Unbecoming Modern: Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities [2. ed.] 9780367135737, 9780429027239

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Unbecoming Modern

In this volume, well-known scholars from India and Latin America – Enrique Dussel, Madhu Dubey, Walter D. Mignolo, and Sudipta Sen, to name a few – discuss the concepts of modernity and colonialism and describe how the two relate to each other. This second edition to the volume comes with a new introduction which extends and critically supplements the discussion in the earlier introduction to the volume. It explores the vital impact of the colonial pasts of India, Mexico, China, and even the United States, on the processes through which these countries have become modern. The collection is unique, as it brings together a range of disciplines and perspectives. The topics discussed include the Zapatista movement in Southern Mexico, the image of the South in recent African-American literature, the theories of Andre Gunder Frank about the early modernisation of Asian countries, and the contradictions of the colonial state in India. Saurabh Dube is Professor of History, Centre for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de México, Mexico City. Ishita Banerjee-Dube is Professor of History, Centre for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de México, Mexico City.

Unbecoming Modern Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities Second edition Edited by

Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee-Dube

SOCIAL SCIENCE PRESS

Second edition published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Saurabh Dube and Ishita BanerjeeDube; individual chapters, the contributors and Social Science Press The right of the Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee-Dube to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Social Science Press 2006 Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan or Bhutan) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-13573-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-02723-9 (ebk) Typeset in Giovanni Std by Apex CoVantage, LLC

SOCIAL SCIENCE PRESS

For Ashis-da and Uma-di registering the many paths of plurality

Contents

Coloniality, modernity, decoloniality: a new introduction to the second edition Preface

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1. Introduction: critical questions of colonial modernities Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee-Dube

1

2. Reading a silence: the “Indian” in the era of Zapatismo María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo

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3 Between anthropology and history: Manuel Gamio and Mexican anthropological modernity, 1916–1935 Guillermo Zermeño

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4. Mapping oppositions: enchanted spaces and modern places Saurabh Dube

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5. Postmodern geographies of the U.S. South Madhu Dubey

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6. Orientalism, anti-Orientalism, relativism Rubén Chuaqui

116

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7. Henry S. Maine: history and antiquity in law Andrés Lira

133

8. Uncertain dominance: the colonial state and Its contradictions Sudipta Sen

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9. World-system and “trans”-modernity Enrique Dussel

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10. Eurocentrism, modern knowledges, and the “natural” order of global capital Edgardo Lander

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11. The social sciences, epistemic violence, and the problem of the “invention of the other” Santiago Castro-Gómez

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12. The enduring enchantment (or the epistemic privilege of modernity and where to go from here) Walter D. Mignolo

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Contributors

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Index

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Coloniality, modernity, decoloniality A new introduction to the second edition Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee-Dube

PROLOGUE Twelve years after its initial publication, Unbecoming Modern is being reissued in an international edition with Routledge. This is a matter of some gratification and intellectual enthusiasm, especially as an earlier avatar of the work (Dube, Banerjee-Dube, and Mignolo 2004) in the Spanish language continues to garner much critical interest in different parts of the world. The attraction derives from the place of this wider endeavour as possibly the only one of its kind that sets up key conversations between Latin American and South Asian worlds, particularly as turning on the interplay between the colonial and the modern. The appeal is equally related to the fact that various chapters in the volume articulate key concerns of “coloniality” (of power) and “decoloniality” (of knowledge), which have acquired wide address and vital significance in scholarly and political arenas. Indeed, Unbecoming Modern and the questions it raises have themselves formed part of the larger articulation of such interests and issues. In this new introduction, we propose to undertake three tasks. Each of these moves imaginatively extends and critically supplements the discussion in the earlier introduction to the volume. These considerations crucially concerned the pressing requirements of: (1) historically grounding colonialisms; (2) adequately specifying the terms of modernity; and (3) prudently addressing the imperatives

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of power and difference in critical endeavour. Unsurprisingly, on offer ahead are deeper historical specifications of colonial cultures, succinct understandings of the contradictions of modernity as well as the contentions of its subjects, and prudent readings of decolonial claims. These themes are reflected in the title of this introductory essay.1 After this prologue, they are presented as an act in three scenes, followed by an epilogue.2 SCENE ONE: ON COLONIALISMS Over the past three decades, important writings across the disciplines have thought through overwrought designs of colonial structures and imperial systems. Such rethinking has been led by seminal scholarship in historical anthropology (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991, 1992, 1997; Stoler, 1995, 2002, 2008). At stake are the contradictory location and contending agendas of distinct colonising peoples and diverse colonised groups in the creation of colonial cultures of rule. This has involved discussions of the representations and practices and the boundaries and the contradictions of imperial agents, settler communities, and evangelising missionaries in colonial locations. Such studies have revealed the persistent fault lines and the critical divisions between different agents of colonialism, diverse agendas of empire (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991; Dube, 2004a; Stoler, 1989; Wolfe, 1999; see also Guha, 2004). On the one hand, the racial mythologies and the “home-spun” lifestyles of colonisers sought to blur such fault lines, often invoking an exclusive time-space of European (and Euro-American) folk. On the other, divisions between different colonialist groups also stood highlighted within everyday representations and quotidian practices in distinct contexts, betraying contending spatial, contentious temporal, matrices among them. It follows that the view of colonialism as a monolithic temporal venture, a homogeneous spatial project stands severely tested today. At issue here are not only the variations in the colonial endeavours and imperial exertions of different nations and separate epochs, featuring diverse forms of production and exchange – all important distinctions recognised in earlier scholarship. Rather, recent ethnographies and histories have revealed that the conflicting interests and the contending visions of empire of differentially located interests and actors several times drove a single colonial project. At the same time, distinct colonial projects could draw upon each other’s models and metaphors, while imbuing them with varied and contrary

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salience (Comaroff, 1989; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992; Cooper and Stoler, 1997; Dube, 2004a, 2010; Sivaramakrishnan, 1999; Stoler, 1989, 2002; Thomas, 1994). All this has underwritten close analyses of the relationship between the metropolis and the colony. It has become increasingly clear that there were conjunctions and connections – and contentions and contradictions – between efforts to discipline and normalise subject groups at home and attempts to civilise and control subject populations in the colonies (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992; Davin, 1978; see also Keane, 2006). Such explorations have carried forward earlier examinations and contemporary discussions of imperial histories and colonial cultures as deriving from interactions between the coloniser and the colonised. They have crucially considered the mutual shaping of European processes and colonial practices in order to imaginatively analyse how developments in distant margins could influence metropolitan transformations of identity, how the impulses of empire and their reworking in the colonies brought about changes at the heart of Western history (Burton, 1998; Chatterjee, 2001; Cohn, 1996; Collingham, 2001; Gikandi, 1996; Mehta, 1999; Mignolo, 1995; Said, 1994; Stoler, 1995; van der Veer, 2001). All this has been further accompanied by varied analyses of the many modes and diverse forms entailed by colonial processes. There have been remarkable studies of the colonisation of space, time, language, and the body (Arnold, 1993; Collingham, 2001; Fabian, 1986; Goswami, 2004; Hunt, 1999; Mitchell, 1988; Rabasa, 2000, 2011; Vaughan, 1991); critical discussions of imperial travel, exhibitory orders, and museum collections (Bennett, 1995, 2004; Coombes, 1994; Fabian, 2000; Grewal, 1996; Henare, 2009; MacKenzie, 2010; Pratt, 1992); deft analyses of colonial representations (Guha, 1983; Rafael, 1988; Scott, 1994; Wolfe, 1999); astute probing of the politics under empire of art, literature, culture, and consumption (Gikandi, 1996; Guha-Thakurta, 2004; Mathur, 2007; Pinney, 1997, 2004; Tarlo, 1996); and striking work on sexuality, race, and desire as shaping the metropolis and the margins (Chatterjee, 1999; Manderson and Jolly, 1997; Mani, 1998; Sinha, 1995, 2006; Stoler, 2002). The historical identities spawned by colonial cultures have made a striking appearance on the stage of the humanities and the social sciences, inviting reconsiderations of territories and imaginaries – of space and time – of empires and their subjects. In several ways, this emphasis has provided a valuable corrective to reifications of an impersonal, exclusive world capitalist system and

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privileges accorded to abstract, singular colonial structures, which characterised several influential writings in the past.3 At the same time, the concerns of culture here do not necessarily discount considerations of political economy and aspects of state power. Rather, several significant studies in this new genre suggest the importance of tracking the interplay between forms of representation, processes of political economy, and imperatives of state formation in expressions of identity (Birla, 2008; Cooper, 1996; Coronil, 1997). Such nuanced understandings of culture and power have emerged bound to powerful reminders that gender and sexuality crucially inflected the temporal-spatial formations of empire. On the one hand, the critical force of gender and sexuality shaped and structured the different dynamics and diverse dimensions of colonialism’s cultures and the identities these spawned. On the other, the intersections between race, class, and gender – as imaginaries and institutions – acquired new meanings through their elaboration within/ of colonial temporal imperatives and imperial spatial stipulations (McClintock, 1995). The critical spirit of such work has been extended by two other developments. First, key discussions have rethought the past and the present of the disciplines, especially keeping in view their linkages with determinations of colony, nation, race, and gender. Of special significance here have been forceful considerations of the acute inequalities of knowledge and power between the West and the rest, dominant visions and minority voices, and metropolitan histories and provincial pasts (e.g., Chakrabarty, 2000; Mohanty, 2003). Second is the corpus of writings stressing the critical place of the colonial experience in the making of the modern world. In addition to perspectives on the coloniality/decoloniality of power/ knowledge that will be discussed later, important here have been distinct studies focusing on the linkages of Enlightenment and empire, race and reason, the past and the present (Agnani, 2013; Baucom, 2005; Berman, 1998; Fischer, 2004; Gregory, 2004; Muthu, 2003; Scott, 2004; Simpson, 2014). Questions of modernity assume salience here. SCENE TWO: ON MODERNITY Drawing on prior proposals, including our own, modernity requires urgent understanding as constituted by heterogeneous histories and plural processes (Dube, 2004a, 2009, 2010, 2017). These imaginings

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and procedures extend back to the last five centuries and interlock in critical ways.4 There are at least two faces to the phenomena, each insinuated in the other. On the one hand, constitutive of modernity are processes of reason and science, industry and technology, commerce and consumption, nation-state and citizen-subject, public spheres and private spaces, and secularised religion(s) and disenchanted knowledge(s). Here, it warrants emphasis that vigilance is required regarding the endless unfolding of these developments as inexorable, heroic histories. Indeed, instead of teleological tales of the resolutely forward march of modernity, such stories require being unraveled as rather more checkered narratives. On the other hand, at the core of modernity there are also processes of empires and colonies, race and genocide, resurgent faiths and reified traditions, disciplinary regimes and subaltern subjects, and seductions of the state and enchantments of the modern. This is to register that procedures of modernity have been contradictory, contingent, and contested – protocols that are incessantly articulated yet also critically out of joint with themselves (Dube, 2004a, 2017). It is precisely these procedures that emerge expressed by subjects of modernity. Here, the reference is to historical actors who have been active participants in processes of modernity – social actors who have been both subject to these processes but also subjects shaping these processes. Over the past few centuries, the subjects of modernity have included: peasants, artisans, and workers in South Asia that have diversely articulated processes of colony and postcolony; indigenous communities in the Americas under colonial and national rule; peoples of African descent, not only on that continent but in different Diasporas across the world; and, indeed, subaltern, marginal, and elite women and men in non-Western and Western theatres. Unsurprisingly, these subjects have registered within their measures and meanings the formative contradictions, contentions, and contingencies of modernity. At stake in this discussion of subjects of modernity are key questions of heterogeneous yet coeval temporalities and overlapping but contending productions of space. First, it is well known that conceptions of modernity generally proceed by envisioning the phenomenon in the image of the European and Euro-American (frequently, implicitly, male) modern subject (Dube, 2004a). On the contrary, we are indicating the inadequacy of conflating the modern subject with the subject of modernity. Is it perhaps the case, then, that

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such an articulation of subjects of modernity productively widens the range of address of modernity and its participants? Moreover, a chronological claim that everyone living in the modern age counts as a modern subject is not on offer, for subjects of modernity have revealed, again and again, that there are different ways of being modern, now accessing and now exceeding the stipulations of the Western modern subject. Yet, all too often, in fashioning themselves, subjects of modernity have also barely bothered about the Western modern subject exactly while articulating the enduring terms of modernity.5 Finally, it bears emphasis that there are other modern subjects besides Western ones, embodying formidable heterogeneity yet coeval-ness. Does this not suggest the need in discussions of modernity to rethink exclusive images of the modern subject – in the past and present, across non-Western arenas and Western ones, and through space and time (Dube, 2004a, 2017)?6 In inherently distinct ways, several of these issues course through Latin American scholarship on coloniality of power and decoloniality of knowledge, questions to which we now turn. SCENE THREE: ON DECOLONIALITY As is discussed later in this volume, compared to South Asia, in quotidian common-sense and academic apprehensions in Latin America, colony and empire appear as attributes of distant pasts, long-forgotten histories. Against these dominant dispositions, an important body of critical thought on the region has focused on the subterranean schemes, the pervasive presumptions, and the overwrought apparitions of the modern and the colonial (Dube, Banerjee-Dube, and Lander, 2002; Dube, Banerjee-Dube, and Mignolo, 2004). This corpus takes as its starting point the first modernity of Southern Europe – as held together by the Renaissance, the conquest of the “New World”, and the empires of Spain and Portugal – in the margins and the metropolis. It critically considers thereby the place and presence of colonial stipulations of power within modern provisions of knowledge. The writings no less work their way through the second modernity of the global North, constituted by empires of Enlightenment and after, holding up a mirror to modernity as a deeply ideological project and a primary apparatus of domination – in the past, present, and posterity. Here, the recursive possibility of secular-messianic redemption often appears as an exclusive future horizon.

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This corpus is an immense one, known earlier under the rubric of “coloniality of power” and more recently grouped under “decoloniality of knowledge”. It bears linkages with prior traditions in Latin America of “dependencia” theory and “liberation theology”, as well as with somewhat later scholarship on the “world systems theory”, especially as enunciated by Immanuel Wallerstein. In the current configurations of this corpus an important presence has been the work of Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, and Ramon Grosfoguel, alongside a host of other scholars, some of whom shall be cited below.7 Now, the first intimations of this volume are intriguingly tied to the very crystallisation of these somewhat distinct understandings as concerted, coordinated perspectives. Thus, it was in 1998, at the fifth meetings of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group on “Cross Genealogies and Subaltern Knowledges” in Duke University that: the journal Nepantla: Views from the South was officially launched; the imperatives of critically conjoining Latin American apprehensions of coloniality and modernity arguably took root (even as the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group itself began to fall apart); and the editors of the present volume, Ishita and Saurabh, first thought of a workshop in Mexico to discuss questions of colonialism and modernity as part of a wider conversation between South Asian and Latin American scholarship. Two years later, in 2000, the first issue of Nepantla was published by Duke University Press and we held a workshop on “Colonialism, Modernity, and Colonial Modernities” in El Colegio de México. Unsurprisingly, the proceedings of this workshop were published as a special issue of Nepantla (Dube, Banerjee-Dube, Lander, and 2002), also soon reissued in Spanish (Dube, BanerjeeDube, and Mignolo, 2004), quite as understandings of the coloniality of power/modernity emerged as a consolidated perspective on Latin America. And so it has followed that, as our prior endeavours led to Unbecoming Modern, several of the essays in the volume – specifically, those by Dussel, Mignolo, Castro-Gómez, and Lander – are located on the cusp of, even as they index, the movement from questions of the coloniality of power to issues of the decoloniality of knowledge. The point is that these emphases on coloniality and decoloniality have formidably foregrounded the Eurocentric propensities and epistemic violence of modernity that is already/always colonial. They have further underscored the importance of other forms of gnosis and knowing that reveal horizons distinct from those of the dominant, Western modern (Dussel, 1993, 1995; Maldonado-Torres,

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2008; Mignolo, 1995). At the same time, the unravelling by these writings of the “coloniality of power” and “decoloniality of knowledge” is founded on presumptions of the innately dystopic nature of the former and the ethically utopian possibilities of the latter.8 We shall principally base our discussion around the arguments of the Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel, in order to unravel the emphases of the coloniality/decoloniality perspectives, including as turning on the epistemic construal of space and time. In each case, our concern is with reading the analytical assertions of this scholarship alongside the implicit assumptions – frequently tacit, often under-enunciated – that shore up these writings. Crucial for Dussel are the writings of Emmanuel Levinas concerning ethics, alterity, and exteriority (Dussel, 1998; Levinas, 1987a, 1987b). For Levinas, as is generally known, the “other” is a constitutive, haunting presence, which relationally reveals the limits and horizons of “self”, such that “ethics [was] the first philosophy”, rather than epistemology or, say, the Heideggerian ontology of Being (Levinas, 1987a; Maldonado-Torres, 2008). Now, Dussel transforms these innately emergent, necessarily non-empirical attributes of the ethical encounter between the Same and what forever remains exterior to it into split and substantialised spaces with concrete geopolitical, factual referents; namely, Europe and Latin America (Dussel, 1998; Maldonado-Torres, 2008). In this scenario, it is not only that Latin America is ever temporally contemporaneous with Europe/Euro-America, revealing the dark side of the latter. It is also that Latin America, a unitary space that readily subsumes as well the self of the philosopher, is already/always ethically ahead of Europe, which is a space of unethical hegemony, articulating the colonial dimensions of modern power. All of this has large ramifications. To start off, Dussel’s singular split between Europe and Latin America – alongside the exclusive emphasis on the “coloniality of power” – was all too tendentious. Unsurprisingly, it came to be supplanted soon by the geo-political, spatial-moral contrast between Europe/Euro-American hegemony and the “other [or subaltern] side of colonial difference”, variously named as “trans-modernity”, “border knowledge”, and “de-colonial perspectives” (Dussel, 1995; Grosfoguel, 2011; Mignolo, 2000, 2011; Quijano, 1991, 1998, 2000). At the same time, these ethically segregated entities continue to enact, within a shared historical stage, a principled drama, an endless clash between good and bad, virtue and evil, morality and immorality.

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Moreover, while Dussel’s original claims concerned a supersession of phenomenology by an ethically oriented politics (recall, Levinas’ proclamation of “ethics as first philosophy”), under the decolonial turn, the primacy of ethics and politics mean that they appear elided, implicitly and a priori, with epistemology and ontology, reading/writing and being/becoming – as ways of knowing and acting, an antitote to authority before the dystopia of power. Put differently, the “subaltern side of colonial difference” has principled precedence (and always triumphs) over the “coloniality of power”. Here, decolonial scholars not only take the side of, but are already the same as, critical bearers of subjugated knowledge(s), all inhabitants of geo-political margins. Finally, the logics of such segregated spaces in these understandings orchestrate time and temporality in particular ways. Thus, the temporal appears here as something of a chronological placeholder, defining the innate coeval-ness of modernity/coloniality and its others. Saliently, such simultaneity signals discrete verities. While forms of colonialism, modernity, and nation evince juridical-political shifts and transformations, coloniality of power has innately unchanging attributes. At the same time, the other/subaltern side of coloniality, including decolonial perspectives, might have heterogeneous manifestations, but their core logic inheres in unceasing interrogations of modernity/coloniality and heroic articulations of pluriversality/ diversality. This is because decolonising perspectives have innate, a priori precedence – in terms of ethics and politics, knowing and being – over modern power.9 EPILOGUE At stake are critical implications, posed here as open-ended questions. How might we understand power without turning it into a dystopic totality, a distant enemy? What is at stake in attending to the anxieties (and intimacies) of authority, to the inflections (and tripping up) of dominance by difference? Must the subaltern and alterity, the pluriversal and diversality, remain un-recuperated particulars, a priori antidotes to authority? What are the costs for critical understanding of eliding the shaping of difference by power, of ignoring the impress of authority on alterity? What might registers of heterogeneity and not-oneness of projects of power and determinations of difference – specifically, as turning on, colonialism, modernity, and their subjects, which were discussed above – have to

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say about these queries? In discussions of colonialism, modernity, and colonial modernities, what is the place and play of productions of space and time within epistemic practice, itself understood as a species of everyday activity? Such are some of the questions to bear in mind in approaching the essays ahead. NOTES 1. Registering the conversation between scholarship on South Asia and Latin America, the title to this introduction uses the term “coloniality”. This follows the usage of “coloniality” – based on colonialidad in the Spanish language – that intimates a condition that extends into the present, rather than suggesting a distant, now-forgotten epoch of history, as can be implied by colonialism. At the same time, while recognising the genealogies of colonialisms as force fields that straddle the past and the present, we unravel also the historically grounded heterogeneous processes of power and meaning that constitute colonial cultures, querying thereby somewhat singular, often exclusive, connotations of coloniality. 2. The discussion ahead draws on and rearranges the arguments and emphases of a range of our earlier writings, especially Dube (2017). 3. A wider discussion of these issues is contained in Dube (2004b). 4. Here, both models of modernisation and movements of modernism appear as crucial components yet small parts in the broader articulation of modernity (Dube, 2017). 5. Indeed, all of this is to emphasise, too, the importance of affect and subjectivity – long privileged within modernism(s) – in explorations of modernity. Yet, it is to do so while refusing to approach affect(s) as the repressed other of the modern as well as eschewing an understanding of subject(s) as “sovereign” ones (Dube, 2017). 6. These various modern subjects in the West and the non-West are also subjects of modernity. But, once more, not all subjects of modernity are modern subjects, of course. At any rate, we hope it is clear that the dispositions to modernity that I am outlining do not claim to comprehensively define this category, entity, and process. Rather, our bid is to open up spaces and suggest resources for discussing procedures of modernity and their many persuasions (Dube, 2017). 7. While it would an error to underplay the internal distinctions of these writings by readily folding these writings one into the other, it is also the case that work within these perspectives often attempts to express their principal commonalities, mutual unity, rather than dwell on their differences. See Grosfogel (2011; indeed, most articles on coloniality/decoloniality in the journal Transmodernity bear out my claims above).

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8. These are lingering implicit sensibilities, sometimes strikingly explicitly expressed, that course through most of the works cited below on colonial/decolonial perspectives. 9. Alongside, time can be cast in this corpus as a category of reckoning and not of experience, attributed to culture and not to nature. Now, time is explicitly articulated as a central concept of the imaginary of the colonial/modern world system, entirely interwoven with the coloniality of power and the production of colonial difference. At the same time, this querying of time as colonisation, as reckoning and representation, while opening critical possibilities, nonetheless remains circumscribed through the positing of the ethical/epistemic/ontological incommensurables that were explored above. It seeks to find entirely other expressions of space/time rather than staying with, thinking through, their formative heterogeneity as practice and production in social worlds at large (Mignolo, 2009).

REFERENCES Agnani, Sunil M. 2013. Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism. New York: Fordham University Press. Arnold, David. 1993. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Baucom, Ian. 2005. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennett, Tony. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge. ——. 2004. Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism. London: Routledge. Berman, Russel A. 1998. Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Birla, Ritu. 2008. Stages of Capital Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Burton, Antoinette. 1998. At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, Indrani. 1999. Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chatterjee, Piya. 2001. Time for Tea: Women, Labour, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cohn, Bernard. 1996. Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Collingham, E. M. 2001. Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947. Cambridge: Polity Press. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, Vol. 1. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Comaroff, John L. 1989. “Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience: Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa”, American Ethnologist, 16: 661–85. Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder, CO: Westview. ——. 1997. Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, Vol. 2. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Coombes, Annie E. 1994. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. Cooper, Frederick. 1996. Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooper, Frederick, and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.). 1997. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coronil, Fernando. 1997. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Davin, Anna. 1978. “Imperialism and Motherhood”, History Workshop, 5: 9–65. Dube, Saurabh. 2004a. Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles. Durham: Duke University Press. ——. 2004b. “Terms that Bind: Colony, Nation, Modernity”, in Saurabh Dube (ed.), Postcolonial Passages: Contemporary History-Writing on India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ——. 2010. After Conversion: Cultural Histories of Modern India. New Delhi: Yoda Press. ——. 2017. Subjects of Modernity: Time-Space, Disciplines, Margins. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ——. ed. 2009. Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization. London: Routledge. Dube, Saurabh, Ishita Banerjee-Dube, and Edgardo Lander (eds.). 2002. Critical Conjunctions: Foundations of Colony and Formations of Modernity. Special issue of Nepantla: Views from South, 3: 193–431. Dube, Saurabh, Ishita Banerjee-Dube, and Walter Mignolo (eds.). 2004. Modernidades coloniales: Otros pasados, historias presentes. México: El Colegio de México. Dussel, Enrique. 1993. “Europe, Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures)”, Boundary 2, 20: 65–76.

