan: Women Killed in the Name of Honor (Amnesty International), 205 Pan-African Conference, 221–22 Pan-American social movements, 220–21 Pandian, Anand, 227n7 Pan-Indianist movement, 223–25 para-ethnography, 9–10 Park, Robert, 114–15, 121, 251n29 Parsons, Elsie Clews, 19–20, 23– 24, 229n2, 229n5, 230n9, 230n13, 231nn14–15; ethnographic research by, 27; feminism and research of, 49–51, 239n126; matriarchical/matrilineal anthropological research and, 46–47 Parsons, Talcott, 174, 265n39 Pashtun culture: women’s rights abuses and, 198 Patel, Rajeev, 279n22 Patkar, Medha, 213 patriarchal civilization: anthropo-

333

index

‘‘Occidentalism’’ (Bilgrami), 14 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (osha), 214 Okin, Susan, 191 Old Fashioned Woman, The (Parsons), 49–50 Old Societies and New States (Shils), 170, 172 Omaha Severalty Act, 28–29 Omi, Michael, 65, 69, 71, 241n39 Omvedt, Gail, 150 Ong, Aiwha, 204

‘‘On the Concept of Race’’ (Brace), 64 ‘‘On the Non-existence of the Human Races’’ (Livingstone), 62, 64 Organization of African Unity (oau), 192 Orientalism, 131–33 Other Backward Castes, 257n30 otherness: in Indian sociology, 140–45

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patriarchal civilization (cont.) logical questioning of, 43–47; gender asylum and, 199–208; Indian sociology and, 144–45 Patriarchal Theory, The (McLennan), 43–44 patronage structures: caste school of race relations and, 120, 252n47 Patterns of Negro Segregation (Johnson), 122 People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (pdpa), 205 People’s Movement (magazine), 219–20 ‘‘Personal Studies of Indian Life’’ (Fletcher), 24–27 Philadelphia Negro (Du Bois), 111 Phule, Jyotirao, 153–59, 261n86 Pinart, Alphonse Louis, 230n9 Platt Smith, Erminnie, 19–20, 230n12, 231n14, 231n18; evangelical ethnography and, 33; matriarchical/matrilineal anthropological research and, 45–47; organizations joined by, 230n12, 235n65 Plea of Our Brown Brother, The (Densmore), 35–36 Pocock, David F., 133–36, 141 Polis, Adamantia, 272n59 political anthropology: linguistic states and, 183–86; revision of, 164–65; state formation and, 165–71; transnational social movements and, 216–25 political refugees, 193–96 Political Systems of Highland Burma (Leach), 164–65 ‘‘Politics of Meaning, The’’ (Geertz), 170–71, 178 Pollock, Sheldon, 259n61 popular ethnography, 24–27 population genetics: race and, 64– 68

334

postcolonialism: culture and, 164; state formation and, 166–71; transnational social movements and, 217–18 poststructuralism: culture and, 9 poverty: transnational social movements and, 216–25 Powdermaker, Hortense, 115 Powell, John Wesley, 31–32, 231n18 power: status vs., 107–8, 125, 130 Prabhu, Suresh, 213 Prashad, Vijay, 162 Primitive Marriage (McLennan), 43–44 primitive societies: social-relations view of, 173–74; structuralist view of, 75–83, 85–90, 96–102 primordialism: new states concept and, 178–79, 189, 201 ‘‘Problem of the American Negro, The’’ (Boas), 54 Progressive Era: anthropology and, 20–21, 23; antisemitism and assimilation in, 54–55; feminism in, 51 Progressive Writers Movement, 266n55 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber), 104–5, 126 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, 194 Puerto Rico, 71 Purity: physical anthropology and, 56–59, 241n31 Putnam, Frederick, 21, 23–24, 230n13, 231nn15–16, 231n18; Fletcher and, 19, 37–39, 236n83 ‘‘Question of Caste, The’’ (Sumner), 114 Rabinow, Paul, 53 ‘‘Race, Caste and Ethnic Identity’’ (Beteille), 148