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——. 1995. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity. New York: Continuum. ——. 1998. Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y de la exclusión. Madrid: Trotta. Fabian, Johannes. 1986. Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 2000. Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fischer, Sibylle. 2004. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gikandi, Simon. 1996. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Goswami, Manu. 2004. Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gregory, Derek (ed.). 2004. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell. Grewal, Inderpal. 1996. Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grosfoguel, Ramon. 2011. “Decolonizing Post-colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality”, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1: 1–36. Guha, Ranajit. 1983. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ——. 2004. “Not at Home in Empire”, in Saurabh Dube (ed.), Postcolonial Passages: Contemporary History-Writing on India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. 2004. Monuments, Objects, Histories: Art in Colonial and Post-Colonial India. New York: Columbia University Press. Henare, Amiria. 2009. Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunt, Nancy Rose. 1999. A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Keane, Webb. 2006. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1987a. Time and the Other. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ——. 1987b. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. MacKenzie, John M. 2010. Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2008. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manderson, Lenore, and Margaret Jolly (eds.). 1997. Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mani, Lata. 1998. Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mathur, Saloni. 2007. India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mehta, Uday Singh. 1999. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mignolo, Walter. 1995. The Darker Side of Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ——. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Essays on the Coloniality of Power, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——. 2009. “Coloniality at Large: Time and the Colonial Difference”, in Saurabh Dube (ed.), Enchantments of Modernity. London: Routledge. ——. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mitchell, Timothy. 1988. Colonizing Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Muthu, Sankar. 2003. Enlightenment Against Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pinney, Christopher. 1997. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ——. 2004. Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. London: Reaktion Books. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Quijano, Aníbal. 1991. “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad”, Perú Indígena, 29: 11–20. ——. 1998. “La colonialidad del poder y la experiencia cultural latinoamericana”, in Roberto Briceño-León and Heinz R. Sonntag (eds.), Pueblo, época y desarrollo: La sociología de América Latina. Caracas: Nueva Sociedad. ——. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Ethnocentrism, and Latin America”, Nepantla, 1: 533–80. Rabasa, José. 2000. Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ——. 2011. Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You: Elsewheres and Ethnosuicide in the Colonial Mesoamerican World. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Rafael, Vicente. 1988. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Said, Edward W. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage. Scott, David. 1994. Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——. 2004. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Border of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sinha, Mrinalini. 1995. Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ——. 2006. Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire. Durham: Duke University Press. Sivaramakrishnan, K. 1999. Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Stoler, Ann Laura. 1989. “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 13: 134–61. ——. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ——. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——. 2008. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tarlo, Emma. 1996. Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Thomas, Nicholas. 1994. Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. van der Veer, Peter. 2001. Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vaughan, Megan. 1991. Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wolfe, Patrick. 1999. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London: Cassell.

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his volume mainly derives from a workshop on “Intersecting Histories and Other Modernities” held at El Colegio de México in Mexico City on 26 and 27 June 2000. The workshop was attended by historians and anthropologists, philosophers and sociologists, and literary and cultural scholars working on different terrain of the global South—Latin America and South Asia, the American South and West Asia. Conducted in Spanish and English, the event was memorable. The debates were charged but polite. The discussions were intense but amiable. The deliberations spilled over—across coffee, lunch, and dinner. Indeed, the workshop can only be understood as an intensely collaborative venture. The spirit of collaboration was only continued in Critical Conjunctions: Foundations of Colony and Formations of Modernity, a special issue of Nepantla: Views from South, 3, 2, 2002, co-edited by Saurabh Dube, Ishita Banerjee-Dube, and Edgardo Lander; and Modernidades coloniales: Otros pasados, historias presentes (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2004), co-edited by Saurabh Dube, Ishita Banerjee-Dube, and Walter Mignolo. An expanded and recast version of these earlier avatars, Unbecoming Modern now presents to a readership in South Asia distinct, plural horizons of scholarship concerning colonialism, modernity, and colonial modernities. We would like to thank Esha Béteille of Social Science Press for suggesting and sustaining the venture.

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Unbecoming Modern is dedicated to Ashis and Uma Nandy for their warm affection and intellectual generosity over the years. Spirited disagreement and respectful tolerance are equal ingredients of plurality. Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee-Dube Mexico City, July 2005

chapter one

Introduction Critical Questions of Colonial Modernities Saurabh Dube Ishita Banerjee-Dube

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ver the past two decades, a variety of critical perspectives have addressed and questioned the place of the West as history, modernity, and destiny. In the context of Unbecoming Modern three examples should suffice. But two clarifications are in order. The particular critical dispositions to follow often overlap. If they are presented separately here, this is primarily on heuristic grounds. Moreover, these orientations have been expressed in a variety of ways, constituting an enormous corpus. Our bibliographical citations provide only a few representative examples. INITIAL ISSUES First, recent years have seen vigorous challenges to univocal conceptions of universal history under the terms of modernity. Imaginatively exploring distinct pasts that were forged within wider, intermeshed matrices of power, such emphases have queried pervasive imperatives of historical progress and the very nature of the academic archive, both closely bound to aggrandizing representations of a reified Europe/ West (Amin, 1996; Chakrabarty, 2000; Chatterjee and Ghosh, 2002; Dube, 2004a, 2004b; Fabian, 2000; Florida, 1995; Hartman, 1997; Hunt, 1997; Klein, 1997; Mignolo, 1995; Price, 1990; Rappaport, 1994; Skaria, 1999; Thurner, 1997; Thurner and Guerrero, 2003; Vergès, 1999; White, L., 2000. See also, Axel, 2001; Banerjee-Dube, 1999; Mehta, 1999; Trouillot, 1995; and White, L., 2003).

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Second, close to our times, dominant designs of a singular modernity have been increasingly interrogated by contending intimations of heterogeneous moderns. Such explorations have critically considered the divergent articulations and the discrete representations of the modern and modernity, which have shaped and sutured empire, nation, and globalization. As a result, modernity/modernities have been themselves revealed as contradictory and contingent processes of culture and control, as checkered, contested histories of meaning and mastery—in their formation, sedimentation, and elaboration. It follows, too, that questions of modernity increasingly often escape the limits of sociological formalism and exceed the binds of a priori abstraction, emerging instead as matters of particular pasts and attributes of concrete histories—defined by projects of power, and molded by provisions of progress (Asad, 2003; Chakrabarty, 2002; Cooper and Stoler, 1997; Coronil, 1997; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1997; Dube, 2002, 2004a; Ferguson, 1999; Gilroy, 1993; Hansen, 1999; Mitchell, 2002; Prakash, 1999; Price, 1998; Silverblatt, 2004; Taussig, 1987. See also, Appadurai, 1996; Chatterjee, 2004; Escobar, 1993; Gupta, 1998; Harootunian, 2000; Moore, 2003; Piot, 1999; and Rofel, 1999). Third and finally, for some time now critical scholarship has contested the enduring binaries—for example, between tradition and modernity, ritual and rationality, myth and history, and East and West—that have shaped influential understandings of pasts and key conceptions of cultures. On the one hand, such theoretical accounts have derived support from critiques of a subject-centered reason and a meaning-legislating rationality, critiques that have thought through the dualisms of Western thought and post-Enlightenment traditions. On the other hand, critical discussions of cultures and pasts have equally challenged the analytical binaries of modern disciplines, interrogating essentialized representations of otherness and questioning abiding representations of progress that are variously tied to the totalizing templates of universal history and the ideological images of Western modernity (Asad, 1993; Bauman, 1992; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992; Dube, 1998; Errington, 1998; Gray, 1995; Lander, 2000; Mbembe, 2001; Mignolo, 2000; Said, 1978; Sears, 1996; Taussig, 1997. See also, Lowe and Lloyd, 1997; Rorty, 1989; Scott, 1999; and White, S., 2000). At the same time, the reflections of a singular modernity, the representations of universal history, and the reifications of overriding oppositions are not mere specters from the past, now exorcised by critical epistemologies and subversive knowledges. Rather, such lasting blueprints continue to beguile and seduce, palpably present

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in the here-and-now. Both the events of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath, including Operation “Enduring Freedom”—as phrase and program—are striking examples. Articulating dominant traditions of social theory and animating inherited terms of everyday discourse, these resilient mappings and their determinate re-drawings lead a charmed life in academe and beyond in both Western and nonWestern contexts. This book does not propose a general solution to such problems. Rather, it is better understood as hinging on a more modest proposal. The effort of Unbecoming Modern is to address a few of the issues outlined above by bringing into focus some of the critical questions at stake in thinking through colonial modernities—a vogue phrase that indicates a horizon and a perspective, containing problems as well as possibilities. We will have more to say about colonial modernities and the specific orientations of this volume very shortly. For the moment it is important simply to register that this Janus-faced neologism bids us to ask: Are attempts to pluralize colony, modernity, and history mere exercises in scholarly refinement of these categories-entities? Or can such efforts equally, critically engage dominant understandings of the contemporary world, also containing alternatives to newer critical orthodoxies that render such categories as “dystopic” totalities? Conversely, what are the key differences of meaning and power that can be underscored through the elaboration of tradition and community, the local and the subaltern as oppositional categories? Must such contending concepts inhabit the locus of “unrecuperated” particulars, as a priori antidotes to authority, in the mirrors of critical understandings? To pose matters in this manner is to bring into play at least two possibilities, entailing imperatives of theory and the politics of knowledge. The first concerns the importance of drawing on and going beyond—of extending and exceeding—earlier examinations and contemporary critiques of dominant knowledge(s), including the central place of a spectral yet palpable West in authoritative mappings of the world. The second involves the salience of recognizing the impossibility of easy escapes from modernity and history through the means of talking cures and the ruses of writing remedies. This especially means to cautiously keep in view the seduction of lurking nativisms, the lure of third-world nationalisms, and the enticement of endeavors that wish to flee from the present by turning their backs on the here-and-now. Taken together, these two sets of considerations bring into relief the significance of discussing dominant knowledges

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without turning these into totalized terrain and of exploring the possibilities of alternative understandings that eschew the snares of unrecuperated particulars. KEY QUESTIONS The concerns sketched above are better understood as constituting the wider theoretical context to the essays comprising Unbecoming Modern, as horizons that these writings engage in inherently different ways. Indeed, it is through critical considerations of colonial modernities that this book attempts to articulate questions of difference, power, and knowledge. At the same time, it would be a mistake to claim either a transparent connotation or a precise status for colonial modernities as a category. To be sure, this current coinage highlights the acute enmeshments between foundations of colony and formations of modernity. This is particularly the case when colonial modernities are regarded as a broad rubric that at once indicates historical processes and critical perspectives—a rubric that entails particular locations of enunciation, interrogating the disembodied view-from-nowhere that becomes the palpable view-for-everywhere. Yet, precisely for this reason, colonial modernities indicate both a contentious theoretical terrain and a contending analytical arena. And it is exactly such contention that can turn this concept-metaphor into an enabling resource for dialogue and debate. Therefore, it is useful to raise two distinct sets of questions, overlapping points for discussion, in order to think through colonial modernities. First, what is at stake in conjoining questions of colonialism with issues of modernity to produce and endorse the hybrid figure, colonial modernities? What marks of difference and which lineaments of power are underscored through such moves? Indeed, in what ways are we using the term modernity and its plural modernities here? In speaking of modernity is the reference to an overarching ideology that accompanied, say, Western elaborations of democracy and nation and European expansion of capital and empire over the last three to five hundred years? Or, are the terms modernity/modernities also to be understood as particular historical processes predicated upon distinct but wide-ranging intersections of the metropole and the margins, upon discrete yet critical encounters between the colonizer and the colonized? Clearly, these different orientations can actually come together, each questioning dominant representations of the modern, both

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challenging singular images of modernity, including in the writings in Unbecoming Modern. The point is simple. Rather than imagining and instituting a facile synthesis between contending understandings of modernity and modernities—and, indeed, between competing conceptions of colonialism and history—consciously recognizing such distinctions and differences as productive tensions can be a source of strength in thinking through colonial modernities. Such acknowledgements entail the admission that we already labour in the light of anterior understandings, always work in the shadow of prior categories—in order to revisit the binds and exclusions between globalization and colonialism, modernity and “coloniality”, and world-system and colonial modernities, the one set engaging and extending the other copula. Second, what are the critical imperatives of reading and writing— of dialogue and debate—as we consider stipulations of difference and provisions of power? The question is salient. In a wide variety of contemporary scholarly endeavors both power and difference can appear as pre-fabricated entities, already given categories, a priori terms of discussion. This suggests that much more than bouts of hasty critique and fits of academic absentmindedness are at stake here. In such a scenario, if it is significant to specify the ways in which we put forward notions of difference and premises of power, two other considerations also stand out. On the one hand, it is important to be vigilant of the manner in which difference is inflected by power. On the other hand, it is salient to recognize the way in which power is shot through with difference.1 None of this is to indulge in sophistry. Take the example of that plural of modernity—modernities. In speaking of modernities are we merely saying that Indian modernity is different from German modernity which is then different from, say, Mexican or Venezuelan modernity? If this is the primary import of our statements, what modalities of power are occluded here, not only in relation to authoritative grids of empire and globalization but also within non-Western formations of state and nation? Equally, by invoking a bloated and singular modernity centered on the West, in order to interrogate the homogenizing impulses of projects of power, do we perhaps succumb to reified representations of an imaginary but tangible Europe that overlook the labor of difference within the work of domination? In other words, what understandings of prior traditions/pasts and which conceptions of present history/progress do we bring to bear upon our renderings of power and difference? What anterior idea

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animates our appropriation of history, universal or provincial? Which immediate image articulates our apprehension of modernity, singular or plural? Can we bring into play forms of reading in which power is not construed as totalized terrain? Can we work through practices of writing where difference does not constitute a ready antidote to power—whether as insurgent identity, or as ecstatic hybridity, or as pre-configured plurality? CRITICAL CONJUNCTIONS The nature of the questions we have just raised indicates our intention in this Introduction to generate debate rather than to garner consensus. This is in keeping with the tenor of Unbecoming Modern in which contending positions access and exceed each other, the exchange and the surplus intimating newer directions. At work here are particular terms of interaction between distinct bodies of scholarship, especially writings on and readings out of Latin America, and South Asia, as they converge on the critical conjunctions at the heart of colonial modernities. In authoritative apprehensions and commonplace conceptions flowing from Latin America, intimations of modernity have been long present in the region, generally reflected in the image of a reified Europe. Here Latin America has itself been envisioned as part of the Western world, albeit with specific lacks and within particular limits. All of this is a result of dominant mappings and authoritative “metageographies”, which have split the world into the Occident and the Orient, the East and West. A handful of exceptions apart, questions of colonialism have been often understood in Latin America as occupying the locus of a dim and distant past.2  Not surprisingly, issues of empire, themselves narrowly conceived, continue to be widely considered as the distinct domain of specialist scholars of a long-forgotten period in Latin American history. In such dispositions the salient traces of colonial cultures in modern Latin America can chiefly consist of the monumental architecture and the grand art of a distinctive, bygone era. Against the grain of these dominant orientations toward the presence of modernity and the past of colonialism, an important body of critical thought on Latin America today focuses on the subterranean schemes and the overwrought apparitions of the modern and the colonial—in the past and the present. In other words, this corpus critically considers the spectral place and tangible presence of

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colonial stipulations of knowledge/power within modern provisions of power/knowledge. Consequently, such moves, acutely represented in this volume, have also held a mirror up to modernity as a deeply ideological project, a ruse of history, a primary apparatus of domination, here- now-and there tomorrow (Dussel, 1995; Lander, 2000; Mignolo, 1995, 2000; and Castro-Gómez, 1998). Concerning South Asia, colonial questions have occupied a critical place in writings on the region’s history, economy, and society for several decades now. The immediacy of empire and the force of nationalism— the latter as anti-colonial movement and nation-building project— have both played an important role here. Over time, this has resulted in the accumulation of distinct perspectives on colonial processes in South Asia. These developments have extended from revisionist histories of colonial transitions, to historical ethnographies of imperial formations, to postcolonial perspectives associated with the Subaltern Studies project and critical literary analyses.3  It is also the case, however, that in general the import of modernity has been critically considered in scholarship on India only in recent years.4 Here there have been different understandings of the distinctions and dynamic and the determinations and direction of modernity in South Asia. Such analyses have variously presented modernity as an enlightened trajectory of social transformation, an overweening project laboring against creative difference, an authoritative apparatus ever engendering critical alterity, and a historical process productive both of exotic exceptions and historical sameness.5 At the same time, in several of these readings, current reflection on modernity has followed upon the prior presence of the colony. Not surprisingly, newer critical writings on South Asia, also represented in this volume, have sought to extend anterior understandings of colony and present propositions of modernity through historical filters and ethnographic grids, at times the one in conjunction with the other (see, e.g., Chakrabarty, 2000, 2002; Chatterjee, 1993; Dirks, 1987; and Hansen, 1999). Recent years have seen the proliferation, in and out of print, of “alternative” and “early” modernities, “colonial” and “multiple” modernities, attempts to write into the concept of modernity anterior histories, multiple trajectories, and alternative patterns (e.g., Barlow, 1997; Burton, 1999; Daedalus, 1998, 2000; and Gaonkar, 2001). Unbecoming Modern joins such exercises, but it does so with its particular twist, its specific stipulations—based on the salience of plural perspectives on colonialism, modernity, and colonial modernities.

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For this volume is shaped by fruitful encounters between distinct bearings toward colonialism and modernity that we have just outlined. Arguably, this plurality and contention constitute one of the central strengths of the corpus ahead, since they indicate diversity in cultures of scholarship and theoretical orientations. For example, it is not enough to suggest that the philosophically inclined writings in the volume are primarily interested in the epistemological labor of colony and modernity, while the empirically grounded chapters are more concerned with the historical work of these categories. Actually, most of the essays tack between the two predilections, inexorably mixing them up. At the same time, rather than simply articulate a uniform multi-disciplinary impulse (or merely express a homogeneous trans-disciplinary desire), in Unbecoming Modern different disciplinary dispositions are enlivened by their interplay with distinct theoretical orientations. Here intellectual diversity and theoretical distinction are enhanced and extended, since, as they circulate together, one orientation interrupts and exceeds the other disposition. These questions are better understood in the light of the chapters themselves. A little later we shall present the specific arguments of each contribution. Here it is useful to consider the dialogue and contention among these chapters with regard to two critical questions that we broached earlier, the entwined issues of the linkages between colonialism and modernity and the binds between power and difference. Let us turn, then, to the contributions by Enrique Dussel, Edgardo Lander, and Santiago Castro-Gómez. Discussing the articulation between colonialism and modernity, Dussel’s effort is to undo influential propositions of a subtle, “second Eurocentrism” that project Europe as the center of the world-system for the last five centuries. Lander interrogates the Eurocentric premises at the heart of authoritative agreements to facilitate global capital. Castro-Gómez explores the enmeshments of the disciplinary power of the modern nation-state with the hegemonic relationships of the modern/colonial world-system, also suggesting that although the structural terms of global power remain in place, the means and strategies of their legitimization have undergone crucial transformations. At the same time, in spite of their different emphases, the three essays all point toward the formations of modernity as grounded in the foundations of colony, where both colonialism and modernity are apprehended as dominant European projects of power/knowledge, which form the exclusive core of a singular capitalist world-system.

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Thus, when Castro-Gómez describes modernity as a series of practices oriented toward the rational control of human life—entailing the institutionalization of the social sciences, the capitalist organization of the economy, the colonial expansion of Europe, and the juridicalterritorial configuration of nation-states—he is summing up a powerful perspective that is arguably also shared by Enrique Dussel and Edgardo Lander (and, of course, many, many others). What of the orientations of these three scholars toward the relationship between power and difference? Dussel and Lander underscore the authoritative thrust and the homogenizing impulse of recent Euro-American modernity and of Eurocentric knowledge, respectively. Ahead of the exclusive trajectory of such power that has underwritten global capital, both emphasize the ethics of critical difference. Here Dussel locates alterity in the exteriority of “transmodernity” and Lander emphasizes the need to consolidate/recuperate alternative knowledges. For his part, Castro-Gómez identifies modernity as a machine that engenders alterities, even as it suppresses hybridity, multiplicity, ambiguity, and contingency in the name of reason and through the designation of humanity. He also argues that under conditions of postmodernity the continued hegemony of global capital within the world-system is secured not through the repression of difference, but rather through the production and proliferation of alterities. However, despite such distinctions— including, the productive “ambiguity” that attends Castro-Gómez’s formulations of the fabrication of alterities under modernity and postmodernity—these writings share key characteristics. They each present power as emanating from a singular locus and holding exclusive sway, and they all stage pure difference as an answer and antidote to power. The critical terms of such dispositions toward colonialism and modernity, power and difference are at once elaborated and extended by being sieved through overlapping but distinct analytical filters in several of the writings that precede these three essays. As indicated earlier, at stake here are differences of disciplinary understandings working in tandem with distinctions of theoretical dispositions. Thus, in both explicit and implicit ways many of these contributions configure colonial modernities as premised upon the mutual determinations of power and difference, upon the ceaseless dynamic of exclusion and inclusion—pointing toward contingency and contradiction at the heart of such processes. Here there is also no direct recourse to categories such as the “world-system” and “global

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capital.” For example, Josefina Saldaña-Portillo unravels the productive conjunctions at the core of a colonial modernity through two intertwined procedures. First, she explores the continuities between the Spanish colonial state and the modern Mexican nation in the production of “Indian” difference. Second, she discusses the ways in which in the Lacandon forest today the Zapatistas interrupt the dominant clamor of the contemporary nation by accessing and exceeding revolutionary nationalism and a colonial-modern. These simultaneous protocols serve to reveal how the contemporary Zapatistas articulate the glimmers of an alternative modernity. Guillermo Zermeño and Sudipta Sen highlight that the powerful impulse within the modern nation and the colonial state toward excluding subaltern subjects and colonized peoples has been equally accompanied by the forceful drive to include them at the margins of the authoritative grid of “civilization.” Zermeño underscores the “convergent-divergences” between the colonial apprehension of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and the national anthropology of Manuel Gamio—and indeed between Spanish colonialism and the modern state—in Mexico. The essay shows how these distinct modalities of knowledge nonetheless fabricated the figure of the Indian as the “primitive” outsider who had to be forged as the “improved” insider within the space of empire and the time of the nation. Sen seizes upon the double imperatives of British colonialism that lamented and decried the lack of a true civil society in India while simultaneously imagining and instituting a residual order of civil society in the colony. He reveals thereby that the twin moves together constituted modalities of colonial rule that straddled the line between dominance and hegemony. The politics of exclusion and inclusion are ever entwined with the interplay between power and difference. The terms of such a dynamic find distinct expressions in the book. For instance, Saurabh Dube explores dominant projections and commonplace apprehensions of state and nation, colony and modernity, culture and society, and the past and the present that rest on enduring mappings of “enchanted spaces” and “modern places”. Here are figures and forms that are grounded in the stipulations of universal history, which animate the provisos of historical progress and define the orientations of modern disciplines. They split the world while holding it together, acutely indicating also the salience of tracing the enmeshed determinations and the entangled denials between power and difference. For it is the precise split between power and difference that institutes authoritative

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representations of modernity at the core of influential critiques of modernity, questions that are discussed by Madhu Dubey in her critical analysis of the “Southern turn” in contemporary culture in the U.S., tendencies that increasingly cast the American South as an enchanted terrain of difference. Taken together, in Unbecoming Modern different theoretical stances engage and argue with distinct critical alignments, yet none of them give up their own cardinal persuasions.6  For the aim of this book is not to legislate on colonial modernities, resolving an inquiry in the manner of a problem by adjudicating upon it. On the one hand, it is important to restate that as critical perspective and historical process colonial modernities emerge in front as a question and a horizon better approached through distinct orientations. This is to say that the category intimates inquiries and indicates vistas that are best kept open. On the other hand, it is useful to repeat that precisely on account of such differences between theoretical dispositions, colonial modernities appear ahead rather less as a given object predicated on transcendental knowledge and omniscient history, and rather more as a historical rubric betokened by specific places and particular pasts. It is time to describe such advances. CRISSCROSSING CONCERNS Our considerations open with a critical chapter by Josefina SaldañaPortillo, who frontally addresses the productive conjunctions at the heart of colonial modernities by considering the prior place of the colony and exploring the present productions of the modern in the making and unmaking of Mexico. On the hand, the essay traces the marks of difference engendered by Spanish colonialism in its fabrication of the figure of the “Indian.” On the other hand, it outlines the work of such difference on lineaments of power and their subversions in the modern Mexican nation. Starting with the premise that the varieties of modernity in Latin America all “bear the imprint of Spanish colonialism”, Saldaña-Portillo resolutely refuses to locate the figure of the Indian in a never, never land of enchanted tradition, in front of determinations of domination and ahead of provisions of power. Rather, the chapter outlines the manner whereby what appear today as the key characteristics of Mesoamerican indigenous cultures— formations of distinctive Indian townships, involving “traditional” costumes, unique rituals, and local councils—are all products of “Spanish colonial governmentality and economic exploitation”. The

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figure of the “Indian” was produced within these processes, which at once “universalized” and “parochialized” Indian identity. At the same time, far from being passive victims, indigenous communities worked within the interstices of these processes of power, producing value and meaning in surplus of governmental techniques, thus creating cultural formations and resistant identities that exceeded the colonial category of the lowly Indian. Not surprisingly, the stipulations of this “colonial regime of difference” have shaped the modern project of nation building in Mexico. Here Saldaña-Portillo reconstructs a long past, from the beginning of the nineteenth century through to the end of the twentieth century, in order to demonstrate the contradictory articulation of Indian difference and national identity through cultural and economic processes. This history is marked by a peculiar progression. From the historical indigenismo of the Creole nationalist elite that emphasized Indian difference as the sign of a new nation against imperial Spain; to the desire of the mid-nineteenth century political oligarchs to erase such difference in the name of liberal citizenship while avowing it as the negation of the modern nation; to the developmental indigenismo of the revolutionary elite of the twentieth century that celebrated Indian difference but equally sought to simply assimilate indigenous communities to the project of building a modern Mexico, a mestizo nation. This sets the stage for the next step. Saldaña-Portillo explores how the Zapatistas and their insurrection in southern Mexico have interrupted the telos of empire and nation. Once more, she does not cast the politics and resistance of the Zapatistas outside the determinations of nation and modernity. Rather, she argues that the indigenous communities of the Lacandon that form the EZLN have emerged from within the terms of a revolutionary nationalism and the idioms of a colonial modernity, where Zapatismo has appropriated and extended, accessed and exceeded such stipulations. Saldaña-Portillo makes the case through a sensitive ethnography of a political event that she attended: this was a dramatic representation by the Zapatistas in the summer of 1996, adducing the participation of visiting outsiders, primarily Western supporters of the EZLN. The enactment of this event was a theatre of politics and a play on power. It hinged on the staging by the Zapatistas of a silence. At work was a silence that echoed with multiple civic identifications and several ethical associations. At stake was a silence that interrupted the noisy command of dominant Mexican nationalism. Through a close engagement with work of the political theorist Ernesto Laclau,

Introduction

13

the paper reveals that such staging of a salient silence is actually indicative of the presence of the Zapatistas as an “empty signifier” of civil society, of Mexican community. Indeed, by oscillating between avowing and claiming Indian difference and disavowing and vacating Indian particularity, the Zapatistas “also present us with an alternative modernity.” The figure of the “Indian” and the form of the “primitive” forged by colonial knowledge and nationalist thought in Mexico also constitute the subject of Guillermo Zermeño’s essay. Here Zermeño offers a slice of the history of anthropology in Mesoamerica by focusing on the configurations of the anthropological discipline and of a national modernity in the work of Manuel Gamio, widely considered as the “father of modern anthropology” in Mexico. Taking a cue from the philosopher Paul Ricouer’s critical yet enabling reading of Hegel, Zermeño’s effort is to acknowledge the weighty legacy of Gamio as a means to transcend it. The essay reads Gamio’s writings alongside the work of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, the colonial chronicler of the sixteenth century who was interestingly described by Gamio himself as the “father of Mexican anthropology”. Manuel Gamio’s intellectual formation reveals salient conjunctions between his training under Franz Boas at Columbia University, his proximity to different Mexican Presidents for over two decades beginning in 1915, and his place as a statist intellectual whose main interlocutors were government officials. Yet the scholar’s professional program also emerges as rooted in a particular anthropological past and as constitutive of a distinct ethnographic present. On the one hand, the work of Manuel Gamio was shaped by later nineteenth-century positivist assumptions concerning scientific knowledge in the service of national progress. In the face of pervasive projections that a modern Mexico could not develop without the support of science, the challenge before the new science was to discover essential racial, cultural, and economic patterns that would turn sociological observation into a means of accurate prediction and effective governance. Based on acute distinctions between “tradition” and “modernity” and “backwardness” and “progress”, this matrix of knowledge fostered the economy of power of the modern nation-state. It also underlay Gamio’s own division of the Mexican nation into two poles: its white population representing “modern civilization”, the “dynamic” harbingers of “progress”; and its indigenous and mestizo groups, “the great majority underdeveloped and passive”. On the other hand, Gamio sought to develop an applied an-

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thropology adequate for the twentieth century. While he saw the anthropological enterprise in Mexico as stretching back for almost four hundred years, he simultaneously argued that the earlier writings—of colonial chroniclers, for example—had to be sifted as sources for information according to the strict criterion of science. It was in this manner that magic would be separated from truth under the dispensation of a new anthropology. At its core, this new anthropology had to be an applied endeavor, a scientific discipline whose conclusions were geared toward an “immediate application in benefit of social improvement”. Taken together, in Gamio’s vision the task of applied anthropology was to work with the state to transform the “cultural backwardness” of the indigenous subject in the image of the modernity and the civilization of the white citizen. The very procedures of this new knowledge entailed a “substantialization of method” that produced an “essential image of the Indian”, which could be easily manipulated in time and space. It is against this background that Zermeño traces the “divergent convergences” in the anthropology of Manuel Gamio and the work of Bernardino de Sahagún. Both construed the Indian as an object of knowledge that had to be healed—of “idolatry” in the case of Sahagún, and of “backwardness” in the vision of Gamio. Both these scholars constructed knowledges designed to erase meanings and practices that connoted a “primitive” presence in their conceptual schemes. Here are to be found intellectual endeavors that critically conjoined the imperative to understand with the stipulation to subdue the indigenous peoples as part of political projects with which the chronicler and the anthropologist were in entire accord—the colonizingevangelizing project in the case of Sahagún, and the project of building a modern nation in the case of Gamio. In each case, the construction and consolidation of the “otherness” of the indigenous also constituted the means and mechanism to assail and diminish this difference. The precise divergences between the projects of Sahagún and Gamio go hand-in-hand with the profound convergences among them, so that the “century of Mexican liberal nationalism”—in its bourgeois guise and its revolutionary incarnation—emerges as no less than the “second conquest” of the Indian world. Yet it will be hasty to confine such questions only to the past. As Zermeño poignantly asks, what is the guarantee that present anthropological apprehensions of indigenous peoples do not continue to be inscribed within related teleologies of progress? Abiding terms of history and ethnography and of cultural

Introduction

15

politics and political cultures, now in the shape of the wider sway of enchanted spaces and modern places in authoritative mappings of the past and the present, form the locus of the next chapter. Here Saurabh Dube explores the persistence of the “enchanted” and the “modern” in dominant “metageographies”—shaped by the vision of a universal history and articulated by the provisions of historical progress. He argues that the sets of spatial imaginings and structured dispositions under question are closely connected not only to colonial encounters and imperial entanglements but equally to determinations of difference and stipulations of sameness. They play a critical role in the imagination and institution of modern disciplines and the contemporary world. Such lineaments are first presented through an ethnographic description of a scholarly conference, a learned symposium. Focusing particularly on two of the presentations there, Dube highlights the several seductions of enchanted spaces and modern places in academic endeavors and everyday arenas. Next, he turns to the unsaid and the under-thought of academic deliberation, which have rather wider implications. Here the figures of an already enchanted tradition and the forms of an always disenchanted modern lie before the privilege of vision and the distinction of voice in reading the past, writing the present, and imagining the future. Finally, Dube critically analyzes the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Sydney to point toward the spectral presence of the enchanted and the modern that haunts the contemporary politics of culture, a presence and a politics contingent upon the nation, complicit with the state, and predicated on progress. At the end, tying up its different strands, the essay argues that at stake in thinking through the density and gravity of such mappings is the significance of reconsidering the mutual determinations of power and difference. Such cartographies further come alive in the following chapter as Madhu Dubey puts the spotlight on another South, discussing the discourses of difference concerning southern regional specificity that have burgeoned in the United States since the 1970s. The paper begins with the proposition that a “spatialized cultural politics of difference” is a hallmark of the “postmodern” era. Such spatial politics emphasizes particularity, diversity, and the situated nature of all knowledge in order to criticize universalizing, global, and disembedded claims of modern knowledge and politics. Recent reflections of the regional difference of the U.S. south are exemplary of these wider bearings. To unravel the terms of these discourses

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and politics, Dubey explores writings across a range of different disciplines, particularly anthropology, history, sociology, cultural studies, and African-American literary criticism. It focuses on a wide body of work by important authors, including Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Houston Baker, Jr., Addison Gayle, the anthropologist Carol Stack, and the historian Eugene Genovese. Thereby, Dubey unravels the widespread construction of the South as a rural, pre-modern, enchanted arena precisely at the moment when it is becoming increasingly industrialized and ever more urban. Indeed, she interprets the southern turn in U.S. culture as a distinct response to processes of economic and cultural change—the southern Industrial boom and the Civil Rights movement—that have dramatically transformed the South. Here the discursive construction of the South as a magical zone of arrested “development” is crucial to its operation as an Archimedean lever for the critique of global capitalism and an impersonal modernity. Dubey underscores both the problems and the possibilities of such moves by historicizing and evaluating the conservative political implications of current quests to preserve southern cultural difference. What are the epistemological entanglements of contemporary critiques of Eurocentric knowledge and modern power? In a provocative essay, Rubén Chuaqui cautions against the dangers of the relativism that can attend these arenas. With Edward Said’s powerful indictment of Orientalist discourse as his point of entry, Chuaqui’s own worry concerns the ways in which relativism—of a cultural kind as well as of an epistemological nature more broadly—militates against the very possibility of objective understanding, especially of the radically “other”. Chuaqui acknowledges that the precise “distortions” unraveled by Edward Said and other scholars have for long characterized Western representations—not only of the objects of “Orientalism” but indeed of all non-European others. He also admits that such representations are ever enmeshed with modalities of power. At the same time, Chuaqui argues that to ground such distortions and representations in the commonly exhibited traits of “gnoseological” relativism results in an entirely untenable situation, one that actually undermines the positions and subjectivities being defended. Contrary to the precepts of (what he deems) the relativism of knowledge, Chuaqui believes that not all that we can grasp about peoples and societies depends on our knowledge of their institutions and cultures. This is to say that most of what we apprehend about human

Introduction

17

beings and social orders yet not all that we understand of them rests on our comprehension of their cultures. The distinction is critical. It means that despite the manifold problems of knowing and the inevitable residues of unknowability, the cultures and the beliefs of the “other” are in fact knowable. In tune with these emphases, Chuaqui explores terms of incommensurability and commensurability through different instances— cases projected in the essay as not depending on culture, even if they might have cultural dimensions. These dual or triadic conditions or subject states (of the individual or the collective) require that the observer leave, even if momentarily, the position to which s/he belongs, in order to ascertain from the one side what lies on the other side. The essay offers examples of the differences of experience between male and female, blindness and vision, visual distortion and normal vision, youth and ageing, madness and sanity, sleep and wakefulness, hallucination and drunkenness, mystical states and everyday life, and, finally, between error, certainty, and doubt. Chauqui argues that none of these conditions embody incommensurable conditions, which would make the experiences of one side utterly incommunicable to the other. Thus, the essay concludes that in the field of epistemological difference(s) between individuals—and between groups of people—some phenomena are relative to other phenomena: but this does not imply that the facts upon which these phenomena depend are inscribed within an endless and inescapable chain of relativism. In other words, far from an absolute relativism, Chuaqui endorses a relative relativism, which (devoid of paradox) will be a relativism anchored in the fact that is not relative. Next, a historian of Mexico and a historian of India, Andrés Lira and Sudipta Sen, both undertake comparative reflections on India and Mexico. Drawing on his disciplinary capital as a lawyer and a historian, Lira considers the work of the English legal scholar Henry S. Maine, especially by exploring the significance in this corpus of the administrator-intellectual’s experience in colonial India. In discussing Maine’s explicitly comparative juridical understandings of community, property, and the law, Lira brings into focus schemes of “evolution” and projections of “progress” that characterized Victorian Britain. At the same time, Lira also underscores that Maine’s construal of history as the “uninterrupted present of humankind” at once straddled and scrabbled the blueprints of evolutionary progress. This served to put a question mark on the notion of the “primitive”, while interrupting

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the singular scale and the distinct stages of “civilization” at the heart of evolutionist principles. Through a close attention to the crafting of Maine’s arguments, Lira points to the convergence and contention in this body of legal-historical scholarship between “evolutionist” apprehension and “historicist” interpretation, analytical orientations that are often collapsed together in contemporary critiques of history and modernity. Lira argues that Maine conceived of the law as an objective order, but without confining it within the narrow limits of nineteenthcentury analytical jurisprudence. Indeed, Maine also went beyond the individualist and utilitarian premises and projections of “European rationalism” embodied in the writings, for example, of John Austin and Jeremy Bentham. Here a critical role was played by Maine’s understanding of the nature of the village community—entailing the patriarchal family and landed property—which drew in no small measure on his experiences and studies of communitarian dynamics and colonial rule in British India. Indeed, when Maine stated that “the Indian and the ancient European systems of enjoyment and tillage by men grouped in village-communities are in all essential particulars identical”, he was suggesting possible pathways not just in the study of comparative jurisprudence but also in the comparative study of history. After all, at stake here was the salience of village community “as a past that was present” in India and Europe. Specifically, Maine proposed that when an effective external power—especially, a “good” government seeking to preserve prior “custom”—intervened in the life of the community, this led to a process of “feudalization” and the community lost its earlier power to incorporate external elements. Lira draws on these propositions to highlight the significance of initiating a conversation between Maine’s writings on the travails and times of the village community, on the one hand, and studies of processes affecting indigenous communities in Latin America under empire and nation, on the other. Endorsing Maine’s own proposal for comparative history and emphasizing the legal-scholar’s practice of comparative jurisprudence, Lira points to parallels in the decline of the village community in India and the dissolution of the indigenous communities in Mexico (and other sovereign states in Latin America) in the nineteenth century. At the same time, the essay suggests that reading the work of Maine together with the writings of much earlier colonial chroniclers such as Alonso de Zorita might hold immense possibilities for a critical history of colonialism, modernity, and colonial modernities—from South Asia, through Europe, to the Americas.

Introduction

19

The comparative sensibility of Lira’s essay is taken forward by Sudipta Sen’s contribution. Sen discusses questions of colonial modernities by exploring the mutual interplay between processes of power in the colonial terrain and modalities of governance of the European state. Focusing on British colonialism in South Asia and providing comparative notes on the Spanish Empire in the New World, the essay explores the relationship between civil society and the modern state. It proposes that a useful manner to consider the difference between domination and hegemony—an issue brought to the fore by Ranajit Guha’s (1997b) important arguments concerning “dominance without hegemony”—is to take into account the exogenous origins of the colonial state form and its relative alienation from indigenous society. Here the form and ambition of a colonial state are analyzed by measuring “state formation at home against state formation in the farthest reaches of the colony”, in order to uncover the homologies and parallels of the state form as stretched across the metropole and the colony. Specifically, Sen argues that in many respects the ideology and practice of colonial state formation straddled the line between acts of domination and ambitions of hegemony. Implicitly engaging and critically extending revisionist histories of colonial rule in South Asia, the paper shows that from its very inception the colonial state in British India created a paradoxical image of Indian society and peoples. On the one hand, this state form decried the lack of a true civil society in India on account of the persistence of tyranny here. On the other hand, the requirement of the colonial state to pass legislation and to govern the Indians—for the very “improvement” of these subjects—equally entailed another, twinned imperative. Here, both the advocates and critics of empire were compelled to bestow on the Indians “a degree of volition and agency”—a residual order of “society”, or “civilization”, or “culture”— so that their consent and compliance could be imagined and elicited within an apparition of a civil society. Such invention and institution of a novel colonial society in South Asia through legal and economic measures actually parallels the creation of a new order of colonial subjects in Spanish America, although of course religious conversion did not play a significant role in the British-Indian empire. Indeed, it is this fabrication of a new social order that is crucial to apprehending colonial domination and its attempts at hegemony in different parts of the modern world. Enrique Dussel returns to the terms of a global history in distinct

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ways, contributing a chapter that bears all the hallmarks of the Argentine philosopher’s intellectual breadth and capacious vision. Here Dussel attempts two simultaneous tasks. On the one hand, he seeks to revise authoritative chronologies regarding the European domination of the modern world, arguing that the “centrality” of Europe in the world-system is in fact no more than 225 years old. On the other hand, he puts the spotlight on the majority of human cultures excluded by modernity, which precisely from their position of “exteriority” to the “totality” intimate new horizons, alternative futures described by Dussel as “trans-modernity.” Articulating several key categories that this Introduction has touched on earlier, in the chapter the ideas of dependencia theorists, the formulations of the world-system, and the influential terms of modernity, globalization, and postmodernity are all sieved through the critical stance of Dussel’s analyses. Here Western modernity appears as closely bound to colonial power, whether in its foundational first guise or in its dominant second incarnation, and the terms of transcendence of modernity are vested in the ethics of “trans-modernity.” Dussel’s thesis is deceptively simple. He begins with the moment of the “first Eurocentrism” that was initially formulated in the late eighteenth century as part of the French and English Enlightenment(s) and German Romanticism and later elaborated by Hegel, Marx, and Weber among others. This Eurocentrism presented an immaculately conceived Europe as staging and rehearsing itself as the centerpiece and the end of universal history—its palpable modern manifestation ever bound to its putative Greek origins, its values and spirit seemingly produced entirely from within. Dussel argues that this authoritative ideal-imaginary Europe came to be challenged by understandings of the world-system as formulated by Immanuel Wallerstein. The notion of the world-system revealed at once that the European dominance of the modern world was only five hundred years old and that this centrality was crucially dependent on the “discovery” of the Americas. At the same time, according to Dussel, while this critique is salient, a necessary non-Eurocentric interpretation requires that we overcome its subtle “second Eurocentricism” by reconsidering the chronology and the terms of the European hegemony over the world-system. To this end, engaging and extending the recent arguments of André Gunder Frank (1998), Dussel examines the place of China in the world-system from the fifteenth through to the eighteenth centuries. He proposes to assume that after the “discovery” of the Americas, from the sixteenth century onwards Europe became the

Introduction

21

center of the world-system is to submit to the “second Eurocentrism.” Rather, well until the latter part of the eighteenth century, China— along with India—remained an enormously important player in the world-system of production and exchange. Indeed, during this “first” modernity there were clear limits to the dominance of Europe, which was primarily an Atlantic phenomenon. If we follow this interpretation, Europe came to supplant China (and India) as the primary protagonist in the world-system only after the industrial revolution and the “second” modernity of the Enlightenment, revealing thereby that the centrality of Europe in the modern world is no more than 225 years old. All of this has vital implications for Dussel. For the very recentness of European hegemony over the colonial/modern world-system opens up a variety of “civilizational” possibilities for transcending modernity and globalization. At the same time, the essay does not elaborate this alternative through postmodern propositions. Indeed, the philosopher suggests that since postmodern knowledges emerge from within modernity, they are emblematic merely of the structural crisis of contemporary globalizing regimes. Quite simply, postmodern critiques of modernity remain confined within abiding Eurocentric premises. Instead, Dussel finds alternative futures within the terms and ethics of “trans-modernity”, incorporating cultures of most of humanity excluded from modernity, a condition of “exteriority” that links the past, present, and posterity through its precise possibilities. For this alternative exteriority “still possesses a human potential capable of making crucial contributions in the construction of a future human culture, beyond the end of modernity and capitalism.” Dussel’s emphases find discrete articulations in the essays by Edgardo Lander and Santiago Castro-Gómez, which discuss the epistemological premises, universal pretensions, and palpable limits of Eurocentric knowledge under regimes of global capital. Lander explores the geopolitical implications of Eurocentric understandings of the contemporary world, insinuating that such knowledge is colonial in nature because of its underlying assumptions and its totalizing thrust, which together make for aggrandizing and authoritarian modalities of meaning and power. To this end, he analyzes how Eurocentric knowledge naturalizes the contemporary capitalist world-system in order to legitimate it, especially by consolidating a new transnational legal system that is best understood as the “constitution” itself of capital’s new global order. The essay begins with a brief consideration of the dualities at the

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heart of Eurocentric knowledge. This sets the stage for an analysis of the often explicit assumptions that shore up and sustain significant recent deliberations on investment and commerce, namely the Multilateral Investment Agreement (MAI) and the proceedings leading to the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Lander’s discussion of these texts reveals the ways in which agreements concerning global arrangements of trade and investment project a particular construction of the liberal order as the most “advanced” and desirable form of social organization, the unquestioned and inevitable goal for all humanity. Here the free market appears as the “natural state” of society. All counter-claims to the universalizing procedure of the market, particularly those based on non-economic criteria, are immediately apprehended as “unnatural distortions.” This underlies the consolidation of a legal/political global order designed to secure and guarantee relentless freedom for investment and trade through severe prohibitions upon all public endeavor and collective action that might limit the full freedom of capital. The ideal of a “free” global society is actually the institution of a social order in which capital has unfettered freedom, denying all possibilities both of sovereignty and of democracy. As the weighty centerpiece of the hegemonic discourses of global capital, Eurocentric knowledge promotes the polarization of a privileged minority and an excluded majority—in the South of course, but also throughout the planet. It also legitimizes a predator model of civilization that threatens to destroy the very conditions that make life on earth possible. It is barely surprising, therefore, that in Lander’s hands the critique of Eurocentrism and the construction and/or recuperation of alternative knowledges appear as much more than an interesting scholarly exercise. Rather, for Lander such critical endeavor constitutes a vital political effort, intrinsically linked to “local” and “global” demands of communities and organizations that challenge the increasing dominance of transnational capital. In a wide-ranging essay, the Colombian scholar Santiago CastroGómez discusses the mutual entanglements between the nationstate, the social sciences, the “coloniality” of power, and the capitalist world-system in the articulation of modernity, further exploring the terms of critical knowledge that are adequate for the present. Indeed, the essay’s point of entry is the contemporary crisis of modernity. Not unlike Enrique Dussel but with somewhat different emphases, CastroGómez argues that the recent proclamations regarding the “end of modernity”—especially from within postmodern philosophy and