structuralist analysis and, 103– 30; value neutrality and, 58–59; women’s rights and, 190–212 Race: Science and Politics (Benedict), 58–61, 87, 241n40 ‘‘Race Thinking Before Racism’’ (Arendt), 127, 255n84 racial democracy, 54, 240n10 Racial Formations in the United States (Omi and Winant), 65, 241n39 RaΔes, Thomas, 178–79 Raghavan, V., 136, 140 Rahman, Saeed, 202–3 Rai, Lala Lajpat, 155–56, 159 Rajagopalachari, C., 185 Rajasekhar, V. T., 161–62 rape: cultural and state sovereignty issues of, 200–201, 206–8, 272n53; international comparisons on statistics of, 208–10; language and, 206–8, 274n69; as political weapon, 194–96, 267n9; in United States, 208–10, 275n80; women as social group and laws against, 196–99 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (rss), 131, 140, 259n65 Razack, Sherene, 201 Reagon, Bernice Johnson, 190 Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, The (Wells and Douglas), 40 Redfield, Robert, 136, 138 Refugee Act of 1980, 193 refugee policies and institutions: rape or domestic violence and, 202–8; transnational social movements and, 218–25; women’s rights and, 192–96, 269n27 Rege, Sharmila, 144, 148 Reinventing Anthropology (Hymes), 166

335

index

‘‘Race, Caste and Gender’’ (Beteille), 148 Race, Language and Culture (Boas), 148–50 ‘‘Race and Caste’’ (Beteille), 147 ‘‘Race and Culture’’ (Lévi-Strauss), 74–75, 82–90, 92 ‘‘Race and History’’ (Lévi-Strauss), 74–83, 96–97, 128–29 race and racism: anthropological research and, 21–24, 61–62; Benedict’s a≈rmation of, 59–61, 241n40; Boas’s discussion of, 53– 59; Brazilian race-relations model, 240n10; caste school of race relations, 110, 114–30, 151– 59; caste system and concepts of, 113–14; conflict over, 57–59, 59–61, 241n39; culturalist expansion and, 166–71; cultural studies and, 68–72, 244n76; culture of anthropology and, 52–73; in democratic societies, 110–11; domestic violence and, 276n84; Du Bois’s study of, 68–72, 111– 14, 245n82; Dumont’s discussion of, 110–11, 126–30; e√ect on children of, 117, 123–25; feminism and, 40–41; gender and, 5–6, 29–30; genetics and, 58–68, 241n40; hierarchy and, 108–10; immigrant rape or domestic violence and, 202–8; imperialism and, 160–63; Indian sociology and, 132–33; internationalized concepts of, 74–102; Lévi-Strauss’s on, 74–90, 96– 102, 248n40; life expectancy and, 243n54; new culturalism and, 7– 11; paradigms of scholarship on, 11–14; rearticulation of cultural di√erence and, 1–17; Rousseau’s three humanisms and, 90–96; as social experience, 149–50; South African Indians and, 147–50;

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religion: hierarchy and, 107–8; Hindu-Muslim syncretism in, 187–88; Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of, 100–102; nationalism and, 176–77, 182–86; persecution based on, 198–201 Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (Srinivas), 136–37 Religion of India (Weber), 104–5, 125–26, 264n31 Remembered Village, The (Srinivas), 136 Renaissance Europe, 93–96 Risley, Herbert, 116 Rodrigues, Gustave, 99 Rosaldo, Renato, 68–69, 245n80 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 35–36, 74, 79–83, 90–96; on the noble savage , 96–102 Rwanda: rape as political weapon in, 194 Rydell, Robert, 41

¡

Said, Edward, 227n8 Sanskritization: Indian Muslims and, 141–45; Indian sociology and, 131–35, 259n64; nationalism in India and, 145–47, 259n65; social organization and influence of, 107–8; sociology of Hinduness and, 136–40 ‘‘Sanskritization as Female Oppression in India’’ (Berreman), 144 Sapir, Edward, 58 Sarangi, Satinath, 215 Sardar Sarovar dam (Gujarat), 215 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 74–76, 81, 92, 94, 246n7, 248n44 Sassen, Saskia, 192 Satyshodak Samaj (Society of the Seekers of Truth), 153 Savage Mind (Lévi-Strauss), 74, 90, 96, 246n7, 248n44 Savarkar, V. D., 146–47

336

Schneider, David, 72–73 School of American Archaeology, 231n15 School of American Research, 231n15 ‘‘Science or Swaraj’’ (Uberoi), 133 scientific research: in India, 133– 35; race and racism and, 55–61, 64–68, 72–73, 242n42 ‘‘Scope of Anthropology, The’’ (Lévi-Strauss), 94, 246n8 second-wave feminism, 190 secular-nationalist sociology: in India, 134–36, 145–47 segregation: American model of, 240n10; caste studies and, 111– 26; Du Bois’s discussion of, 149– 50, 152–53; impact on black scientists of, 252n47; Indian sociologists’ on, 152–60 self-reflexive anthropology: comparative paradoxes in, 108–10; of Dumont, 104, 108–30 Selvam, O. S., 139–40, 143 Senart, Emile, 116 Senghor, Léopold, 167 Service, Elman, 165 settlement house movement, 33–34 sexual di√erence: anthropological research and, 21–24, 43–49 sexuality: caste and taboos concerning, 120; class conflict and, 241n39; Sanskritization and, 144–45; as social group definition, 196–99; women’s rights and, 190, 194–96. See also gender; homosexuality sexual violence. See rape Shadow of the Plantation, The (Johnson), 119 Shariat Act, 187–88 Shaw, Anna Howard, 40–41 Shils, Edward, 169–70, 172–73, 265n34 Shukla, Champa Devi, 215

new-states paradigm and, 169– 71 ‘‘Social Structure of a Mysore Village, The’’ (Srinivas), 136 ‘‘Social System of a Mysore Village, The’’ (Srinivas), 136 Society against the State (Clastre), 165 sociocentrism: caste system and, 107–8 sociological research: caste school of race relations and, 114–25; on Indian caste system, 104, 125– 33; Indian sociology and, 133– 35, 259n60; race and, 69–73, 95, 245n80, 245n82; transnational social movements and, 216–25, 279n12 ‘‘Sociology for India, A’’ (Dumont and Pocock), 141 Sorabji, Soli, 149 Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 111– 14, 126 South Africa: Indian race and caste practices in, 3, 147–50, 154–59 South Asia: cultural values and gender in, 203–8; feminist movements in, 191–92; rape and sexual violence in, 200–201; research on Muslims in, 143–45; University of Chicago South Asian studies program, 136; women’s rights in, 189–212. See also specific countries South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (saarc), 192 Southern Workman (journal), 24, 233n36, 235n78 Southwest Society, 231n15 sovereignty: gender asylum policies and, 198–208; transnational social movements and, 219–25; women’s rights and, 192 Spanish-conquest narratives, 27–32

337

index

Sia tribe: Cox Stevenson’s research on, 28; matriarchical/matrilineal anthropological research and, 45–46 Sickles, Emma, 41 Sierra Leone: rape as political weapon in, 194 Sikand, Yoginder, 142–43 Singer, Milton, 136–37, 140 Sinha, Anita, 201 Sioux tribe: in popular anthropology exhibitions, 41–42 slavery: African American kinship and, 70–72; caste studies and, 11, 111–14, 116, 153–59, 251n28, 261n86, 261n89; racism and, 127–30, 150; untouchables compared with, 161–63 ‘‘Slaves and Untouchables’’ (Ambedkar), 155–58 Social Change in Modern India (Srinivas), 137 social constructivism: new culturalism and, 7; race and, 67–68, 245n82; transnational social movements and, 225 social discrimination: caste school of race relations and, 114–25; Indian sociologists on, 154–59; race and, 60–68, 77–83, 94–96, 243n54, 247n22; against women, 196–99 social group definitions: women’s rights and, 196–99, 270n35 social justice: race concepts and, 149–50; transnational social movements and, 224–25 social mobility: Sanskritization as tool for, 138–40 social movements: transnational disjunction and a≈liation and, 159–63, 213–25 Social Rule (Parsons), 50–51 social science: Indian national sociology and, 133–35, 259n60;