Introduction

23

cultural studies—connote in reality the crisis of a historical configuration of power of the capitalist world-system. It follows from this that the task of a critical theory of society today is precisely to unravel projections of the “crisis” and the “end” of modernity as entailing newer configurations of global power—configurations that are based not on the repression but on the production of differences. How does the chapter proceed? Castro-Gómez begins with an interrogation of the “project of modernity”. He points to the centrality of the state in practices of modernity that seek to disenchant and demagicalize—to control and master—the natural and social world in the mirror of “man” and through the reification of “reason.” As a project of power seeking to organize and order human life, the central place of the state is equally accompanied by the critical presence of the social sciences at the core of modernity. Working in tandem, sharing their labor, the nation-state and the social sciences together constitute a disposition toward knowledge/power that produces coordinated profiles of subjectivity entailing the “invention of the other.” Castro-Gómez elaborates these propositions by drawing upon the work of the Venezuelan thinker Beatriz Gonzalez Stephan—itself based upon Foucauldian principles of genealogical analysis—on formations of nation and citizenship. Through these measures, Castro-Gómez highlights the forging of the figure of the citizen—and the fabrication of his other—in nineteenth-century Latin America through disciplinary practices embodied in the national constitution, the manuals of urbanity/urbaneness, and the grammars of language. At the same time, according to Castro-Gómez, although such readings regarding the “microphysics of power” are valuable, the terms of genealogical understandings of knowledge-power require that they be deepened through a geopolitical perspective. He suggests specifically that the question of the “invention of the other” needs to be articulated with considerations of “macro-structures of the long duration. Against the persistent denial of the key linkages between colonialism and modernity by the social sciences, which has made for one of their most acute conceptual limitations, one of the most important contributions of postcolonial theory has been to reveal that the rise to world dominance of the nation-states of Europe and America from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries was not an autonomous process but one that was structurally based upon the consolidation of colonialism. Colonial formations played a critical role in engendering forms of disciplinary power that are characteristic of modern institutions and societies. Indeed, since 1492 the modern

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state has itself functioned as an internal vector of the modern/ colonial world-system. Castro-Gómez proposes that the disciplinary dispositions of modernity as a project are anchored in a double “juridical governmentality”—one exercised by the nation-state from within, and the other articulated by the hegemonic terms of the colonial/modern world system from outside. But this is not all. For it is within the single structural dynamic of these twin processes that the social sciences and social theory have been constituted from the seventeenth century onwards. Here are to be found binary categories and imaginaries of progress—including, crucially, their endorsements of universal history and their enmeshment in statist modernization— that form part of a singular disposition of power, one that produces alterities from within and from outside. Put succinctly, both the “coloniality of power” and the “coloniality of knowledge” derive from the same genetic matrix. How are we to understand the notion of the “end of modernity” with which the chapter begins and closes? According to CastroGómez, the project of modernity arrives at its “end” when the nationstate loses its capacity to organize the social and material life of human subjects. Now, what substitutes the project of modernity is the phenomena of globalization, based upon a qualitative change in the global relations of power. Under globalization, governmentality does not require an Archimedean point, a central mechanism of social control. Rather, globalization entails governmentality without government, a spectral and nebulous dominance—the libidinal power of postmodernity that instead of repressing differences stimulates and produces them, which is entirely in keeping with the newer global requirements of the accumulation of capital. All of this has brought about a “change of paradigm” in the social sciences and the humanities, a transformation entirely in tune with the systemic exigencies of global capital. Here Castro-Gómez critically considers Lyotard’s influential formulations of the “postmodern condition”— and attends to other salient orientations within cultural studies—to argue that the end(s) of meta-narratives of modernity should not in any way be seen as implying the death of the capitalist world-system itself. Thus, Castro-Gómez concludes that the task of a critical theory of society in the present is to make visible the new mechanisms of the production of differences in times of globalization. Addressing issues of the geopolitics of knowledge in distinct ways, Walter Mignolo approaches modernity as enacting a double role in determinations of discourse and formations of power. Part

Introduction

25

of a series of authoritative antinomies, modernity equally names and constitutes the “paradigm” producing and reproducing these oppositions. Astutely acknowledging that enchantments and oppositions created by the “self-defining discourse of modernity” acquire pervasive ontological attributes, Mignolo explores the continuities and changes in what he describes as the “modern/ colonial” world—from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, from the aftermath of the former to the wake of the latter. Specifically, he discusses the manner whereby modern oppositions came to inhabit and (re)make the world in their singular reflection after the “second modernity” of the European Enlightenment, all the while pointing to the prior presence of the discourses and practices of the “first modernity”, grounded in Renaissance transformations and colonial endeavors in the “New World”. Mignolo finds in “border thinking” or “border gnosis” measures of disassembling modes of knowledge and embodiments of power that endlessly bind the modern and the colonial, a task that also requires constant vigilance regarding the complicities and denials of “possible epistemologies” that articulate a “double consciousness”. A FINAL WORD Having brought to a close this description of the routes traveled and the paths traversed by Unbecoming Modern, it remains to add that the volume embodies yet another distinction, which we have been unable to unravel. Alongside the differences in theoretical orientations and disciplinary dispositions, the contributions to this volume are also marked by distinct styles of writing. While this may be the case with most cross-disciplinary endeavor, it is possibly even truer of the effort at hand. Six of the contributions here have been translated from Spanish, which arguably only adds to the divergent locations shaping the writings. This plurality, too, is characteristic of the possibilities and predicaments of the journey(s) ahead.  NOTES

1. An elaboration of these issues is contained in Dube, 2004a. 2. Such exceptions include, for example, dependencia theorists and related scholars who have apprehended the world in terms of an aggrandizing center and an expropriated periphery, instituting imperialism and neoimperialism at the core of modern history. 3. Once more limitations of space permit only indicative references. Here

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the first tendency is represented by Bayly, 1983, 1988; and Washbrook, 1988. The second indicated by Cohn, 1987, 1996; and Dirks, 1987. And the third embodied in Guha, 1982–1989; Guha, 1997a; Chatterjee and Pandey, 1992; Arnold and Hardiman, 1994; Amin and Chakrabarty, 1996; Bhadra, Prakash, and Tharu, 1999; and Bhabha, 1994. 4. To speak of the recentness of critical discussions in the academy of modernity on the subcontinent is not to deny the palpable place of provisos of progress in understandings of India. We find them in everything from historical debates on social advance under colonial rule, to sociological celebrations of modernization theory, to governmental seductions and everyday enchantments of the importance of being modern as a state, a nation, a people. Nor is it to overlook the significance of the critique of modernity as embodied, for example, in the thought and practice of M. K. Gandhi. Rather, our point concerns the salience of recognizing the conjunctions and disjunctions—in academic arenas and beyond them—between intimations of modernity in South Asia and Latin America. Imagined as a passage of history and an attribute of nation building, representations and processes of modernity in South Asia and in Latin America have both been shaped by logics of difference and sameness in relation to Europe. However, such logics have followed somewhat separate directions. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the tangible terms of imperial authority, the immediate pasts of colonial rule, and the urgent designs of new nations have meant that dominant articulations of modernity in South Asia stand haunted by the presence of colonial difference and postcolonial distinction. Here the West has never been absent but only ambivalently ahead. During this period, the lack of formal empire, the dominance of a Creole elite, and the prior patterns of colonial categories have engendered distinctive designs of modernity in Latin America, an authoritative modern premised upon specters of shared history and cultural affinity with Europe. Here Europe has been always present and seemingly ever ahead. 5. These four, distinct apprehensions of modernity are articulated by Gupta, 2000; Nandy, 1983; Prakash, 1999; and Dube, 2004a. It also bears mention that questions of modernity have been raised in critical ways in the discussion and the practice of art and cinema in India. See, for example, Kapur, 2000; and Sheikh, 1997. 6. The very conditions of possibility of dialogue, debate, and distinction among the chapters of Unbecoming Modern cohere in the fact that these contributions address a shared set of concerns under the rubric of colonial modernities. In addition to questions of power and difference presented above, two other examples are pertinent. First, issues of authoritative dualities—and of the connections between modern disciplines and disciplinary power—run throughout the essays of, for

Introduction

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example, Castro-Gómez, Lander, Mignolo, Dube, Chuaqui, Zermeño, and Dubey, where they find distinct expressions. Second, the more specific concerns that are taken up by the different authors reveal, equally, critical conjunctions and productive divergences. A case in point is the fabrication of the figure of the lowly “Indian” in Mexico (Saldaña-Portillo and Zermeño); and the proliferation and reification of difference under the postmodern condition (Castro-Gómez and Dubey). Indeed, in the section that follows our goal is precisely to present such binds and distinctions through the ordering of the essays and the means of describing them, unraveling thereby the crisscrossing concerns that constitute Unbecoming Modern.

REFERENCES Amin, Shahid. 1996. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992. Berkeley: University of California Press. Amin, Shahid and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds. 1996. Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arnold, David and David Hardiman, eds. 1994. Subaltern Studies VIII: Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. . 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Axel, Brian. 2001. The Nation’s Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh “Diaspora.” Durham: Duke University Press. Banerjee-Dube, Ishita. 1999. “Taming Traditions: Legalities and Histories in Eastern India”, in Gautam Bhadra, Gyan Prakash and Susie Tharu eds., Subaltern Studies X: Writtings on South Asian History and Society. Delhi: Oxford University Press: 98–125. Barlow, Tani, ed. 1997. Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia. Durham: Duke University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1992. Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Bayly, Christopher. 1983. Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 1988. Indian Society and the making of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bhadra, Gautam, Gyan Prakash, and Susie Tharu, eds. 1999. Subaltern Studies X: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Burton, Antoinette, ed. 1999. Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities. London: Routledge. Castro-Gómez, Santiago and Eduardo Mendieta, eds. 1998. Teorías sin disciplina. Latinoamericanismo, Poscolonialidad y Globalización en debate. Mexico City: Porrúa / USF. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. . 2002. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press. . 2004. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press. Chatterjee, Partha and Gyanendra Pandey, eds. 1992. Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chatterjee, Partha and Anjan Ghosh, eds. 2002. History and the Present. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Cohn, Bernard. 1987. An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987. .1996. Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Comaroff, John and Jean Comaroff. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder: Westview. . 1997. Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on the South African Frontier, Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cooper, Frederick and Ann Stoler, eds. 1997. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coronil, Fernando. 1997. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Daedalus. 1998. Special issue of the journal on “Early Modernities”, 127, 3, Summer. . 2000. Special issue of the journal on “Multiple Modernities”, 129, 1, Winter. Dirks, Nicholas. 1987. The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dube, Saurabh. 1998. Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity, and Power among a Central Indian Community, 1780–1950. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. . 2004a. Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles. Durham: Duke University Press. Dube, Saurabh, ed. 2002. Enduring Enchantments. A special number of the South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4. . ed. 2004b. Postcolonial Passages: Contemporary History-writing on India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Dussel, Enrique. 1995. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity. New York: Continuum. Errington, Shelly. 1998. The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress. Berkeley: University of California Press. Escobar, Arturo. 1993. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fabian, Johannes. 2000. Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ferguson, James. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt Berkeley: University of California Press. Florida, Nancy. 1995. Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future: History as Prophecy in Colonial Java. Durham: Duke University Press. Frank, Andre Gunder. 1998. Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gaonkar, Dilip Parmeshwar, ed. 2001. Alternative Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Gray, John. 1995. Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age. New York: Routledge. Guha, Ranajit, ed. 1982–1989. Subaltern Studies I-VI: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Delhi: Oxford University Press. . 1997a. A Subaltern Studies Reader 1986–1995. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. . 1997b. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Gupta, Akhil. 1998. Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Durham: Duke University Press. Gupta, Dipankar. 2000. Mistaken Modernity: India between Worlds. New Delhi: Harper Collins. Hansen, Thomas. 1999. The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Harootunian, Harry. 2000. Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton University Press. Hartman, Saidiya H. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Hunt, Nancy Rose. 1999. A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo. Durham: Duke University Press. Kapur, Geeta. 2000. When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. New Delhi: Tulika. Klein, Kerwin Lee. 1999. Frontiers of the Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890–1990. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Lander, Edgardo, ed. 2000. La colonialidad del saber: Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires: UNESCO/ Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO). Lowe, Lisa and David Lloyd, eds. 1997. The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Durham: Duke University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mehta, Uday Singh. 1999. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mignolo, Walter. 1995. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. . 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Moore, Laurence R. 2003. Touchdown Jesus: The Mixing of the Sacred and the Secular in American History. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003. Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Piot, Charles. 1999. Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Prakash, Gyan. 1999. Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Price, Richard. 1990. Alabi’s World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. . 1998. The Convict and the Colonel: A Story of Colonialism and Resistance in the Caribbean. Boston: Beacon Press. Rappapport, Joanne. 1994. Cumbe Reborn: An Andean Ethnography of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rofel, Lisa. 1999. Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Scott, David. 1999. Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sears, Laurie J. 1996. Shadows of Empire: Colonial Discourse and Javanese Tales. Durham: Duke University Press. Sheikh, Gulammohammed, ed. 1997. Contemporary Art in Baroda. New Delhi: Tulika. Silverblatt, Irene. 2004. Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World. Durham: Duke University Press. Skaria, Ajay. 1999. Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers, and Wildness in Western India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1997. The Magic of the State. New York: Routledge. Thurner, Mark. 1997. From Two Republics to One Divided: Contradictions of Postcolonial Nationmaking in Peru. Durham: Duke University Press. Thurner, Mark and Andrés Guerrero, eds. 2003. After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Vergès, Francoise. 1999. Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage. Durham: Duke University Press. Washbrook, David. 1988. “Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History, c. 1720–1860”, Modern Asian Studies, 22: 57–96. White, Luise. 2000. Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 2003. The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. White, Stephen. 2000. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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chapter two

Reading a Silence The “Indian” in the Era of Zapatismo María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo

Hasta que guarden silencio no podemos empezar. —Comandante David, Oventic, Chiapas, 27 July 1996 Politics is possible because the constitutive impossibility of society can only represent itself through the production of empty signifiers. —Ernesto Laclau, Emancipations (1996)

T

he editors of Unbecoming Modern have asked the contributors to consider what is at stake in the conjoining of colonial with modernity: What “marks of difference” and which “lineaments of power” are elucidated through such conjunction? I would like to rephrase the question: What “marks of difference” were engendered by colonialism, and in what ways do such differences continue to inflect the “lineaments of power” within the modern nation-states? For three centuries, Spanish colonial governmentality in the Americas successfully articulated processes of exploitation with procedures of cultural formation to produce racial and ethnic differences. These differences in turn have structured modern national identities in most of Latin America. It is in this sense that I will explore here the productive conjoining of “colonial modernities,” the two terms tipping forward, as it were, with colonial modifying modernity. For, arguably, the Spanish colonies, though well within the world-system, were neither modern nor capitalist.1 But modernity in Latin America, including all of that modernity’s thriving alternative varieties, bears

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the imprint of Spanish colonialism. It is with such an understanding of modernity that I reexamine the figure of the “Indian” as a colonial creation, and interpret Zapatismo’s iteration of an Indian silence as the basis for alternative representations within modern nationalism. COLONIAL MODERNITIES AND “INDIAN” ISSUES In my discussion of colonial modernity, the indigenous populations of Mesoamerica are particularly salient. For those characteristics that today seem truly authentic attributes of Mesoamerican indigenous culture still bear the insignia of colonial exploitation. Take, for example, the formation of Indian townships, thousands of which dot the landscape from the valley of Oaxaca to the highlands of Guatemala. Each town has its own council of elders as its highest normative authority, its own system of assembly and decision making, its particular religious obligations, rituals, and saints, its unique “traditional” costume, its distinctive language, and its central plaza around which social and market life is organized. Indeed, during the first round of negotiations between the Mexican government and the Zapatistas2 on “Indian Rights and Culture” in 1995, the latter sought communal autonomy—rather than regional autonomy—in Chiapas, recognizing the form of the township as the basis for Indian identity and for the organization of indigenous life. Yet the Indian town as the organizing complement of indigenous life is the engineered product of Spanish colonial governmentality and economic exploitation (Díaz Polanco 1997, 24). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish Crown perfected ways of managing its most valuable asset in the New World: indigenous labor. It established institutions for the subjugation of the indigenous population and for the rationaliziation of its exploitation. The most pervasive and successful of these institutions centered on the atomized Indian town, with its set of specific cultural traits. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the Crown’s encomienda system assigned conquistadores individual Indian communities, which provided servants and laborers for their haciendas and mines. Rewarded with this “guardianship” for his exploits on behalf of the Crown, the encomendero also collected tribute for the Crown from Indian labors (ibid., 29–34).3 Two plagues in the second half of the sixteenth century severely diminished the indigenous population, precipitating its further relocation and concentration. Under the supervision of the clerics, the Crown introduced the

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system of congregaciones, or the forced concentration of dispersed Indian populations, and the strategy of reducciones, or the “voluntary” relocation of entire villages once they converted to Christianity (ibid., 52–58). Ostensibly undertaken for medical and evangelical purposes, these congregaciones and reducciones were more effective than the encomiendas in reorganizing indigenous life-worlds for the purpose of insuring a steady supply of labor that would pay tribute to the Crown. All three systems for appropriating Indian labor relied principally on the re-creation of the pre-Hispanic Indian communities into fragmented townships: The shift [between pre-Hispanic communities and colonial townships] consisted of turning the communal nucleus into the single milieu of Indian ethnicity, given the elimination of preexisting higher levels of political, socioeconomic, and cultural organization and the reduction of their territoriality. The jurisdiction of the Indian hierarchy (nobles and other members of the town councils) was limited to a narrower and narrower communal world. Each separate nucleus established its own links to spanish power, without the mediation of any intermediate political structure as the expression of a supracommunal authority. (ibid., 53; my emphasis)

Indeed, Indian ethnicity was reduced to the level of the town by the colonial regime through a myriad of administrative effects, among them the introduction of a “traditional” costume for each township as a method of imperial surveillance, the institution of unique religious rituals for each town organized around particular saints’ days, the tithing by township for the Crown and the Church, and, most important, the creation of local councils. Indian hierarchies— the basis for preexisting supracommunal indigenous networks—had their power and jurisdiction reduced as they were slowly replaced by elected officials on the local councils, and as each council negotiated its interests separately with the Spanish administration, without the mediation of supracommunal authorities or allegiance with other councils (ibid., 55). The communitarianism of village life revolving around the town council of elders, now identified as a hallmark of various Mesoamerican indigenous cultures, is nevertheless the by-product of the colonial regime’s success at dismantling supracommunal levels of organization and identification. It is not my intention, nor is it within my purview, to question the basis of the production and reproduction of genuine indigenous identities that exist within the town structures today.

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Rather, my aim is to highlight the manner in which the very cultural formations that are crucial to the production and reproduction of “particularistic” or “traditional” identities—as in the case of contemporary indigenous subjectivity in Mexico—are nevertheless deeply articulated with the processes of economic exploitation initiated by colonialism. Spanish colonialism universalized Indian identity, as all inhabitants of the Americas were rendered “Indian”—regardless of their heterogeneous cultures and political organizations—in contradistinction to Spaniards. At the same time, colonial policy also parochialized indigenous identities by disarticulating previous cultural, political, and spatial organizations, replacing them with circumscribed structures of local identification and governance that existed parallel to, and in the service of, colonial governance. Taken together, Spanish colonialism engineered a lasting Indian difference through this simultaneous process of universalizing and particularizing Indian identity. Thereby, it reproduced a racialized labor force that spanned two continents, not through military force, but by relying on the disciplining power of thousands of atomized “Indian” towns to produce and contain Indian difference. These towns, in turn, served to proliferate ethnic differences among Indians by further fragmenting identity.4 Briefly stated, Spanish colonialism transformed every aspect of indigenous cultural life and political territoriality through the townships, while at the same time (re)producing the grounds for Indian difference at a safe but accessible distance. From their contrasting perspectives about what constituted preHispanic indigenous community, both Alan Knight (1990, 75), a British historian of racial ideology in modern Mexico, and Héctor Díaz Polanco (1997, 58), a Mexican anthropologist of indigenous culture and Zapatista advisor on autonomy, have concluded that the colonial system, because it so completely restructured indigenous life-worlds, created the “Indian.” Given the historical record, this is undeniably true. Nonetheless, to the degree that indigenous communities produced meaning and value in excess of Spanish techniques of governmentality, they also produced a cultural formation that exceeded colonialism’s subalternized category of the Indian. Let me clarify. I am not suggesting that this excess existed outside of colonialism, as the pure other to colonialism. Rather, it is from colonial techniques of governmentality that new and resistant indigenous identities emerged, that new political and cultural indigenous communities coalesced.5 It is also from this colonial regime of difference that modern national identities were forged in Latin America.

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In Mexico, the century-long project of building a modern nation-state repeatedly articulated this Indian difference with the economic and cultural processes of forming a national identity, often in contradictory ways. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Creole elites claimed as their own nationalist story of origin the history of Aztec resistance to Spain, as the historical resistance to Spain that legitimized New Spain’s struggle for independence from the Crown. This historical indigenismo, as some scholars have called it, also gave Mexican insurgency its distinctive popular character—“an agrarian element and an element of ‘caste’ struggle against Spain” (Díaz Polanco 1997, 16). Indeed, Creole nationalists were able to appropriate this Indian identity as their own precisely because of the colonial regime’s reiterative production of Indian difference as at once universal and particularistic. The maintenance of Indian town councils as a structure of governance that was parallel, though subordinate, to Spanish town governance tended to universalize the difference between Indians as native inhabitants of the Americas and the Spaniards as European. Indian difference thereby provided Creole nationalists—many of whose precise status as mestizos defied this differentiation—with a rich alibi for their actions against the Spaniards as foreigners. But, more exactly, the dialectical relationship between a particular and an universal Indian identity put into play by colonialism allowed the Creole elites to fill the universal signifier of a generic Indian identity with the specific content of Aztec resistance, thereby overlooking the history of tribal collaboration with the Spaniards in the overthrow of the Aztec empire, as well as the evident subordination of living Indians in their ethnic townships to Creole elites in their towns. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the liberal government in independent Mexico had identified Indians, with their communally organized townships and landholdings, as the main obstacle to building a modern nation based on the private ownership of land (Bonfil Batalla 1996, 104). In viewing the Indian as an obstacle, liberal and conservative Mexican elites were in line with other nationalist elites in Latin America, all of whom saw the heterogeneous indigenous population as primarily to blame for the failure of their newly founded independent societies to congeal as national cultures. Indeed, various Mexican scholars (García Canclini 1995; Bonfil Batalla 1996; Medina 1998) have noted that in the nineteenth century, the Indian became the sign of an absence of modernity, or, if you prefer, the sign of the incompletion of the national project.6

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Not surprisingly, the indigenismo of the republican era targeted the Indians, and particularly their townships, as objects of reform. Mexico’s Lerdo Law of 1856, for example, provided that all corporate property held by the townships be disentailed, equating these communal properties with the monopolistic estate of the Catholic Church—the largest landholder in Mexico at the time. Both were considered equally backward colonial institutions. In the following year, the Constitution of 1857 did away with all possibilities of communal holdings by recognizing private holdings as the only legal form of tenure. The explicit intention of both the Lerdo Law and the Constitutionalists was to create a deethnicized small-holding peasantry out of the indigenous rural population for the purposes of national development. Instead, breaking up these corporations only served to dispossess Indian communities and increase the number of Mexican latifundios (Díaz Polanco 1997, 75; Durand Alcántara 1994, 165–66; Barre 1983, 60–61). It was the heterogeneous, parochial, and communal aspects of Indian townships that disquieted the liberal reformers. Through the generalization of private property, these nationalists intended to translate and transform the concrete particularity of Indian difference into the abstract universality of liberal citizenship. Yet Indian difference was not absorbed into the universal equality of the liberal Mexican nation. This resulted not only from the resilience of Indian ethnicity, but also from the centrality of Indian difference to the very formation of the abstract liberal national identity. If at first colonial Indian difference provided Creole nationalists with the mythical difference that distinguished them from Spaniards in the New World, after independence Indian difference as the negation of the nation became the paradoxical organizing principle for national elites. The need to correct, to address “the Indian problem” reiteratively, brought liberals and conservatives together.7 At the same time, the idea of Indian difference allowed Mexican elites to ally with U.S. imperialists in their successful effort to turn an ethnically inflected class war in southern Mexico into the Caste war of 1847 (Joseph 1986, 1998; Reifler Bricker 1981). Once the oligarchic interests of nationalist elites replaced the corporate interests of the Crown and the Church, these oligarchs found that they needed to preserve an Indian labor force for their latifundios. Indian towns as the basis for the reproduction of Indian difference did not disappear during this period of dispossession and warfare. Though they suffered a dramatic change in character, these

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towns were most often preserved and were absorbed by the same latifundios that took over Indian communal lands and required the reproduction of Indians as a source of indentured, racialized labor (Knight 1990, 76). Through this brief reexamination of Mexican history over the nineteenth century, I hope to have demonstrated how, economically and culturally, modern nationalism emerged from—or, more precisely, stands articulated with—colonial difference. But this is not all. Twentieth-century revolutionary nationalism in Mexico also needs to be understood in terms of its affiliation with colonial difference. Revolutionary elites, particularly under the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40), purportedly incorporated Indian difference into their nationalist ideology through the policy of revolutionary indigenismo.8 Not unlike the role historical indigenismo had played in the struggle for independence, revolutionary indigenismo resuscitated the Indian warrior as the symbol of revolutionary nationalism, as the emblem of the Mexican people’s true ancestral rights. This was, in part, in response to the great numbers of Indians who had participated in the revolutionary struggle.9 But revolutionary elites also identified Indian difference as a potential threat to the formation of a revolutionary nation. According to Knight (1990, 83), a historian of revolutionary indigenismo, the problem of Indian difference and the project of nationalism were once again articulated together by these revolutionaries: “The revolutionaries’ discovery of the Indian— of the Indian’s capacity for either troublesome sedition or supportive mobilization—was paralleled by their commitment to state and nation-building.”10 The war between 1910 and 1920 had destroyed the centralized state, and “reduced Mexico to a patchwork of warring factions” (ibid., 84). Although most of the fighting was among revolutionary elites, these elites, like liberal nationalists of the previous century, identified Indian difference as the most powerful threat to their hope of unifying and homogenizing the nation. Elites turned to indigenismo as a necessary strategy in their efforts to create a unified nation out of the chaos that emerged at the end of the civil war. At once ancestor to Mexican nationals’ rights and devoid of nationalist sentiment, the Indian was paradoxically outside and inside the nation—supportive and seditious. The Indians were in desperate need of full incorporation, in spite of the fact that thousands of them had fought in the revolutionary war. The policy of revolutionary indigenismo was devised to celebrate Indian difference, but also

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to inculcate in Indians the sense of patriotism that they necessarily lacked—from the perspective of revolutionary elites—because of their ethnic specificity (ibid., 82). Revolutionary indigenismo was born more out of a desire to suture the indigenous populations into the fabric of a new, modern nation than out of an appreciation for ancestral, or living, Indian culture. In its intent, revolutionary indigenismo resembles assimilative liberal policies of the nineteenth century. Yet revolutionary indigenismo was considerably different in its approach to assimilating indigenous difference. Although not effectively, in official terms, the nineteenth-century republican era of indigenismo sought to deethnicize Indian identity through complete assimilation of the indigenous population, through an eradication of Indian specificity. In contrast, the intellectual architects of revolutionary indigenismo, among them Manuel Gamio and Alfonso Caso, believed that integration of the Indians could be enlightened rather then coercive, that intellectual and economic modernization of the Indians could proceed without eliminating existing Indian culture (ibid., 80). They hoped this could be achieved through widespread educational programs, rather than by dispossessing Indians of their lands, as took place during the liberal era. With this end in view, Gamio designed the rural school program during the Lázaro Cárdenas administration. These rural schools were to infuse Indians with “the new ‘religion’ of the country—post-Revolutionary nationalism,” while incorporating Indian customs and history into revolutionary history (Gamio 1960, 159; quoted in Knight 1990, 82). Gamio believed these schools could preserve the positive elements of indigenous culture, integrating them into the national culture, while eliminating the negative aspects through education. Though revolutionary indigenismo may have been less racist than the nineteenth-century, republican variety, it was no less appropriative and assimilative, and it was certainly more developmentalist. Indian difference continued to mark the failure of the nation to congeal into a unified society. This was by no means unique to Mexico: many twentieth-century nationalists throughout Latin America continued to view the Indian as the sign of a lack of national cohesion. But Mexican revolutionary indigenismo also inscribed particular Indian subjectivity within a teleology of becoming more perfect citizens. Nothing testifies more to this developmentalist logic than the paradoxical relationship between indigenismo and mestizaje.11 Indigenismo glorifies Indian difference (albeit a reformed difference) as a cultural formation. But it is mestizaje that represents perfect

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citizenship in Mexico, a mestizaje that at once incorporates Indian difference as a source of historical and cultural pride, and yet subsumes it into a sum that is greater than its Indian and Spanish parts. Indians may be Mexico’s ideal ancestors, but mestizos are Mexico’s ideal citizens. Once again we see how Indian difference created by colonialism is rearticulated—indeed, cannibalized—within modern revolutionary citizenship. Indian difference is an essential precedent for this mestizo nation, even as Indians, with their difference, are the continuing targets of educational and cultural reform. ZAPATISTA CONTRAPOSITIONS It is this developmentalist teleology that the Zapatistas interrupted with their insurrection, rejecting the biologized and colonial logic of modern Mexican citizenship. But the Zapatistas have done this from within revolutionary nationalism, from within the terms of colonial modernity. Just as historical and thus genuine indigenous identities and communities emerged out of the colonial policy of re-creating Indian townships, the Zapatistas emerged from—and are produced by—the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI)’s developmentalist nationbuilding and citizen-making projects. The indigenous communities of the Lacandona jungle that make up the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) were not somehow left out of the PRI’s development model, as its other, though some critics have argued that this is the reason for the rebellion. On the contrary, they were the targeted beneficiaries of development in Chiapas during the presidencies of Luis Echeverría Alvarez and José López Portillo in the 1970s and early 1980s (Burbach and Rosset 1994, 5–6). Oil-led development projects allowed these consecutive administrations to avoid the redistribution of land in Chiapas by providing two safety valves through which the increasing landless population could be absorbed. First, wage work in the Gulf Coast oilfields, as well as in the hydroelectric projects that oil production financed, siphoned off from the highlands the indigenous population that could no longer be supported on saturated communal farms. Second, oil revenues financed an agricultural policy geared toward making small-scale peasant production viable in the long term, and this, in turn, fostered the continued colonization of the Lacandona jungle (Collier 1994, 91–94, 101). Since the 1950s, the Lacandona jungle had functioned as an agricultural frontier for landless indigenous peasants from all over southeastern Mexico. But in the 1970s, migra-

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tion from the highlands of Chiapas to the jungle increased sharply (Rus 1994, 296; quoted in Harvey 1998, 60). Simultaneously, PRI agricultural policies extended credit to peasant producers in the Lacandona, subsidized the diversification of their production, and facilitated the distribution of their coffee and cattle on national and international markets (Collier 1994, 93; Harvey 1994, 9). In short, PRI agricultural development policy targeted the indigenous peasantry, thereby making small-scale production in the fragile ecosystem of the jungle profitable, but not sustainable. The colonization of the Lacandona jungle marked a significant departure from the “traditional” organization of the Indian town, and this contributed both to the formation of the EZLN and to its democratic structure. The towns that took shape in the Lacandona were no longer made up of a single ethnicity. Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Chol, and Tojolabal groups, and even Mixtec and Zapotec Indians from Oaxaca, established multiethnic townships. As many of these people were fleeing the repressive Indian caciques that had monopolized power within the town councils in the migrants’ home villages, they redefined the horizontal structures of governance within and between the ethnic communities that constituted the new townships (this information comes from my 1995 interview with Chiapas-based journalist Michael McCaughan). Here, the EZLN returned to that colonial creation—the town council—and revalued it, emphasizing its democratic potential, restressing the importance of town meetings and consensus as the basis for town council forms of government.12 Catholic and Protestant indigenous catechists also assisted in fostering democratic forms of communication across ehtnic groups in the jungle (Harvey 1998, 72–76). Since the migrants were both new to the Lacandona and new constituents before the state, such communication and collaboration was essential if these multiethnic communities were to pressure the government successfully for resources. And they were successful in representing themselves before the developmentalist state. For example, in an effort to rationalize production, Echeverría provided incentives—in the form of credits and subsidies—for communal farms to come together and form second-tier cooperatives. By the end of his administration, the most powerful second- and third-tier cooperatives in the state of Chiapas were located in the Lacandona (Harvey 1998, 127–46). In 1982, a sudden drop in oil prices caused a sharp decline in funding for agriculture, as President Miguel de la Madrid put

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into place structural adjustment policies (SAPs). Some years later, Carlos Salinas de Gortari made the SAPs international law when he negotiated, as part of NAFTA, for the permanent elimination of agricultural subsidies and price supports, as well as the end of agrarian reform. Thus, Salinas’s neoliberalism withdrew a social contract on development that had been extended by the developmentalist PRI-state and accepted by indigenous peasant producers throughout the nation, including those in the Lacandona who would go on to form the EZLN (Harvey n.d., 9–10). Though credits and subsidies disappeared from the Lacandona, the re-created multiethnic townships did not. Once again, my point here is to emphasize how a modernizing project of economic integration of the peasantry articulated with a process of cultural formation of Indian difference in the Lacandona to produce the Zapatistas—a new, multiethnic community. The Zapatistas were produced by, within, but also in excess of, state developmentalism. Intellectually, Zapatismo is produced by, but also exceeds, the colonial modernity that is Mexican revolutionary nationalism. The Zapatistas have appropriated for themselves the articulation between a colonial regime of difference and Mexico’s modern discourse of revolutionary nationalism. For a significant portion of the Mexican population, Indians no longer represent a lack of national identity, but its fulcrum. For the last six years the Zapatistas have repeatedly emphasized this, successfully rallying civil society to their aid: they have convened multiple national and international forums on democracy and justice; members from all levels of Mexican civil society have participated in Zapatista negotiations with the government; and, most significant, the EZLN has forestalled military annihilation by galvanizing the general population to their physical and political defense. While this is common knowledge, I would like to investigate further how it is that between 1994 and 1996 the Zapatistas so successfully became, in Ernesto Laclau’s (1996) terms, the empty signifier of Mexican community. To this end, I begin with a reading of just one of the Zapatistas’ performative acts of nationalist identity. On the evening of 27 July 1996, approximately five thousand visitors from forty-three countries gathered under a clear, starry sky in Oventic, Chiapas, invited there by the EZLN to celebrate the “International Meeting for Humanity and against Neoliberalism.” We had traveled half a day by bus to get there. We had stood in line for a very thorough inspection of our persons and of our belongings, the Zapatistas making sure that no one brought drugs or arms into the convention. Then we set up camp, and stood in line a few more

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times, for bathrooms and showers, and for a very satisfying dinner of entomatadas, rice, beans, salad, coffee, and dessert. Following dinner, we gathered in the center of an arena built for the event. It was cool and dark, spirits were high, and this alternative international forum was quite rowdy. Members of the Italian delegation sang antifascist songs, enclaves of Argentines and Chileans played the guitar, and there were cries of “viva!” all around. By the time Comandante David took the stage and asked for silence, the crowd’s cheers for the EZLN and the event seemed irrepressible. Although we quieted down considerably, a low but constant buzz of conversation continued among us. This certainly seemed like silence to us, but Comandante David did not agree. He asked us once again to be quiet. In fact, he insisted on complete silence, repeatedly saying “Hasta que guarden silencio, no podemos empezar” [We cannot begin until you keep silent] and “Hay que guarder diez minutos de silencio antes de poder empezar” [We have to be quiet for ten minutes before we can start]. Europeans, Latin Americans, and U.S. citizens all around grumbled that this seemed unnecessary—even a bit authoritarian. Eventually, after about fifteen minutes, when we realized we had no choice, that he was serious, that there might be a point to this, it happened. We were silent. Completely silent. Not one sigh, not one whisper, not a single chair scrapping against the ground. At first, I could hear—in the silence—people straining not to speak, repressing the urge to hear our own voices, to comment on what was happening. Then, after about two minutes, the strain seemed deafening and I thought, “We are not going to make it, we will not be able to sustain this.” After a couple of more minutes, I started to realize something. If it was this difficult for me, if it was difficult for a group of some five thousand people to keep silent for ten minutes, how difficult it must have been for the members and supporters of the Zapatistas to keep silent for ten years—one minute of ours for each year of theirs. Just a little after this epiphany about EZLN metaphorics, I noticed that Zapatistas were filing into the bleachers surrounding the central plaza where we, the visitors, were sitting. The bleachers, shrouded in darkness, were almost completely full when I noticed them—men and women, donning embroidered huipiles and ponchos, covering their faces with colorful bandannas and masks. I was stunned. Although we, the visitors, were sitting there being our quietest, the Zapatistas were on the move and yet quieter still. I had not heard the hundreds of Zapatistas filling the seats around us. It seemed to me that none of us, the visitors, had

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heard them. Once they had taken their places, for a remaining minute or two, we were all silent together. So much had happened in ten minutes of silence in which it seemed that nothing was happening. How are we to read the fullness of this silence? “Now,” Comandante David spoke, “we can begin.” Recent scholarship on subaltern historiography has illuminated the complexity of possible meanings encoded in subaltern silence (Guha 1988, 1997; Pandey 2000; Scott 1989). Some theoreticians of subaltern subjectivity, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988a), have also addressed the absolute limits of Western knowledge when confronted with subaltern silence and iteration. Indeed, Rigoberta Menchú’s performative silence in Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia foregrounds precisely those limits to Western knowledge. Menchú repeatedly insists on calling the Western reader’s attention to the secrets she withholds (Sommer 1991). She does this as part of a political project in which she seeks a strictly limited engagement with a Western audience about her experience as a Guatemalan Indian (Saldaña Portillo 1994). On the one hand, Menchú publishes her life story to elicit the intervention of an international community on behalf of the human and civil rights of the indigenous people suffering the Guatemalan government’s genocidal war against them. On the other hand, the secrets that she constantly refers to and never reveals in the book mark out a territory of the unreadable, of the unknowable—in Mayan experience—for the reader. Her secrets draw attention to an alterity, to an absolute difference between the reader and the Mayan Indians, with whom, paradoxically, we readers are drawn into limited identification. Precisely because these secrets are constantly alluded to and yet never revealed, indeed, cannot be revealed to a Western readership, the content of those secrets is silence for this readership. The alterity of the indigenous people that Menchú seeks to preserve as a hidden text is richly encoded in this silence—a silence she refuses to decode for the Western reader.13 In the Lacandona, across the border from the Guatemalan highlands and the Petén jungle, the sites and scenes of Menchú’s story, a very different sort of engagement is taking place between the indigenous people participating in the EZLN and Western subjects. Occurring more than a decade after the publication of Menchú’s autobiography, the EZLN’s performative silence at the International Meeting in Oventic is a study in contrast. Whereas in Menchú’s secret, encoded silence lies a stark and purposeful disidentification with the Western reader, the silence invoked by the Zapatistas at Oventic staged

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multiple identifications for the visiting (mostly Western) outsiders: with the indigenous Zapatistas, with the symbolic Mexican nation, with ourselves, and among each other. First of all, the Zapatistas invited us—required us—to join them in their silence. We were obliged to reenact the silence under which the Zapatistas organized for ten years. We were invited to experience the difficulty of attaining and maintaining silence for even a representative ten minutes. It was particularly difficult to maintain the silence once we noticed the Zapatistas adding their numbers to ours. Our ten minutes together stood in not just for the ten years of “silent” Zapatista organizing but also for the five hundred years of silence imposed upon indigenous peoples of the Americas by the subalternizing discourses of the colonial and postcolonial periods. Silence is at once the mark of alterity, of Indian difference, in subalternizing discourses of conquest, and the mask of alterity, for in “silence” the Zapatistas experience community and organize resistance. It is important that the silence that evening was not exactly voluntary, for we were mimicking, too, the structural silence imposed on indigenous subalternity in the Americas. Nevertheless, through this performative silence, the EZLN demonstrated to us just how much can be accomplished under its cover. The Zapatistas, moving in silence, catching us unaware as they encircled us, restaged ten years of organizing in the midst, but outside the awareness, of the rest of Mexico. And so, as visitors, we also symbolized a Mexican nation caught by surprise. We were standing in for those mestizo or ladinized Mexicans who, prior to 1 January 1994, were oblivious to the plight (and fight) of their indigenous compatriots. And yet, as such, we also had shared in the Zapatista silence. For the Mexican nation, as represented here, shared with the Zapatista Indians ten years of silent suffering under structural adjustment policies and neoliberal mandates. Thus, through the visitors’ metonymic silence, the Zapatistas were also identifying themselves with the rest of the Mexican nation. And yet another identification was being staged, namely, our identification as visitors with each other and with ourselves. For we—the many Western and Westernized subjects present before the Zapatistas, in the habit of thinking of ourselves as freely constituted and purposeful individuals—were also subject to neoliberalism, subjugated by its trajectory. In the “first world,” we had experienced a less violent, but by no means less virulent, structural adjustment in the eighties and nineties, disguised by such regionalisms as

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Reaganism or Thatcherism. And certainly, as leftists and progressives of various stripes and positions, from different “developed” countries, we had found our criticisms equally muted by the triumph of postCold War neoliberalism—more effectively, in fact, than criticism in Mexico. The simple reenactment of silence, then, provided the grounds for these multiple identifications—constitutively fleeting and poignantly inconclusive—identifications that are central to the Zapatistas’ project of wresting national and international terms of political representation for themselves. The Zapatistas staged these multiple identifications for us by having all of us perform their silence. All identifications were mediated, in effect, by the silence of the Zapatista Indians. We had to pass through their silence—to be as silent as an Indian—even to identify with our own subjection. But silence, as the quintessential marker of Indian identity in the dominant discourses of both North and South America, had been ruptured. For the Indian silence enacted here was not the silence of the Indian in modernizing discourses— the silence of an absence, a lack, an incompleteness. Neither was it the silence of the Indian in revolutionary developmentalism—the silence of incipient rebellion, subjects-in-waiting for leadership. Nor was it the silence of the Indian in Christian martyrdom—the silence of forbearance in expectation of eternal deliverance. It was a silence filled with planning, communication, movement, tactics, coercion, frustration, ties, networks, suffering, satisfaction—a silence so filled with activity that it ruptures from within, a truly deafening quiet. In Spivak’s (1988b) terms, from her now famous introduction to Selected Subaltern Studies, the Zapatistas broke apart the semiotic chain of meaning from within the terms of the discourse (after all, can you ever really trust a silent Indian?) in an attempt to resignify (to stretch as much as possible) the sign of being an Indian in the Americas before the chain reconstituted itself into a (slightly) newer hegemony. Let me amplify my troubling statement about identifying with our own subject(ificat)ion by passing through the identification with the Indian, by being “as silent as an Indian.” I want to distinguish this process of identification from the process of nation building discussed above, in which former colonies like Mexico (and the United States) appropriated the markers of Indian rebellion in order to formulate national cultures separate from the cultures of the empire, and to justify independence movements. I also wish to distinguish it from the various contemporary nostalgic processes of identification in which markers of Indian purity are appropriated by individuals and

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movements in the search of more “natural” states of being. Although inevitably connected to and contaminated by both of these kinds of identification, the identification posited by the Zapatistas was also different from them. Initiated by the Zapatistas, this identification between the visiting outsiders and the indigenous subalterns was not a naive erasure of the difference between these positionalities. When the Zapatistas joined the visitors in this performative silence, they did not take their place among us in the central part of the arena. Nor, for that matter, did they position themselves in front of the visitors, on the stage. Instead, they encircled us, they filled the bleachers at the margin of the arena. As such, they chose to represent the imbalance in political, economic, and cultural power that sustains the centrality of the Western nonindigenous subject visà-vis the indigenous subject.14 On the other hand, the Zapatista call to us to identify with them, to be “as silent as an Indian,” foregrounded the centrality of Indian difference in our own subject formation. While apparently dramatizing Indian silence, we were, in effect, dramatizing an international Left’s silence before neoliberalism. To recognize ourselves as silent, to recognize the silent Indian of our imaginary was to necessarily displace our habit of recognizing ourselves as purposeful and freely constituted individuals.15 The Zapatistas’ encircling of the visitors is suggestive of a number of possible symbolic relationships: those of confinement, engulfment, absorption, protection. These alternate readings of our relative positioning in this shared silence simultaneously suggest force, resistance, commensurability, cooperation, and dependency, all within a context of a materially given imbalance in power. Identification, in this case, is a complexly structured process, simultaneously conflictual and commensurable, in which differences are only temporarily superceded.16 The differences among the non-indigenous subjects present at the event were also temporarily superceded by the Zapatista-imposed silence. In effect, the many differences which existed in the crowd that night were brought into an equivalent relation through the signifier of Zapatista difference—silence. Silence does not eliminate differences. Rather, it makes it possible not only for differences to emerge, but also for a universal identification in difference to take place. Silence is the site on which alterity and universality converge. That night in Oventic the Zapatistas, in Laclau’s (1996) terms, filled the empty signifier of “the fullness of the community” with the sign of their difference; they brought all of our differences into abstract and temporary parity (not solidarity, as in the 1980s)

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through our identification with their silence. At this moment, Indian difference comes dangerously close to losing all specificity, as my multiple interpretations of the silence make evident. Each interpretation begins with the specificity of Indian silence only to abstract it into a generalizable silence capable of encompassing us all. This is a microcosmic example of the Zapatistas’ political project at the national level. The Zapatistas attempt to become the empty signifier of the “fullness of the Mexican community” by alternately emphasizing their Indian differences from mestizo nationals, and by successfully superceding these differences, in the hope of being able to shape the contours of democratic citizenship. As such, the Zapatista model of citizenship poses a serious threat to the terms of citizenship that currently govern Mexico, not because they insist on their indigenous identity, but precisely because they do not. In “Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?” Laclau (1996, 40) theorizes how empty signifiers function at moments of potential hegemonic transition, when various working-class struggles achieve unity in their confrontation with a repressive regime. He begins with a review of semiotic theory, reminding the reader that the systemicity of a semiotic system always depends on radical exclusion from the system: “The very possibility of signification is the system, and very possibility of the system is the possibility of its limit” (37). As every signifying totality is a system of differences, the signifying system’s limit cannot be neutral. It cannot be a limit such as would occur between two signifying terms within the system; it must be antagonistic. The absolute limits of a signifying system, beyond which is radical exclusion, cannot by definition be represented by the signifying terms of the system; it exists as pure negativity against which the system defines its totality (ibid.). This is the first empty signifier we come upon in Laclau’s essay, the empty signifier of the exclusionary limit. This empty signifier of the exclusionary limit, however, only interests Laclau insofar as it “introduces an essential ambivalence within the system of differences constituted by those limits. On the one hand, each element of the system has an identity only so far as it is different from the others: difference = identity. On the other hand, however, all these differences are equivalent to each other inasmuch as all of them belong to this side of the frontier of exclusion. But, in that case, the identity of each element is constitutively split” (38). It is this constitutively split identity of every signifying term in the system that allows the empty signifier of the system’s pure being to signify itself, “on this side of the frontier of exclusion.”