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index

¡

Spencer, Herbert, 43–44 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 190 Sri Lanka: women’s rights issues in, 189, 201, 205, 207–8 Srinivas, M. N, 130–33, 136–41, 144–47, 256n11 Starn, Orin, 171 states: culture and, 164–71, 199– 208; ethnography of, 165–71; gender asylum policies and sovereignty of, 198–99; human rights and gendered culture in, 189–212, 272n59; new states concept, 167–77; symbolic anthropology of, 164–65; theater state concept and, 177–79; transnational social movements and, 216–25; women’s rights policies and, 192–96, 199–208 States Reorganization Commission, 183 status: power vs., 107–8, 125, 130 stereotypes: gender asylum policies and, 206–8, 210–12; manifest destiny and gender stereotypes, 18–19; of Native Americans, 233n36; racial stereotypes, 241n40; in Spanish-conquest narratives, 27–32 Stocking, George, 55–56, 238n111 Stolcke, Verena, 66–67, 241n39 Stou√er, Samuel, 174 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 114 stratification: Indian caste system and, 105, 109–10, 142–45, 150– 59, 162–63 structural anthropology: hierarchy in, 105–8; of Lévi-Strauss, 74– 103; racism and limits of, 130 Structural Anthropology (LéviStrauss), 74–76 Studley, Cordelia, 231n16 ‘‘Study of Race, The’’ (Washburn), 64–65 subaltern histories of, 151–59

338

Sudarshan, K. S., 131 Sudra caste, 257n30 su√ragist movement: expository feminism and, 40–43; Native American women excluded from, 47–49, 239n126; nativist politics and, 40–41; women anthropologists and, 46–49 Sumner, Charles, 114 ‘‘Superorganic, The’’ (Kroeber), 58 symbolic anthropology: comparative analysis and, 179–86; postcolonialism and, 172–77; state formation and, 166–71 Systems of Consanguinity (Morgan), 44 Tagore, Rabindranath, 155 Taguie√, Pierre-Andre, 8–9 Tajik ethnic minority, 198–99, 270n37 Taliban: women’s rights abuses under, 196, 198 temporality, 93–96 Thakur, Rekha, 144–45 Thaw, Mary Copley, 230n13 theater state, 177–79 Third World Liberation, 161–63 Third World states: culture and, 170 Thoughts on Linguistic States (Ambedkar), 181–86 Thoughts on Pakistan (Ambedkar), 182–86 ‘‘Three Humanisms, The’’ (LéviStrauss), 92–96 Tibbles, Henry, 18 Tito, Josip Broz, 175 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 106–7 totalitarianism: caste and race and, 129–30; women’s rights issues and, 205–8 Traditional India: Structure and Change (Singer), 136 Trans-Mississippi Exposition, 41– 42, 237n98

transnational relations: ethnic nationalism and, 165; history of, 277n3, 281n59; social movements and, 159–63, 213–25; women’s rights and, 190–212 travel: cultural di√erence and, 97– 102; spatial inequality and, 117– 18 tribal culture, 200 Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss), 16, 89–91, 96–102 Tuskegee College, 119 Tylor, Edward, 19–20, 22, 43