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Because each element of a signifying system is split ambivalently by difference and equivalence—because it contains both these possibilities—signifiers are able to “empty themselves of their attachment to particular signifieds” (of their identity = difference) and, in turn, “assume the role of representing the pure being of the system—or rather the system as pure Being” (identity as the equivalence of all the elements of the system) (39). Indian difference, as I have suggested, has historically been emptied of any attachment to “particular signifieds,” to particular indigenous populations, and as such performs the function of representing the revolutionary Mexican nation as pure being, as the equivalence of all the elements of the system. In Etienne Balibar’s terms (see n. 7), Indian difference has served as the racial supplement to Mexican nationalism by both universalizing Mexican identity through its abstract persistence in mestizaje and particularizing Mexican identity through the privileged customs and traditions of state-sponsored indigenismo. Laclau then uses the logic of the semiotic system as a metaphorics to analyze the political terrain at a moment when a repressive regime has increased its repression to such a degree that it becomes “less the instrument of particular differential repressions and . . . express[es instead] pure anti-community, pure evil and negation” (42). Laclau tells us that at such moments, according to Rosa Luxemburg, disparate working-class struggles may unite not because of a unity of interests, but because they are all equivalent before the repressive regime (41). A community of struggle is created through identification in opposition, through “this equivalential expansion” in which the differences of struggles are deferred in their confrontation with the regime. But as this community of struggle is nevertheless punctuated by differential interests, community will emerge as “the pure idea of a communitarian fullness which is absent as a result of the presence of the repressive power” (42). Here Laclau has brought us very close to the function the Zapatistas have played for the idea of “civil society” in Mexico since the time of their uprising. He goes on to suggest that precisely because “the community as such is not a purely differential space of an objective identity but an absent fullness, it cannot have any form of representation of its own, and has to borrow the latter from some entity constituted within the equivalent space—in the same way as gold is a particular use which assumes, as well, the function of representing value in general. This emptying of a particular signifier of its particular, differential signified is, as we saw, what makes possible

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the emergence of ‘empty’ signifiers as the signifier of a lack, of an absent totality” (42). Following Laclau’s analysis of the function of empty signifiers in representing the absent fullness of the community, I argue that the Zapatistas once again mobilized the empty signifier of Indian difference to unite a community in struggle against the PRI dictatorship. Just as in Oventic, in the silence they reenacted for the international community, the Zapatistas were able to become the “empty” signifier of the fullness of that community in opposition to neoliberalism, for at least two years following their uprising, the Zapatistas signified for the Mexican working class and the intellectual Left—with all their disparate struggles—that ever present absent totality, the fullness of the Mexican community in opposition to the repressive PRI regime. After ten years of structural adjustment policies, followed by two years of neoliberal reform, the Zapatistas were able to coalesce the various working-class and leftist struggles in Mexico by mobilizing the empty signifier of Indian difference to represent the fullness of “civil society” in their communiqués and in their repeated performance of democratic participation. When the Zapatistas interrupted Salinas’s neoliberal project because it excluded them as Indians, they were successful in generalizing their exclusion as Indian difference. If Indians have traditionally been excluded from the privileges of mestizo citizenship in Mexico, then what the Zapatistas made evident to the general population, through their communiqués and political acts, was that neoliberal reform had turned the entire country into Indians. The popularized chant “todos somos indios” attests to this. The Zapatistas succeeded in making Mexican society aware that all Mexicans were Indians before this neoliberal agenda, an agenda that defaulted on the historical promise of inclusion extended by the developmentalist revolutionary nationalism of the PRI. The Zapatistas succeeded in universalizing the alterity traditionally ascribed to Indians. The Zapatistas are uniquely positioned to become the empty signifier of “civil society” because they operate within the existing semiotic chain of meaning for Mexican nationalism. By mobilizing the colonial trace of Indian difference that exists within modern revolutionary mestizo identity, the Zapatistas rearticulate the dialectical relationship that has historically existed between Indian particularity and universality in Mexican citizenship. Like the Creole and revolutionary elites of the previous two centuries, the Zapatistas once again empty the signifier of Indian difference of any specific

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content when they universalize Indian particularity to signify the “fullness of community.” And yet they refuse the reification of Indian particularity that inheres in this paradoxical oscillation between universality and particularity in the service of Mexican nationalism. For the Zapatistas simultaneously refused Indian particularity as the basis for their rebellion, insisting that theirs is not an Indianist movement but a broader democratic one. They framed the structure and process of their negotiations with the government in national terms. Of the four rounds of negotiations that took place between 1995 and 1997, only one was on indigenous rights and culture. The other three were on topics of “national character”: the democratic process, economic development, and women’s rights. And even in their preparations for the first round of negotiations on indigenous rights, they convened national assemblies to collect the opinions of Indians and non-Indians on what these rights should consist of at the national and local levels. The Zapatistas have succeeded in capturing the imagination of the Mexican working class, the intellectual Left, and the international community because they have strategically been able to avoid the reification of their own Indian specificity, even as they maneuver between the empty signifier of Indian difference as quasi-natural “fullness of the Mexican community” and the specificity of a construct of Indian difference—their right to have rights—within a field of differences united in opposition to neoliberal reform. In this oscillation between claiming and vacating Indian particularity, they claim the rights of universal citizenship. In mobilizing the empty signifier of Indian difference to unite a community in struggle, however, they also reclaimed this empty signifier discursively for Indian specificity. I am suggesting that the empty signifier is no longer empty. The Zapatistas twice challenge Laclau’s antagonistic formulation of hegemonic politics when they fill the “empty” signifier of Indian difference with their own particularity, even as they universalize this particularity to represent the fullness of the Mexican community. They have filled Indian difference with a specificity—with the aesthetics of silence and the politics of the comón (the collective process of arriving at consensus)—capable of encompassing the abstract national community in struggle and in difference. The Zapatistas disrupt the PRI teleology of mestizaje by insisting that Indian particularity finally, openly informs the condition of national citizenship, that Indian particularity informs the national forms of democratic representation: that is, the guidelines for all levels of electoral participation, for party affiliation, for judicial review—all

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the topics left pending for the second round of negotiations. These kinds of demands cannot be satisfied by the math of liberal pluralism, by the simple addition of an Indian difference that has always already informed the condition of mestizaje as the ideal form of citizenship. The government did not end negotiations with the Zapatistas after the first round on indigenous rights because it wanted to abandon the first set of accords. After all, indigenous townships in Oaxaca were granted communal autonomy n 1992, two years before the Zapatista uprising had begun. Ernesto Zedillo and his PRI government ended negotiations precisely because he wanted to limit the Zapatistas’ movement to Indian rights, to wrest from them the empty signifier of “fullness of the Mexican community.” Zedillo was partially successful. Through the government’s tacit support—if not open encouragement— of Paz y Justicia, a death squad operating in Chiapas made up of indigenous PRI supporters, Zedillo succeeded in portraying the unrest in the state as interethnic warfare. His administration re-Indianized the Indians, attempting, for the second time in Mexican history, to turn an ethnically inflected class war into a caste war. It is in their oscillation between particularity and universality that the Zapatistas also present us with an alternative modernity. They eschew the antimodernist position of nativist movements because even their particular indigenous forms of democratic representation were produced by a colonial modernity and national modernization. They shun the completion of modernity promised yet again by (neo)liberal development because that promise went unfulfilled under the PRI’s last modernization scheme. And they reject the promise of a more perfect modernity offered by the Central American guerrilla movements of the eighties because history has taught them—and us—that this kind of modernity simply does not exist. Instead they are interested in presenting modernity with the gritty task of reevaluation, of presenting modernity with another vision of itself by weaving the social justice of revolutionary radicalism, and the democratic promise of liberalism, together with an alternative knowledge of the workings of modernity. This is the vision or knowledge not of those excluded from modernity but of those who have suffered in full its consequences and have seen its critical possibilities. Welcome to the era of Zapatismo. NOTES 1. The question of whether Spanish colonialism was modern—or more precisely capitalist—has been extensively debated. I would point the

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reader to the most fruitful and interesting exchange in this debate, that between Andre Gunder Frank (1966) and Ernesto Laclau (1971) on the nature of labor in the Spanish colonies, and whether it was free or feudal in form. Also important is Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1979) rejoinder to Laclau’s arguments against Frank, in which Wallerstein concedes Laclau’s point that labor was not free but feudal in the colonies, yet insists that the Spanish colonies were nevertheless within the capitalist world-system. 2. I will use Zapatista interchangeably with EZLN to refer to the rebel group. 3. Out of concern over the depletion of the indigenous labor supply at the hands of the encomenderos, the Crown reformed the encomienda at mid-century, introducing labor regulations that constrained the encomenderos from squandering this resource. Technically, the encomienda was not slavery, as it could not be inherited by the heirs of the encomendero. But this limited life span produced its own justification for abuse, as encomenderos anxiously squeezed every last drop of labor power out of their charges before the encomiendas were vacated. Consequently, the reforms of 1549 sought to regulate the use of indigenous labor, but the Crown’s interest was always in preserving their assets in the New World. The prominent Mexican anthropoloigst Héctor Díaz Polanco (1997, 43) has characterized the reform as follows: “Control over the labor force passed to the government from that moment on. Encomenderos had to request permission from royal officials to use Indian labor on their own encomiendas. Those benefiting from the workers’ toil had to pay them whether they belonged to their encomienda or not. Officials more actively intervened in the regulation of tributes and working conditions. All these changes benefited the king, who extended his socioeconomic and political control over the colonial society and increased the number of persons offering him tribute.” 4. Spanish colonial practices with regard to native populations were quite distinct from U.S. ones. U.S. colonial governmentality marginalized the surviving native populations by physically removing them from sight onto reservations, as if their difference were contagious. But under Spanish colonial rule, Indian towns were visible everywhere, with Spaniards and Indians crossing into each other’s townships regularly. Spanish colonialism was also quite different from early British colonialism in India, which until the second half of the eighteenth century governed through a class of client rulers without fundamentally changing indigenous governmental structures. 5. As an example of these resistant identities that emerged from within the regime of colonial difference, consider four indigenous religious movements that took place in the highlands of Chiapas between 1708 and 1713, the last of which ended in an organized, armed rebellion by

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the movements’ members. The four townships involved in these religious movements were Zinacantan, Santa Marta, Chenalho, and Cancuc. The Virgin made serial appearances to the Indians in three of these towns over the course of five years and the indigenous residents consecutively formed cults of worship to her. Though Indian leaders insisted they were following standard forms of worship, the local Catholic priests objected to the Indians’ rituals and repressed their movements, prosecuting the Virgin’s interlocutors for heresy. In the case of Cancuc, the cult leaders claimed that God had spoken with them, proclaimed the King of Spain dead, declared the end of their tribute to the Crown and Church, and asked that the Indians replace Spanish priests, mayors, and governors with Indian priests, mayors, and governors. The cult raised a multiethnic army from over thirty towns in the region and proceeded to take over other Indian towns and declare their church the official Church. For a full account of this resistive religious movement, see Reifler Bricker 1981, 53–83. 6. Liberal and conservative elites came to this conclusion even though, as Florence Mallon (1995) has established, indigenous peasant subalterns participated in the struggles for independence as nationalists, expressing republican aspirations and defending Mexican territory from the repeated foreign invasions. 7. For a theoretical discussion of the supplementary role residual racism has played in the consolidation of the nation, see Balibar 1991. Etienne Balibar elucidates the “paradoxes of universality” in nationalism thus: “In fact racism figures both on the side of the universal and the particular. The excess it represents in relation to nationalism, and therefore the supplement it brings to it, tends both to universalize it, to correct its lack of universality, and to particularize it, to correct its lack of specificity” (54). In the Mexican case, the function of Indian difference as a supplement to nationalism shifted paradoxically in ways suggested by Balibar. First, Indian difference provided the racial supplement necessary for universalizing “Mexican” identity across the heterogenous population making up this geopolitical formation. Indian difference also gave Mexican identity specific content, as discussed above. However, after nationalism, another paradoxical shift suggested by Balibar emerges. Having served its purpose of giving national identity a certain integrity, Indian difference shifts to mark a racialized exteriority dangerously within the nation, threatening to destabilize it. To return to Balibar, “The racial-cultural identity of ‘true nationals’ remains invisible, but it can be inferred (and is ensured) a contrario by alleged, quasi-hallucinatory natives, Blacks . . . In other words, it remains constantly in doubt and in danger; the fact that the ‘false’ is too visible will never guarantee that the ‘true’ is visible enough” (60). Similarly, after independence indigenous populations become such “false nationals.” Balibar’s theory must be adjusted for its trek across the Atlantic: Indian difference in the imaginary

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of Latin America cannot be recognized as “foreign,” precisely because of the population’s native status and the ideological uses it has been put to in the service of independence and revolution. Indian difference is thus registered as a temporal, rather than a geographic, “foreignness”: the Indian is forever foreign to modernity. It is the historical anachronism that makes visible the failure of “true” modern, national citizenship. 8. For an exhaustive analysis of revolutionary indigenismo in twentiethcentury Mexico, as well as a thorough comparison of revolutionary indigenismo and its nineteenth-century predecessors, see Knight 1990. Knight addresses the ideological differences among the various revolutionary proponents of indigenismo, its uneven application in the realms of culture and politics, as well as the historical and political factors behind its adoption by the revolutionary elites. I borrow substantially from his discussion of indigenismo in this period in my attempt to sketch a broad historical outline of the creation and perpetuation of Indian difference in the service of governmentality. 9. The most notable example of this participation were the original Zapatistas, the indigenous peasants from Morelos who, under the direction of Emiliano Zapata, were a central force in overthrowing the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship. Indeed, the 1917 constitution, with its guarantee of agrarian rights to the peasantry, is a testament to the participation of indigenous subalterns in the processes of revolutionary nation building (Womack 1968). 10. Unfortunately, Knight (1990) loses critical distance from the revolutionaries’ perspective on the Indians. Though Knight meticulously documents the historic prejudicial opinions of the revolutionaries concerning the Indians, he nevertheless uncritically adopts the revolutionaries’ position that the indigenous population was not sufficiently nationalistic: “For them [the indigenous population] the nation-state was, at best a source of fiscal and other demands; they owed it no loyalty (revolutionaries lamented the Indians’ blind support of antinational reactionary caudillos like Meixuero in Oaxaca and Fernández Ruiz in Chiapas)” (84). He then cites one of the great architects of revolutionary indigenismo, Alfonso Caso, in order to characterize the Indian for the reader: “Mexico’s Indians lacked ‘the essential sentiment of the citizen, that political solidarity which is the very base on which the principle of nationality rests’” (Caso 1971, 110; cited in ibid.) While some Indian groups in Mexico did indeed support antirevolutionary forces, indigenous armed support of the Revolution and its principles has also been thoroughly documented (García de León 1985; Womack 1968; Womack 1999, chap. 5), and even Knight recognizes this support at other points in the article. 11. The limits of the article form prevent me from discussing here the relationship that exists between indigenismo and mestizaje. Clearly, the two form one racial ideology in Mexico, and a genealogy of the two

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terms shows how they have been articulated together historically. For a further discussion of how mestizaje and indigenismo functioned as one metaphorics for corporate citizenship under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), see chapter 5, “The Politics of Corn,” in SaldañaPortillo 2003; or Saldaña-Portillo 2001. 12. One Zapatista advisor, Luis Hernández Navarro (1997, 33), has suggested that the neotraditionalism of the new Indian movement— the insistence on consensus and town meetings—is part of the struggle against the practice of caciquismo that historically has propped up the PRI in rural communities. 13. I have suggested previously (Saldaña Portillo 1994), Menchú’s project is an attempt to preserve a nonmodern space for subaltern alterity by negotiating the terms for a limited participation in modernity. Her oscillation in the text between revelation and withdrawal is a tactical strategy toward this political end, and current pan-Mayan movements in Guatemala have followed this early position taken by Menchú (Warren 1998). 14. Indeed, as visitors we participated in this representation, reinforcing our own centrality, since it obviously had not occurred to any of us to sit in the bleachers and leave the middle space for the Zapatistas who might be joining us. 15. By refusing to fill the stage in front of the visitors, the Zapatistas were also rejecting the possibility of an inversion of the hierarchical relation between a simplistically rendered colonizer and colonized, a possibility that many anticolonial struggles embraced in the 1960s and 1970s, as did previous indigenous uprisings in Chiapas. They refused the purity that such an inversion would have granted them. In so doing, they also refused we visitors the promise of a vanguard that would deliver us safely from our own responsibility. 16. This would be analogous, in psychoanalytic terms, to heteropathic identification, in which the subject identifies self with the other (excorporative), and contrasts with ideopathic identification, in which the subject identifies the other with its self (incorporative), Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 205–8, 226–7).

REFERENCES Balibar, Etienne, 1991. “Racism and Nationalism.” In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, edited by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. London: Verso. Barre, Marie-Chantal. 1983. Ideologías indigenistas y movimientos indios. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno. Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo. 1996. México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization. Translated by Phillip A. Dennis. Austin: University of Texas Press, Institute of Latin American Studies.

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Burbach, Roger, and Peter Rosset. 1994. Chiapas and the Crisis of Mexican Agriculture. Policy Brief No. 1. Oakland, CA: Institute for Food and Development Policy. Caso, Alfonso. 1971. La comunidad indígena. Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública. Collier, George. 1994. Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas. With Elizabeth Lowery Quaratiello. Oakland, CA: Institute for Food and Development Policy. Díaz Polanco, Héctor. 1997. Indigenous Peoples in Latin America: The Quest for Self-Determination. Translated by Lucía Rayas. Latin American Perspectives Series, no. 18. Boulder, CO: Westview. Durand Alcántara, Carlos. 1994. Derechos indios en México . . . derechos pendientes. Chapingo, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma Chapingo. Frank, Andre Gunder. 1966. “The Development of Underdevelopment.” Monthly Review (September): 17–31. Gamio, Manuel. 1960. Forjando patria. Mexico City: Porrua. García Canclini, Néstor. 1995. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Translated by Christopher L. Chippari and Silvia L. López. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. García de León, Antonio. 1985. Resistencia y utopia. Vol. 2. Mexico City: Era. Guha, Ranajit. 1988. “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India.” In Selected Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. New York: Oxford University Press. . 1997. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Harvey, Neil. 1994. Rebellion in Chiapas: Rural Reforms, Campesino Radicalism, and the Limits to Salinismo. Transformation of Rural Mexico Series, no. 5. San Diego: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego. . 1998. The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. . n.d. “Redefining Citizenship: Indigenous Movements in Chiapas.” Unpublished manuscript. Hernández Navarro, Luis. 1997. “Ciudadanos iguales, ciudadanos diferentes: La nueva lucha india.” Este país (February): 30–40. Joseph, Gilbert M. 1986. Rediscovering the Past at Mexico’s Periphery: Essays on the History of Modern Yucatán. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. . 1998. “The United States, Feuding Elites, and Rural Revolt in Yucatán, 1836–1915.” In Rural Revolt in Mexico: U.S. Intervention and the Domain of Subaltern Politics, edited by David Nugent. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Knight, Alan. 1990. “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910– 1940.” In The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940, edited by Richard Graham. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Laclau, Ernesto. 1971. “Feudalism and Capitalism.” New Left Review 67: 19–38. . 1996. Emancipation(s). London: Verso. Laplanche, J., and J.-B. Pontalis. 1973. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson Smith. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Mallon, Florence. 1995. Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru. Berkeley: University of California Press. Medina, Andrés. 1998. “Los pueblos indios en la trama de la nación: Notas etnográficas.” Revista mexicana de sociología 1/98: 131–68. Pandey, Gyanendra. 2000. “Voices from the Edge: The Struggle to Write Subaltern Histories.” In Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi. London: Verso. Reifler Bricker, Victoria. 1981. The Indian Chirst, the Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual. Austin: University of Texas Press. Rus, Jan. 1994. “The ‘Comunidad Revolucionaria Institucional’: The Subversion of Native Government in Highland Chiapas, 1936–1968.” In Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, edited by Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Saldaña Portillo, Maria Josefina. 1994. “Re-Guarding Myself: Rigoberta Menchú’s Autobiographical Rendering of the Authentic Other.” Socialist Review 1–2: 85–114. Saldaña-Portillo, Maria Josefina. 2001. “Who’s the Indian in Aztlán?” In The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, edited by Ileana Rodríguez. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. . 2003. The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Scott, James. 1989. “Everyday Forms of Resistance.” In Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, edited by Forrest D. Colburn. London: M.E. Sharpe. Sommer, Doris. 1991. “Rigoberta’s Secrets.” Latin American Perspectives 18.3: 32–50. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988a. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. . 1988b. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” In Selected Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. New York: Oxford University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1979. “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System.” In The Capitalist World-Economy: Essays by Immanuel Wallerstein. New York: Cambridge University Press. Warren, Kay B. 1998. Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Womack, John, Jr. 1968. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. . 1999. Rebellion in Chiapas: An Historical Reader. New York: New Press.

chapter three

Between Anthropology and History Manuel Gamio and Mexican Anthropological Modernity, 1916–1935 Guillermo Zermeño

M

y essay is located in the context of the profound changes at work in our disciplines today. This change of paradigm— to use the well-known Kuhnian expression—is part of the reflection on and revision of the canon of social and historical science inherited from the nineteenth century. This reflection, which became even more intense in the second half of the twentieth century, involves factors both internal and external to science, ones as diverse as the two Great Wars and their consequences for the processes of decolonization of many erstwhile European colonies. A number of intellectual critics are associated with this process of reflection, among them the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. For our purposes we will focus on his work on the relation between time and narration. I refer, in particular, to the passage from Le temps raconté dealing with “the renunciation of Hegel” (Ricoeur 1996 [1985], 918–38). Hegel, as we all know, is a sort of icon of European modernity’s philosophical heritage. We identify him with the effort to philosophically found our age, on the one hand, and as an emblem of closed systems of thought, on the other. Paul Ricoeur ranks among the subtlest critics of absolutist modern reason. I allude to Ricoeur because I believe the distance he takes from Hegel presupposes his recognition of him. Ricoeur urges us to “give up” Hegel, making a little extra effort. It is not enough to accuse Hegel of idolizing the state [“estalótatra”] or of being a totalitarian

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state’s founding philosopher; something more is required if we are to free ourselves from the intellectual weight he represents, and that “something more” consists in recognizing his presence. Indeed, a major epistemological problem that confronts any historian is how to apprehend an intellectual event—the fall into discredit of Hegelian philosophy, for instance—when one has not taken part in it or known its implications. We do not know, for example, if this decline represents “a catastrophe that continues to harm us,” or, rather, “a liberation we dare not boast of” (Ricoeur 1996, 931). Ricoeur’s critical program then, consists of the assertion that we must acknowledge Hegel’s presence before dismissing him. My reflections on Manuel Gamio—an icon of the Mexican Revolution and an enthusiastic preserver of the historical and anthropological knowledge of the indigenous world—are governed by the same intellectual spirit. My purpose is not to deny Gamio’s relevance or his contribution to the development of modern anthropology in Mexico. Nor do I intend to judge him in a way that divides the world into two opposing camps. Rather, my effort is to understand the rise and the social functioning of a particular kind of anthropology from the standpoint of the present, allowing us to view the construction of modern knowledges as contingent. It is a way of facing the alterity represented by the modern notion of “the indigenous.” I will develop my arguments around two basic themes: (1) relationships between the intellectual and the state, or the regime of science and politics, and (2) indigenismo. We owe a great deal to both traditions, even if we have not created them. Hence, the focus of this essay is not the identification but the recognition of this inheritance as a condition for transcending it. Undoubtedly, this intellectual exercise is something of a propitiatory ritual, the retelling of a story more or less known in order to forget it, thereby opening oneself up to new ways of understanding it. Notwithstanding the recurrent criticism of Gamio’s works (Bonfil Batalla 1987; Medina and García Mora 1986),1 is there any guarantee that our writings on the indigenous past and our perception of the “indigenous” are not still marked by the guidelines established by the “father of modern anthropology”? To what extent can we claim that they are still not influenced by a teleology of progress that subsumes the Indian in a kind of eternalized present? Given the complexity and extent of the problem, I will limit myself here to comparing Gamio’s anthropological proposal