339

index

Uberoi, J. P. S., 133–36, 162 uncommon cultures: di√erentialist racism and, 8, 13, 15–16 un Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 193–94 un Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (dedaw), 201, 207 Underdevelopment: new states formation and, 168–71 unesco statements on race and racial prejudice, 63–67, 76–77, 80, 103, 149, 243n50, 243n56 Unhappy India (Rai), 155–56 un High Commissioner for Refugees, 194–95 Union Carbide Corporation, 213– 15, 277nn7–8, 278n10 Union Signal (wctu newsletter), 40 United Nations: Indian complaints against, 154–55; Optional Protocol to the Women’s Convention, 208 United Nations Children’s Fund (unicef): Violence Against Women campaign, 191–92 United Nations Commission on Human Rights (unchr), 6–8, 194–96, 262n94 United Nations Development Programme, 210

United Nations Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization (unesco), 6; Lévi-Strauss’s address to, 83–90, 247n32; new culturalism and, 7–8 United States: Afghanistan and, 205; gender asylum policies in, 193–96, 268n20, 270n34; immigrant rape or domestic violence in, 201–8; Indian relations with, 132–33; Indian sociology and, 136–40, 150–51, 160–63; Muslims in, 13–14; neoliberalism in, 10–14; Pakistan and, 164, 205; violence against women in, 202– 10, 275n80, 276n84 United States Constitution, 113, 160, 163, 255n94; Fifteenth Amendment to, 113, 160, 255n94; Fourteenth Amendment to, 160 United States of America: A Hindu’s Impressions and a Study, A (Rai), 155 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 77, 80 universalism: Lévi-Strauss on cultural specificity and, 89–90; transnational social movements and, 224–25; of values and Indian caste system, 104; women’s rights and, 190–91, 202–8, 272n56 University of Chicago: Committee for the Study of New Nations, 167, 173; School of Sociology, 114, 151; South Asian studies at, 136 ‘‘Unmaking the ‘Great Tradition’ ’’ (Hancock), 139–40 un Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, 193 un Subcommision on Human Rights, 161 untouchables. See Dalits

¡

‘‘Untouchables, or The Children of India’s Ghetto’’ (Ambedkar), 156 Urgent Problems in Anthropology conference, 134–35 U.S. census: racial categories in, 72 U.S. Immigration Commission, 53

index

Van De Veer, Peter, 166 varnas: Indian theory of, 107–8, 251n12 Vedas: Hinduism and, 136, 138; Indian nationalization and, 146–47 Via Campesina, 219 Vichy regime, 99–102, 249n49 Victorian sex roles: anthropological research and, 21–24; evangelical ethnography and, 32–37; expository feminism and, 39–43; feminism and, 50–51; matriarchical/ matrilineal anthropological research and, 45–49 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, 201 View from Afar, The (Lévi-Strauss), 74, 83–84, 90, 103 Village India: Studies in the Little Community (Marriot), 136–37 violence: anthropology of, 171; caste and race and, 120, 129–30, 154–59; state sovereignty and culture and, 200–208; in United States, 208–10, 275n80, 276n84; women’s rights issues and culture of, 189. See also conflict; domestic violence Violence Against Women Act, 194, 268n20 visas, 10–11 Vishwa Hindu Prashad (vhp), 259n65

¡

Warner, Lloyd, 114–17, 119, 121 Washburn, Sherwood, 64–65, 243n50

340

Washington, Booker T., 159, 240n10 Watterson, Helen, 45 Weber, Max, 104–5, 108, 125–26, 250n7, 255n84; postcolonial state formation and, 178–79 Wells, Ida B., 40 Western culture: gender-related violence in, 206–8; India in context of, 6, 109–10; Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of, 81–83, 89–90; new states paradigm and, 169–71 What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (Ambedkar), 157–58 When a Great Tradition Modernizes (Singer), 136 ‘‘Which Is Worse? Slavery or Untouchability?’’ (Ambedkar), 158–59, 262n95 Wild Bill’s Congress of Rough Riders, 41, 237n94 Wilson, Diane, 213–15 Winant, Howard, 65, 69, 71, 241n39 womanist frontier machismo, 31– 32 woman question: anthropological research and, 21–24, 43–49; culture and, 5–6 Woman’s Building exhibits, 38–43, 45–47, 236n86 Woman’s Share of Primitive Culture (Mason), 44 women: anthropological research and, 18–24, 229n5, 230n9, 232n23; colonial intervention and ethnographic research by, 27–32; culture and rights of, 199–208; evangelical ethnography and, 32–37; human rights and, 201–8; Indian masculinity and anthropological research by, 29–31; matriarchical/matrilineal anthropological research and, 22,