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with that of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, whom Gamio himself considered to be the father of Mexican anthropology.2 I would like to contrast the primary “anthropology” of the Franciscan friar with the anthropological modernity of Gamio, in order to indicate where the novelty of Gamio’s anthropology lies, and/or in what sense he simply extends, in another context, a project designed in the colonial period. In particular, I will take into account some of the political and epistemological implications of both projects. I will conclude by offering a few historiographical remarks. SOME BASIC ELEMENTS OF MANUEL GAMIO’S INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY Manuel Gamio (1883–1960) was the first professional Mexican anthropologist to be educated at a U.S. university (Columbia). He was a student of the (German-born) U.S. anthropologist Franz Boas. One also notes that he maintained close relationships (not always free of conflict) with presidents of the governments that emerged from the Mexican Revolution, from Venustiano Carranza (1915–19), through Alvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles (1921–25), to Lázaro Cárdenas (1936–40). This makes it difficult to separate the formation of modern Mexican anthropology from presidential power. Along with his anthropological research, first in the region of Teotihuacán (1917–22) and then on Mexican migrants in the United States (1927), both pioneering studies, Manuel Gamio published two politico-anthropological works that can be read as suited to the political conjuncture, or as an intellectual’s offer to conform to the social program of the presidency. The first, Forjando patria [Forging a fatherland] (1916), allied him closely with Carranza,3 and the second, Hacia un México nuevo [Toward a new Mexico] (1935),4 linked him to Cárdenas once Elías Calles had fallen from grace. This double politico-scientific movement should not completely surprise us. In the first place, academic institutions solely dedicated to scientific research had not yet come into being. Almost all activities of this kind were sponsored by the administrative agencies of the federal government. Or they were financed from abroad, as part of the programs of Columbia University or the University of Chicago, or by institutions such as the Carnegie Foundation, which financed research projects (“expeditions”) like the ones developed by Gamio or by Sylvanus Morley in the region of the Yucatán. There could have been a more important reason: a commonplace

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of the nineteenth century, expressed by Napoléon I, held that no modern state could exist without the power of science, and that politics or the science of power required the power of science.5 In prerevolutionary Mexico there were many intellectuals, among them Justo Sierra, who tried to convince rulers of the need to incorporate scientific rationality into the art of government. The kind of intellectual who emerges from this description is one who considers government officials as his or her main interlocutors. Was this relationship only a traditional gesture in a regime of modern science, or, on the contrary, is the close collaboration between intellectuals and scientists crucial to the formation of the modern state? It would be worthwhile to assess the possibilities opened by the dispute in anthropology initiated in the 1960s (Medina 1993; Fábregas 1997), which marks the inauguration of a critical anthropology that regulates itself by its own norms, taking increasing degrees of autonomy from the political world. GAMIO’S ANTHROPOLOGICAL PROGRAM The program of Gamio’s anthropological science may be characterized as “nationalist-indigenist.” In general terms it corresponds to the effort of the positivist liberal world to identify, classify (order), incorporate (govern), and predict the development of the social world: if certain conditions are created or given, then one can expect that in a reasonable amount of time the indigenous population will be able to form an important part of the civilization represented by the orchestrators of this model. Gamio’s program follows the basic rules of what is known as the algorithmic model of universal science forged in eighteenth-century Europe.6 With the publication of Forjando patria in 1916, Gamio proclaimed himself the promoter of a new anthropology. If we adopt the historian’s perspective, however, this novelty can easily be inscribed in a wider temporal chain of effects. The foundation of a new anthropology and of contemporary national-indigenismo can be seen, then, as something that had its roots in the past, without being aware of it completely. The historical problem derivable from this proposal could be how to distinguish what links Gamio with, and what separates him from, the anthropological knowledge constructed during the colonial period. What clearly separates Gamio from colonial anthropology is the liberal political and scientific positivist regime. Gamio shared with

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intellectuals like Andrés Molina Enríquez and Francisco Bulnes the belief that a new Mexico could not develop without the support of science. This assumption implied that society was governed by laws similar to the ones regulating the evolution of nature. The challenge of this new science was to discover racial, cultural, and economic regularities (norms) that could make sociological observation into something governable and, most of all, predictable. The operation was carried out on the basis of three main distinctions: individual/society, tradition/modernity, and backwardness/progress. Under these conditions came into being what can be called a new political economy peculiar to the modern nation-state. The effect of Napoleonic wars and the independence from Bourbon Spain made it imperative, for a territorial entity called Mexico, to make not simply juridicial and political adjustments, but also discursive ones (i.e., changes in the way things were named). A new lexicography appeared and developed in nineteenth-century Mexico. As a consequence of this transformation, the Indian people and communities were divested of their former status and made equals as citizens before the law. But at the same time, the Indians were branded as backward and identified as that part of the population least prepared to deal with the new rules of the market’s political economy. Mexican liberals fueled this idea, which they largely borrowed from the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who had developed it in course of his scientific trips through the Americas. The methodical research on the customs and beliefs of indigenous peoples conducted by Gamio between 1917 and 1922 was governed by these ideas (Gamio 1979 [1922]).7 And it was the first research of its kind in modern Mexico after that of Sahagún four centuries earlier. The lecture Gamio gave in Washington in 1925, after he had completed his study on Teotihuacán and started working on Mexican migration in the United States, laid out his anthropological program. In his speech he presented himself as a son of the U.S. academy8 and as a bridge between two worlds: American progress and Mexican backwardness. Although confident in the power of science, he recognized that the methods of the social sciences had to be perfected if these were to become practical and applied sciences. He saw the unification of the research methods of the social sciences as a panacea for all prejudices, one that would usher in “an era of forgiveness, love, and goodwill” (Gamio 1993, 11). As regards the indigenous population, estimated at 8 or 10 million, the problem was how to use anthropology as a means

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to remedy its “defective and primitive life, which lagged centuries behind” despite inhabiting a country of the future, of wireless and aerial communications, in the era of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Upholding the pan-American ideal, so much the mark of the 1920s, he offered American scholars a stimulating and open—almost virgin—field to develop their research. For Gamio, Mexico’s people were divided into two groups: on the one hand, the white population, promoters of progress, embodiments of “modern civilization, and speakers of the Castilian language,” who constituted the “leading classes,” “the most dynamic of the country”; and, on the other, the indigenous and mestizo groups, “the great underdeveloped and passive majority.” Though he accepted the cultural and linguistic differences among a great part of the population, Gamio argued that an important problem confronting the Mexican social scientist was the “cultural backwardness” of the “indigenous majority,” which kept its members from understanding the studies carried out on them. Moreover, “their miserable economic situation” compelled them “to devote themselves almost completely to maintaining their organic life” (Gamio 1993, 12). Next, he underscored the long tradition of his job as an anthropologist: “Research of an anthropological character has been going on in Mexico for the last four hundred years.” Gamio saw himself as a member of that family of chroniclers that included “Sahagún, Landa, and Durán.” He considered them part of the tradition of applied anthropology because they “recorded in their works the observations they made directly or indirectly on the racial characteristics of the conquered indigenous people, their mythical ideas, social organization, artistic manifestations, languages and dialects, rites and magical ceremonies, household, food, clothing, etc.” (ibid.). These observations, Gamio declared, had to be considered “in all fairness” as ethnographic, linguistic, and folkloric ones. In Gamio’s opinion, that line of research had continued uninterrupted until his era. At that same time, as the promoter of a new antrhopology, Gamio had to set himself apart from the chroinclers. Their works, he contended, were inadequate because “following modern scientific criteria, the enormous quantity of books produced by national and foreign authors far exceeds their quality.” It was not their fault, he added, since the norms that regulated scientific discipline were “only half a century old.” With these criteria in mind he divided the anthropological literature

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into three categories: (1) books in which scientific method guided neither the inquiry into and recording of observed data, nor the conclusions derived from them; (2) books in which data and conclusions were indeed based on scientific discipline; and (3) scientific works whose conclusions were immediately applied toward social improvement (Gamio 1993, 12–13).9 Thus, though Gamio placed his work within a four-centuryold intellectual tradition, he set himself apart from the first and the second groups. He did this on two grounds: scientific criteria and its applicability. For Gamio scientific anthropology had to be, above all, applied anthropology. Nevertheless, he considered that the works of the past were still useful as “sources of information,” provided they were “scientifically interpreted so they can be used correctly.” Conversely, the work of those who, after this period, continued to write about anthropological topics at the margin of science’s normative principles—“without even having the originality of the colonial chroniclers”—was reprehensible (Gamio 1993, 13). What Gamio presented was a reelaboration of the anthropological traditions based on the normative criteria of scientific methodology, which not only separated true facts from fiction, but also pure scientific erudition from applied science. But Gamio did not realize that his own method and the object of his study were also subject to the conditions of historicity. The result was the substantialization of a method that produced, by definition, timeless entities. Indeed, this method produced, by definition, an essential image of the Indian so that the latter could be manipulated in both time and space. Let us not forget that modern historiography, in the tradition of a Johann Gottfried von Herder or a Jules Michelet, sustains among its tenets a belief that each era verifies its truths according to historically constructed conceptual schemes or rules of procedure. Consequently, as historians, we cannot accept a priori that Gamio’s way of conceptualizing knowledge was necessarily better than those of the colonial past, those of mid-nineteenth century scholars, or even those of the present. What we can affirm, instead, is that in history there have been variations concerning the forms of appropriation, validation, and vigilance of “truth,” which depend on institutions and codes that made them possible. In this sense, Gamio was right to indicate that works of the past were useful to modern historians, not to solve their practical problems, but as sources of information for establishing the “background” of modern anthropological “speculations.” Gamio realized that historical and epistemological

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conditions, which make knowledge possible, had changed. As a result, judged by the new parameters, anthropological observations made under the former code of verification, dominant during the colonial period, were of limited use: they did not allow their author to draw scientific conclusions or provide logical certainties about the cultural concepts they referred to. Hence, Gamio could unhesitatingly proclaim that his science was superior to that of colonial knowledge. His dialogue with the anthropological production of the nineteenth century focused on the character attributed to experimental observations themselves, regulated by established principles and laws derived from anthropological knowledge itself. From Gamio’s point of view this production stands between the production he represents and the output of the colonial chroniclers. In sum, we can say three things. First, Gamio, considering himself part of a four-hundred-year-old anthropological family, noticed the same applied anthropology in the products of both colonial and nineteenth-century anthropology. Second, he argued that this practice had changed according to the criteria that regulated anthropological modes of observation. This practice was distinct basically in its separation of the world of fiction or magic from the world of certainties. This practice, according to Gamio, was very recent and so one had to proceed carefully in dealing with testimonies from the past, the chronicles of friars and conquerors. They were sources of information that had to be sifted through and interpreted following the scientific method. Third, what Gamio did in this case was to rework the received anthropological heritage from different criteria. But he was not aware of the inherent historicity of this observational exercise. Scientific method functioned for him as a deus ex machina. Thus, he had no qualms in proclaiming that his method was superior to Sahagún’s, or even to the one used by his immediate predecessors in the nineteenth century. The difference, he claimed, was that this scientific method was a form of applied knowledge, that is, one that would transform the situation of the observed. In retrospect, one of the problematic elements of the anthropology of Gamio and his contemporaries was that it considered the Indians as a means to carry out a project seemingly alien to their natural evolution. That is why their incorporation in the civilizing process required the disappearance of their culture (Brading 1989, 269); at the same time, this denial implied a return to the indigenous past and the transformation of their arts into folklore. Scientific anthropology,

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working in collaboration with state agencies, became one of the main tools for achieving the transmutation of the “Indian.” The integration of indigenous communities within a nationalist teleology was an attempt to incorporate them into a lay or secular model of civilization, a teleology opposed to the Christian one constructed by missionaries and evangelists of the colonial period. Processes of incorporation in both models implied the destruction of the vestiges of indigenous experience, before and after the Conquest, respectively. In both cases, as we shall see, there was recourse to a kind of “anthropological knowledge” as a means to better “rule” the indigenous population. ABOUT SOME THREADS THAT TIE GAMIO TO SAHAGÚN Having arrived this far, we can observe some points of “divergent convergence” between Gamio’s anthropology and Sahagún’s. We can begin by asserting that between 1917 and 1922, Manuel Gamio became the first person since Sahagún in 1560 to conduct methodical research on the customs and beliefs of the indigenous population. The enormous similarity between the two works is indisputable. Each author asserts, in his particular way, that his research is intended to cure the Indians of a kind of evil: idolatry in the case of Sahagún, “backwardness”10 (magical thinking and religious fanaticism) in that of Gamio. Both consider Indians as an object of knowledge to extirpate practices that do not fit into the conceptual schemes with which such objects are studied and evaluated. Even if we argue that we are dealing with two different modes or codes of producing truth—the modern and the colonial—there still exists a point at which Gamio’s scientific aspiration and Sahagún’s may coincide: the necessity of providing a useful and practical knowledge for the benefit of “good government.” Oscar Martiarena, a Foucauldian historian, has recently produced a small but substantial text that allows me to explain the possible links between the proposals of Gamio and Sahagún. Martiarena (1998) poses three key questions of Sahagún’s text: What prompts Sahagún to get to know the Indians? What method or procedure does he follow to achieve his aim? And according to what “conceptual scheme” does he carry out his task? As we know, one of the most important themes of Foucault’s work was the inquiry into the historical forms and conditions that allowed the human sciences to emerge, transforming men and women into

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objects of knowledge. The search for the historical forms and conditions under which Indian people became objects of knowledge constitutes only one chapter of this history of the humanities and social sciences. According to Foucault one element binds modern knowledge to ancient or medieval knowledge. This is inquisitio or inquiry, which, starting from a religious origin, secularized itself over centuries until it constituted a basic element of the administration of nation-states. In its religious origins, inquiry was a means to attain the “good government” of souls. However, it gradually turned into a form of government, not only for souls, but also for fiefs and bodies. As a result, the reason that governs this method is fundamentally political (Foucault 1992; cited in Martiarena 1998, 196–98). The machine of inquiry for the construction of truth that Sahagún set in motion had its roots in strategies used by the Inquisition to deal with “groups alien to Christianity.” One of the characteristics of Sahagún’s machinery was its neglect of “the contents of the truth” to be constructed, even though it proceeded on the basis of a draft or a previous questionnaire. We should keep in mind not just that the existence of idolatry, rites, and superstitions among Indians was the reason that Sahagún used to justify his enterprise of knowledge, but that this work inscribed itself in the evangelizing or Christianizing works of New Spain. Like the doctor, the anthropologist had to know “which humour [condition/ circumstance] is cause of the disease” in order to be able to eradicate it, applying to “each disease a contrary medicine” (Sahagún 1989, 31; cited in Martiarena 1998, 201). Although Sahagún acknowledged difference, it was a difference that, as for Gamio, had to be diminished. That is to say, the knowledge of the practice of idolatry had to be used precisely to combat it. It was not a case, as Martiarena emphasizes, of approaching the “other” for the aesthetic interest of knowing it; rather, the aim was to apprehend it in order to assail its very otherness. The indigenous past had to be brought into the present so that the vestiges of idolatry could be identified and combatted. Sahagún’s work was addressed precisely to all those—officials or magistrates of the sacred, present and future— who did not know how to recognize indigenous idolatry. He claimed for his work a high degree of generalization, allowing any Christian who read it to become an “inquisitor,” that is, a persecutor and a denouncer of idolatry, thereby laying the foundation for a Christian government for the Indians. If Sahagún became a knowing subject, his knowledge was guided not by the philanthropic intention of

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knowing the other but by the desire to convert or transform Indians to Christianity. Turning back to Gamio and his anthropological modernity, what is he proposing if not a knowledge that allows its object to be transformed into something else? Is he not offering the government an instrument by which it may better rule the population? It is in this procedure that I recognize a traditional gesture linking him to Sahagún. In a different context and, above all, within a different discursive order, we may now recognize the presence of the colonial past in Gamio’s modernizing present. It would be something like the survival of the world of New Spain in the functioning of modern anthropology (O’Gorman 1969 [1967]; Morse 1995, 34–45, 151–202). Certainly it is an unimaginable perspective for a positive science that defines itself, as Ricoeur observes, by its exclusion of the metaphor (with all that the latter implies in terms of culture, religion, fable, superstition: in short, everything combated as idolatry), a science that is sustained by the idea of progress in stages. SOME HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS: TOWARD A NEW ANTHROPOLOGICAL MODERNITY? 1. From all the above we can conclude that both Gamio and Sahagún instrumentalized the Indian. Nevertheless, their representations follow different criteria or conceptual schemes. Representation of the Indian as a part of the Augustinian city is not the same as representation of the Indian in a democratic and industrial city. Thus, the semantic weight that the word Indian carries with relation to the savage, the barbarian, and the primitive can vary in significance. Gamio’s anthropological modernity turns Sahagún’s anthropology into an obsolete gesture, one insufficient to undertake Gamio’s project of incorporation of the Indian into modern civilization. 2. Recent research, including studies by Andrés Lira (1983), Bernardo García Martínez (1987), Nancy Farriss (1992), and Marcelo Carmagnani (1993), has begun to focus on a fact that will modify our perception of the indigenous world inherited from Gamio: that the century of Mexican liberal nationalism implied a “second conquest” of the indigenous world, carried out through a new set of political, discursive, technical, and scientific instruments. The incorporation of the Indian in a new order of representations presupposes taking a distance from the colonial order as a world differentiated by and organized into estates. However, through certain political

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and economic mechanisms this order found a way of generating consensus that did not deny difference, without having to resort to extreme violence. William Taylor’s (1999, 18) monumental history of eighteenth-century parish priests examines precisely “how the colonial system, with its great disparities and scant mobility, could last three centuries without a regular army or greater deployment of force,” and how this regime attained relative equilibrium faced with the complacence as well as the resistance of the Indians. This assessment can be contrasted with the formal and practical schemes set in motion with the Bourbon reforms, the Cádiz Courts, and the liberal reforms intended to regulate the population’s political and social conduct. In this case, it is possible to speak of a democratically functioning scheme that, in principle, makes everyone equal before the law but in the course of its development generates difference and conflict or increasing inequality, rather than consensus and unity (Guarisco Canseco 2000). One consequence of this process was that the liberal criollos expropriated, not only the lands of the indigenous people, but also their name as “Mexicans” (which is what Sahagún had called them).11 It is ironic that the “authentic Mexicans” (the ancient inhabitants of Anáhuac) were displaced by the “new Mexicans” to the point that they were forced to occupy the ethnic and racial category of “indigenous people” (Rozat 2001). Thus, with liberal reforms and the process of land redistribution [desamortización], the Indians not only lost their lands (the road to equality led to their proletarization) or were exterminated, as in the case of the nomadic Indians of the north (Rodríguez 1998); but they also became inscribed in the imaginary of backwardness, indigence, and barbarism. 3. We can thus see that the indigenous world became part of a taxonomy and a social order ruled by the science of anthropology. The task was begun systematically by Gamio in his practice of “applied anthropology.” As I have suggested, this new way of organizing the social universe cannot be attributed exclusively to the process known as the Mexican Revolution. Its elements and devices are parts of the integral educational reform undertaken by the liberal state in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a reform that entailed a demarcation between the individual and the social, the scientific and the political. But the path from politics to anthropology implied a return from anthropology to politics. And it is at this point—even if under another sign—that Gamio, the scientist, and Sahagún, the

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Franciscan friar, come together. In consequence, I cannot fail to mention that, for the revolutionary regime, Gamio was the first, archetypical intellectual-academic-official of the state (Lempérière 1992), not far from—although with a different sign and scope—the ideal official intellectual of the old colonial regime. 4. There exists, however, one more fact that distinguishes the national-revolutionary enterprise from the colonial one: its impatience, another definitive trope of modernity. As Gamio (1993, 21–22) puts it, “The most pressing problem in Mexico today is to awaken those energies and possibilities dormant for centuries in 8 or 10 million Indians. When this mass of automatons recovers the dynamism that it had in its remote past and acquires the efficiency that characterizes modern action, then it will exploit and effectively profit from the country’s almost virginal resources.” Gamio often chided his predecessors for not having been radical enough to make the different Indian nations disappear and conform to one nationality. This diversity was for him the clearest sign of the ancient régime. In this sense, Gamio’s crusade was focused, in the final analysis, on openly combating any kind of presence or reminiscence of the past. This gesture allows us to see that in nineteenth-century Mexico, as in other countries, a new kind of subjectivity and relation with the world of the ancient Mexicans, now called “Indians,” was being constructed and consolidated. The Porfirian make-believe of Teotihuacán as a Mexican Egypt and the development of a nationalist-indigenist museography (Bonfil Batalla 1987, 89–92; Morales 1998) can be seen as the culmination or counterpart of this civilizing project. They may also symbolize the building of a great showcase that would help develop and be consumed by the tourism industry, that is, the place where the trophies of the new “social conquests” are displayed. Our story is framed by an anecdote told by Pedro Armillas, an archaeologist and anthropologist of the second generation, in an interview with Jorge Durand (1990). A group of important anthropologists was among the foreigners invited by the Mexican government in 1910 to the centenary celebration of Mexican independence. During the commemorations at Teotihuacán, “every morning” “at the foot of the Pyramid of the Sun,” one could see an eminent group of scientists and politicians climbing the pyramid, French champagne bottles in hand, to have breakfast, “all expenses paid by the Porfirian government” (27–28).