43–49; plight in South Asia of, 6, 189–212; Sanskritization and control of, 144–45; as social group and essential persecutions, 196–99; state sovereignty and rights of, 199–208 Women in Afghanistan: Pawns in Men’s Power Struggles (Amnesty International), 205 Women Living Under Muslim Laws, 222 Women’s Action Forum, 267n9, 273n65 Women’s Anthropological Society, 20, 33 Women’s Christian Temperance Union (wctu), 18–19, 40, 234n55 Women’s Conference of 1995, 201 World Bank: women’s rights and, 192, 210 World Conference Against Racism (wcar), 5, 132–35, 147–50, 161–63 world’s fairs: anthropological re-

search and, 23–24; Native American exhibits at, 236n86; popular anthropology and, 37–43 Wounded Knee massacre, 41 Wright, Richard, 175, 222 ‘‘Year among the Eskimo, A’’ (Boas), 24 Yorke Stevenson, Sara, 19–20, 24, 229n5, 230nn12–13, 231n15, 231n18; colonialism research of, 27; ethnographic research by, 24–27; feminist politics and, 47– 48; popular anthropology exhibits and, 38 Zapatista movement, 220–21 Zia al-Haq, 205 Zina Ordinances (Pakistan), 205 Zuni tribe: matriarchical/matrilineal anthropological research and, 45–46; Parson’s research on, 239n126; women anthropologists’ research on, 33–35

index 341

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¡ kamal a visweswaran is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian studies at the University of Texas–Austin. She is the author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography.

¡ Chapter 1 was originally published as ‘‘Wild West Anthropology and the Disciplining of Gender,’’ Gender and the Origins of American Social Science, ed. Helene Silverberg (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 86–123, reprinted with permission. Chapter 2 was first published as ‘‘Race and the Culture of Anthropology,’’ American Anthropologist 100, no.1 (1998), 70–83. A version of Chapter 3 was published as ‘‘The Interventions of Culture: Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Internationalization of the Modern Concept of Race,’’ Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, ed. Robert Bernasconi with Sybol Cook (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 227–48. A shorter version of chapter 4 appeared as ‘‘An Idea of Race, A Philosophy of Hierarchy: Louis Bumont’s Homo Hierarchicus,’’ Race: Blackwell Readings in Continental Philosophy, ed. Robert Bernasconi (London: Blackwell, 2001), 205–17. Chapter 5 was previously published as ‘‘India in South Africa: Counter-genealogies for a Subaltern Sociology?’’ Against Stigma: Studies in Caste, Race and Justice since Durban, ed. Balmurli Natrajan and Paul Greenough (New Dehli: Orient Blackswan, 2009), 323–74, reprinted with permission. Sections of chapter 6 appeared as ‘‘A√ective States,’’ special issue, ‘‘Philosophy and the Crisis of the Humanities,’’ ed. David Lloyd, Topoi 18, 81–86, and are reprinted with permission of Springer Publishing. Chapter 7 was originally published as ‘‘Gendered States: Rethinking Culture as a Site of South Asian Human Rights Work,’’ Human Rights Quarterly 26, no. 2 (2004), 483–511, reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Visweswaran, Kamala. Un/common cultures : racism and the rearticulation of cultural di√erence / Kamala Visweswaran. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-4621-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-4635-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Race. 2. Culture. 3. Anthropology. I. Title. gn320.v57 2010 301—dc22 2009051109