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NOTES A preliminary version of this article was presented at the Eleventh Congress of the Asociación de Historiadores Latinoamericanistas Europeos, Porto, Portugal, 21–24 September 1999. I thank Ricardo Falomir for his comments and bibliographical suggestions, and Luis Aboites for his comments on the preliminary version, which helped make it more intelligible. The participants in the seminar held at the Colegio de México on 26 and 27 July 1999 enriched this text by allowing it to “intersect” with other histories and other modernities. 1. I refer to the debate that began in the field of anthropology in the 1960s. One of the most interesting results was the book of Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México profundo: Una civilización negada (1987). At the root of this discussion, without a doubt, was the key figure of Manuel Gamio, who spurred the confrontation between the functionaries of anthropology and the academics of anthropology. 2. This can only be an anachronism, because the “anthropology” to which Gamio referred is the discipline that he practiced, and which developed in the nineteenth century. 3. With this work Gamio reiterated his intellectual commitment to the victorious constitutional faction. Undoubtedly, this text would have had different implications in the context of a triumphant Zapatismo or Villismo. Within the logic of the “restoration of Maderismo,” carried on by the constitutionalism of Carranza, Forjando patria can be read as offering the social program that Francisco Indalecio Madero did not develop in his 1999 book, Presidential Succession. 4. Hacia un México nuevo reveals Gamio’s ability to adapt to changes in the sphere of presidential power. Gamio’s break with Calles in 1925 prompted him to go back to this anthropological work. Once the Obregón-Calles cycle ended in 1935, Gamio drew closer to Cárdenas with Hacia un México nuevo. 5. See Santiago Castro-Gómez’s contribution to this volume. 6. For a very successive approach to the theme of the development of alphabetical writing in the Western world, see Olson 1998. 7. La población del Valle de Teotihuacán was first published in 1922 by the Secretaría de Agricultura y Fomento, and reedited in 1979 by the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, with a foreword by Eduardo Matos Moctezuma. The book is more a collective work developed in the Secretaría de Agricultura y Fomento’s Dirección de Antropología (1917–24) than an exclusive product of Gamio’s authorship. 8. That is, as a follower of Franz Boas, the promoter of new American anthropology. It is well known that Boas was one of the guests at the Porfirist celebration of independence in 1910. This event coincided with the reopening of the University by Justo Sierra, and the creation, through a multinational agreement, of the International School of

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American Archaeology and Ethnography, directed first by Boas and then by Gamio. That same year, Mexico City also hosted the International Congress of Americanists. 9. “Anthropology, in its widest theoretical conception and in its unlimited sphere of practical application, is the main base on which the intellectual and material well-being of the people must be elaborated. Moreover, governments are agents of the people and their mission is to employ means for the achievement of the people’s welfare. As a result, a government cannot rule logically and effectively if it does not take the anthropological factor into account. The truth of these assertions can be historically demonstrated on the American continent and, above all, in those countries where the Indian population represents a social majority, since the abnormality of their development has been due to ignorance on the part of the governments of anthropological problems like the construction of mestizaje and cultural struggles and fusions” (Gamio 1993, 27–28). Gamio adds that Mexico became the first country whose government gave this project unconditional support, with its creation of an office of anthropology in 1917. 10. “The population lived with a cultural backwardness of four centuries. Their education had to be begun again, a complete education, not limited to reading and writing” (Gamio 1993, 31). 11. Sahagún writes, “You, the inhabitants of this New Spain, Mexicans, Tlaxcaltecas, and those who inhabit the lands of Michoacán, as well as all other Indians of these Western lands, must know that you have lived in the great darkness of infidelity and idolatry in which your ancestors left you, as is clear from your writings, paintings, and the idolatrous rites in which you have lived until now” (cited in Martiarena 1998, 217).

REFERENCES Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo. 1987. México profundo: Una civilización negada. Mexico City: CIESAS/SEP. Brading, David. 1989. “Manuel Gamio y el indigenismo oficial en México.” Revista mexicana de sociología 51, 2: 267–84. Carmagnani, Marcello. 1993. El regreso de los dioses: El proceso de reconstitución de la identidad étnica en Oaxaca—Siglos XVII y XVIII. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Durand, Jorge. 1990. “Entrevista a Pedro Armillas.” In Caminos de la antropología: Entrevistas a cinco antropólogos, compiled by Jorge Durand and Luis Vázquez Léon. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes/Instituto Nacional Indigenista. Fábregas, Andrés. 1997. “Una reflexión antropológica en torno a la antropología en México.” In Ensayos antropológicos, 1990–1997. Chiapas, Mexico:

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Gobierno del Estado de Chiapas/Universidad de Ciencias y Artes del Estado de Chiapas. Farriss, Nancy M. 1992. La sociedad maya bajo el dominio colonial: La empresa colectiva de la supervivencia. Madrid: Alianza. Foucault, Michel. 1992. La verdad y las formas jurídicas. Barcelona: Gedisa. Gamio, Manuel. 1916. Forjando patria: Pro-nacionalismo. Mexico City: Porrúa. . 1935. Hacia un México nuevo: Problemas sociales. Mexico City: n.p. . 1979 [1922]. La población del Valle de Teotihuacán. Vols. 5. Foreword by Eduardo Matos Moctezuma. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista. Original edition, Mexico City: Secretaría de Agricultura y Fomento. . 1993. “Estado actual de las investigaciones antropológicas en México y sugestiones sobre su desarrollo futuro.” In Dos aportaciones a la historia de la antropología en México, by Manuel Gamio and Andrés Medina. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (Dirección de Etnología y Antropología Social). García Martínez, Bernardo. 1987. Los pueblos de la sierra: El poder y el espacio entre los indios del norte de Puebla hasta 1700. Mexico City: Colegio de México. Guarisco Canseco, Claudia. 2000. “Hacia la construcción de una nueva sociabilidad política: Indios, ciudadanía y representación en el Valle de México, 1770–1835.” (Doctoral thesis in history, Colegio de México.) Lempérière, Annick. 1992. Intellectuels, Etats et société au Mexique: Les clercs de la nation (1910–1968). Paris: L’Harmattan. Lira, Andrés. 1983. Comunidades indígenas frente a la ciudad de México: Tenochtitlán y Tlatelolco, sus pueblos y sus barrios, 1812–1919. Mexico City: Colegio de México/Colegio de Michoacán. Martiarena, Oscar. 1998. “El indio como objeto de conocimiento.” Diánoia 44: 195–218. Medina, Andrés. 1993. “La formación de antropólogos en México: Notas y figuraciones.” In Dos aportaciones a la historia de la antropología en México, by Manuel Gamio and Andrés Medina. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (Dirección de Etnología y Antropología Social). Medina, Andrés, and Carlos Garcia Mora, eds. 1986. La quiebra politica de la antropología social de México: Antolgoía de una polémica. Vol. 2, La polarización (1971–1976). Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas. Morales, Luis Gerardo. 1998. “Ancestros y ciudadanos: El museo nacional de México, 1790–1925.” (Doctoral thesis in history, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City.) Morse, Richard M. 1995. Resonancias del Nuevo Mundo: Cultura e ideolgoía en América Latina. Mexico City: Vuelta. O’Gorman, Edmundo. 1969 [1967]. La supervivencia política novo-hispana: Reflexiones sobre el monarquismo mexicano. Mexico City: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México, Condumex.

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Olson, David R. 1998. El mundo sobre el papel: Ei impacto de la escritura y la lectura en la estructura del conocimiento. Barcelona: Gedisa. Ricoeur, Paul. 1996 [1985]. Tiempo y narración. Vol. 3, El tiempo narrado. Mexico City: Siglo XXI. Rodríguez, Martha. 1998. La guerra entre bárbaros civilizados: El exterminio del nómada en Coahuila, 1840–1880. Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico: Centro de Estudios Sociales y Humanísticos A.C. Rozat, Guy. 2001. Los orígenes de la nación: Pasado indígena e historia nacional. Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana. Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de. 1989. Historia de las cosas de Nueva España. Vol. 1, Introduction, paleography, glossary, and notes by Alfredo López Austin and Josefina García Quintana. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes/Alianza. Taylor, William B. 1999. Ministros de lo sagrado: Sacerdotes y feligreses en el México del siglo XVIII. Translated by Oscar Mazín and Paul Kersey. Vol. I. Mexico City: Colegio de Michoacán (Secretaría de Gobernación/Colegio de México).

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chapter four

Mapping Oppositions Enchanted Spaces and Modern Places Saurabh Dube

B

y critically considering colonial cultures and vernacular mo dernities in conjunction with each other, this book seeks to thinks through some of the settled stipulations of debate, inherited terms of dialogue, in discussions of colony and modernity. My short article forms part of this larger endeavor. It points toward the provision and the play of “enchanted” places and “modern” spaces at the heart of dominant “metageographies”—the sets of spatial imaginings and structured dispositions through which the world is sequestered and segmented, and the knowledge of these realms is orchestrated and ordered.1 The cartographies of enchanted spaces in question have been shored up and shaped by the visions of a universal history. The topographies of modern places being discussed are animated and articulated by the provisions of historical progress.2 Ever conjoint, these categories and conceptions have a broad provenance, a wide reach. Indeed, variously connected to colonial encounters, imperial entanglements, and global enmeshments, the resilient representations of such mappings have played a critical role in the imagination and the institution of both the modern disciplines and the contemporary world. Therefore, let me open these considerations by describing an academic conference—a learned symposium in an enchanted space, a modern place, Heidelberg.3

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OVERTURE Heidelberg is a beautiful town with a character all its own. A place in history, it offers a rare site to discuss realms of knowledge and deliberate boundaries of disciplines. The marvelously restored Wissenschaftsforum, located at a quiet end of the Hauptstrasse, in the shadow of the Schloss (castle) that dominates the old town, overlooks the “philosopher’s way” on the other side of the river Neckar. Here scholars of the sciences and savants of the humanities gather several times a year for colloquia and conferences. The early summer of 1997 was no different. In the third week of June, soon after the end of a workshop on plasticity in the physical sciences, scholars and students from far and near converged on Heidelberg to deliberate the contours, continuities, and changes in the study of state and society and religion and culture in eastern India. The weather in Heidelberg is truly unpredictable. Even as the suitcases of the workshop participants were being unpacked, a cheerful sun gave way to grayness, and it began to drizzle on the university and tourist town. Shapeless and relentlessly dark clouds overwhelmed Heidelberg. Over the four days of the colloquium the drizzle turned into rain, and sometimes it poured. There were puddles in corners. There were streams on the streets. There was dank love in town. But nothing disturbed the calm purpose of the academics gathered in the Wissenschaftsforum. The conference, I am happy to report, proceeded according to plan. Talks were delivered, presentations made, questions asked, points scored, and scores settled—not just in the seminar room but over the cold buffet at lunch, too. And variously happy and disgruntled seminarians and speakers mingled together in separate groups in the evenings over beer and wine. Don’t get me wrong. It was the stuff that most well-organized conferences are made up of. Why then do I dilate on Heidelberg and the colloquium, since all that seems at stake are minor variations on a familiar theme? Actually, there is a purpose. On the afternoon of the second day of the colloquium on eastern India, there were two immaculately presented papers. The first was on communication with ancestors among the Soara indigenous group, and the second was on ritual and reincarnation among the indigenous Gadabas. During the two presentations, I found myself thinking about the anthropologist’s place as pioneer and traveler, emerging from modern places and traversing enchanted spaces.4

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The first presentation on wall paintings in Soara huts—drawn to communicate with their ancestors—began with the invocation of a journey. This journey carried the scholars of the Soara way of life to their destination. The description of a five-hour trek through difficult terrain to reach the highland peoples actually reminded me of tropes that had ordered missionary travels through treacherous territory in central India in the 1860s. If the first missionary in central India was served refreshments by an untouchable guru, our intrepid traveling scholars had to share the local hooch with the tribal folk.5 The liquor was drunk with a wince but no major qualms, all in the interest of ethnographic research, we were disarmingly told. The pain evinced at the disappearing “tradition” of wall paintings among the Soaras evoked the paternalism—albeit in a different guise—that had shaped evangelical vision and practice in central India The Soaras, too, were like children, far removed from the rational and objective thought of the West. However, unlike the earlier missionary desire to guide, nurture, and control their wards within the confines of a paternalist enterprise, now the scholar’s plea was to save the Soaras. More precisely, the ethnologist’s call was to protect the wall-painting tradition of the guileless Soaras from the relentless march of modernity, represented acutely (if ironically) by the presence of Baptist missionaries in the region. Through the presentation, the crucial presence in Soara wall paintings of cars and jeeps, planes and helicopters (as the slides we were shown illustrated) merely signified the adaptability of the aesthetic of tradition, now animated by the primitive’s juvenile propensity to draw on all objects of wonder from the West. What did not enter the scholarly picture were the many ways in which these symbols of the power of the Indian state and the signs of domination of local superordinates were at once creatively appropriated and critically reworked by the Saoras to (re)draw in their wall paintings the relationship between life and death, the netherwolrd and the domains above. During the discussion that followed this paper, a participant brought up the bleak landscape of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, The Sacrifice, remarkably Lutheran in appearance. In the midst of this decor, at the end of the film, a small boy puts a question to his towering father. Not with the wonder of beginnings, nor with the foreboding of ends, but rather with the acceptance of what has come to pass, the child asks, “In the beginning was the Word. Why was that Father?” The participant wondered: Could not the lush landscape of

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the Saoras serve as a measure of distance and difference in the work of the Word? Was not the Word carried to southern Orissa by Baptist missionaries reinterpreted and reworked by the Saoras from rather different beginnings and toward different ends? (Or as John Hutnyk, an anthropologist of a different stripe, put it more privately: What prevented the Saoras from smuggling a tiny image of baby Jesus into their wall paintings?) The answer was a studied and sardonic silence. The second paper of the afternoon followed a somewhat different course. Focusing on ritual and reincarnation among the Adivasi Gadabas in southern Orissa, the presenter undergirded his elaboration of these issues with a modulation of voice and a manner of writing that ceaselessly drew together nature and culture. Although the two were set up as analytical oppositions in the formal framework of the paper, nature and culture were collapsed together in the actual narrative of the presentation. The transcendental voice and immaculate vision of the ethnologist orchestrated the connected and disparate aspects of ritual and reincarnation among the Gadabas. There was little in the description to distinguish between the manner of death of buffaloes as they were ceremonially sacrificed and the ways of life of the Gadabas as they negotiated the presence of an intrusive state and an alien ethnographer. Indeed, the ethnologist’s writing and speech moved seamlessly between a (ritual) description of drama and a (reincarnated) drama of description as it traversed the moves and maneuvers of the Gadabas, a community that was articulated as an individuated collectivity. The place and the position of the ethnographer as author and witness were erased from a landscape populated by groups of buffaloes and herds of men, where women merely oscillated as vectors of a masculinist logic of kinship defined by male bride givers and male bride takers. The circle was fully drawn. POSTCOLONIAL PROPOSITIONS How are we do disorient this circle? Can postcolonial propositions— understood neither as a favored category of knowledge nor as indicative of a settled stage of history, but rather as a critical perspective among other such orientations—play a role here? Now, the beast of postcoloniality is a curious creature. In order to indicate the nature of this beast, and to suggest what it might have to say on the issues under discussion, I turn to a text that has with reason acquired a

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seminal status in contemporary discussions of postcoloniality: Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” (1992). In this piece, implicitly at the very least, Chakrabarty’s point of departure is Martin Heiddeger’s “second Copernican revolution,” interrogating the artifice of a meaning-legislating reason by revealing the capacity of “existence to project its most proper possibilities inside the fundamental situation of being in the world.” Here, understanding comes to be recognized as “the mode of being before defining the mode of knowing,” whereby in the understanding of history, for example, “the consciousness of being exposed to the labors of history precedes the objectifications of documentary historiography.”6 Focusing on “history” as a discourse that is produced at the institutional site of the university, Chakrabarty makes a compelling case for the ways in which Europe remains the sovereign subject of all histories. In other words, what are designated in academic arenas and quotidian spaces as “Indian” or “Brazilian” or “Mexican” histories are variations on a master theme that can be called the “history of Europe.” Here Chakrabarty admits that Europe—and India and Mexico—are “hyperreal” terms that refer to certain figures of the imagination. At the same time, the essay critically points toward how a certain version of “Europe” ceaselessly circulates as the primary habitus of the “modern.” Reified and celebrated in the “phenomenal world of everyday relationship of power” (Chakrabarty 1992, 6), Europe is instituted and enshrined as the site and scene of the birth of the modern, working as a silent referent that dominates the discourse of history. The essay works through critical readings and imaginative renderings of European philosophy (Husserl and Marx), Indian writing in English (Michael Madhusudan Dutta and Nirad Chaudhari), British colonial representations (Alexander Dow and James Mill), and radical South Asian histories (the Subaltern Studies endeavor). Thereby, Chakrabarty unravels the consequences of the theoretical privileging of Europe as the universal centerpiece of modernity and history. In a word, the histories of India or Mexico or Venezuela come to be cast in terms of irrevocable principles of failure, lack, and absence, since they are always already measured against the West.7 There is much to ponder in these arguments, to reconsider in these formulations, to revise in this understanding. Yet the critical emphasis that I derive from Chakrabarty’s essay stresses the importance of querying the unsaid of academic disciplines and interrogating the

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unthought of intellectual-political positions. I will extend this emphasis to the issues under discussion, casting my net fairly wide. THE ENCHANTED AND THE MODERN For a very long time now, in Western spaces and in non-Western arenas, dominant understandings of patterns of the past and influential conceptions of designs of societies have been shaped by their separation of traditional communities, on the one hand, from modern societies, on the other. These antinomies are at once a lasting legacy of the European Enlightenment’s idea of universal history and an aggrandizing representation of a Western modernity, each seeking to remake the world in its singular image.8 Over time, this analytical and ideological separation has been variously elaborated in post-Enlightenment traditions (and contemporary scholarship) and differently reworked within non-Western modernities (and current critiques of the West). On offer here have been diverse castigations and celebrations of tradition and distinct reifications and rejections of modernity. Yet these disparate positions have been bound to each other through their implicit reliance upon and explicit reproduction of overriding oppositions—between tradition and modernity, ritual and rationality, myth and history, community and state, magic and the modern, emotion and reason (see, e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Coronil 1997; Dube 1998; Taussig 1987 and 1992; see also Brown 1959; and Taussig 1997). While broadly homologous to each other, these oppositions have been expressed in various permutations and diverse combinations. Simultaneously, their constitutive elements have been imbued with contradictory value and contrary salience. More pertinently, the formative agendas of the disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences can be seen as having been predicated upon these binaries. Aware of the complex genealogies of disciplines in the humanities, and appreciative of the dense stemma of development in the social sciences, I speak here of broad orientations of modern learning toward the social world, particularly over the past century. On the one hand, key conceptions of religions (and anthropology, as the study of the irremediable other) long favored the study of ritual, magic, and myth, as marked off from the modern. On the other hand, influential understandings of politics (and history, cast in the image of a hard social science) directed toward modern states, rational individuals,

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maximization of interests, and linear chronologies continued to take the opposite route.9 At the same time, the terms thus exorcised or undervalued by disciplinary distinctions and scientific strategies did not lose their spectral place and transcendental presence in defining the division of labor between disciplines. Rather, they tended to hold in place (and to place on hold) the sanctioned dispositions (and the transgressive ambitions) within disciplines. Mutually shaping each other, the absent elements and the present terms of the binaries of social theory at once animated and were orchestrated by a master blueprint of past, present, and posterity, shaped around the polarities of enchanted spaces and modern places. These enduring enchantments persist in the here and now. Far from being mere building blocks for symbolically charged but normatively benign representations solely within academe, these authoritative antinomies have occupied an influential place and an insidious presence in fabrications of traditions and makings of modernities in Western spaces and non-Western places. After all, the Ur-narratives in which these binaries are embedded were motivated projects “not simply of looking and recording but of recording and remaking” the world in their likeness of universal history and their image of a singular modernity (Asad 1993, 269). Here cultural differences were rendered in terms of principles of order and stages of succession to be turned into hierarchies of otherness, which were variously exotic and erotic, durable and dangerous. At the same time, invocations of a common humanity often contained the dialectic of race and reason, which served, for example, to issue a challenge to slavery but also to speak through categories of the barbaric or the “primitive” and the cultured or the “civilized” (see, for example, Hartman 1997; Mehta 1997; and Prakash 1990; see also Trouillot 1991). Meanwhile, in non-Western theatres, to take but one example, anticolonial nationalisms reworked Enlightenment principles and Western knowledges to creatively translate and actively transform the ideals of the sovereign nation and the free citizen by mapping them onto powerful constructions of the subjugated homeland and the colonized subject. Here the nation could be elaborated in diverse communitarian ways. Taken together, such pasts and constructions question singular and univocal Eurocentric conceptions of nations and nationalisms (see, for example, Amin 1996; Chatterjee 1993; and Prakash 1999).

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At the same time, however, these communitarian imaginings of the nation and dominant visions of the modern state in the nonWestern world bear critical readings. For they have been both crucially shaped by the influential binaries at the heart of narratives of universal history and Western modernity (Chatterjee 1993; Prakash 1999).10 Nor should it surprise us that the idea of universal history and the image of a reified modernity, in reordered and different guises, continue to lead a charmed life in the twenty-first century. Elaborating novel versions of hierarchies of otherness even as they transform critical difference into mind-numbing sameness, this idea and this image have diverse manifestations. They work together in diverse but linked domains, from the movements of transnational capital through global markets, to the policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to the programs of third-world modernization, to the uncritical celebrations of a brave new world of globalized cultures and hybrid identities, to the militarist-masculinist agendas of the Hindu Bomb and the Islamic Bomb. These different endeavors and diverse ideologies all lay claims to an aggressive likeness of modernity in the mirror of a reified West. Here modernity is rendered and represented as a self-realizing project of progress and a self-evident embodiment of development. In a word, modernity inexorably propels states and societies from a traditional (and colonial) past to a modern (and postcolonial) present, and increasingly into a postmodern (and global) future-present, where this path marks both the trajectory and the end of universal history.11 Now, my schematic survey of the effects and affects of overriding opposition is not meant to suggest that the “foundations” of these dualisms in the ideological image of Western modernity exhaust the range of meanings of human action and scholarship that have animated these antinomies.12 Nor does this brief sketch imply that the “origins” of these designs of the past in the Enlightenment idea of universal history consign to a rubbish heap the varieties of historical practice and writing that have been trapped within this telos of progress. To do so would be to exorcise from imagination and understanding diverse human energies and enormous historical passions that I cannot even begin to recount here. It would also be to adopt facile strains of contemporary anti-Enlightenment rhetoric that reject the (so far, largely unrealized) positive possibilities of democracy and modernity, including their critical rethinking, leaving in their place an elitist nihilism. It might even be to confer guilt on people on the grounds of their racial/national origin through an academic politics

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of victimhood, an ethically pernicious move that is also beside the point. I am suggesting rather that the implications of these binaries and the seductions of this blueprint have constituted aspects of the unsaid and the unthought of academic disciplines and reigning metageographies. They inculcate dispositions toward mapping modern peoples and places as being in history and charting traditional communities and customs as being out of time. They cultivate inclinations toward plotting native peoples as being in their passage to progress, the grand transition from enchantment to disenchantment, from tradition to modernity. They generate sensibilities toward rendering “authentic” communities as changeless and entranced, already before history and always beyond the modern. They foster fondness for reifications of a singular modernity, as magical Midas or beastly Behemoth. They spawn sentiments for envisionings of a seamless community, as embodied virtue or as inconvenient impediment. There are many moves here, but the various images reflect each other. GAMES It is perhaps in order, therefore, that I turn to a concrete example of the manner in which enduring representations of enchanted spaces and modern places exercise their seductions in the here and now, playing a critical role in the contemporary politics of culture. Elsewhere (Dube 2004), I point toward the persistence of such mappings in political productions and cultural constructions as apparently diverse as the media coverage of the Gulf War, Kevin Costner’s blockbuster Dances with Wolves, the striking New Zealand film Once Were Warriors, and Stanley Kubrick’s swan song, Eyes Wide Shut. Here I discuss how the Sydney Olympic Games opening ceremony, a media extravaganza with wide implications, coupled the enchanted and the modern in its projection of the past and the present. Witnessed by millions of television viewers around the world, the opening ceremony of the Sydney Games hinged on history, a vision of antiquity and an optic of posterity held in place by the phantasm of progress—an idea and an imagining, singular and universal. The show began with primordial images, first of fire and then of flowers, the desert landscape and the aboriginal lifeways in perfect harmony with each other, nature and culture collapsed together, a primitivist fantasy of visual rhythms and colorful cadences. To conjure this perfect past was to signal its eventual destruction.

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Captain Cook and English voyagers soon sailed into the arena, binoculars in hand, discovery in mind. Here there was no riposte to, little questioning of, colonial journeys. At least, not yet. Pilgrim forbears and adventuring ancestors command veneration. But then colonialism appeared, in the form of an ungainly beast, a mechanical monster that betokened an iron cage, traversing and transforming a faultless terrain, breaching and breaking with a perfect past. At once a finished maneuver of domination and a totalized term of power, colonialism was thus cast as uniformly efficacious, a clumsy but coordinated system that brooked no obstacle. Not surprisingly, untarnished innocence in the present saw through the colonial devastation of the past by being apart from, suspended above, its pathetic trajectory. Precisely as the colonial behemoth moved through the middle of the Olympic stadium, a little child in virginal white was lifted into the Sydney sky. Hovering weightlessly above the spectacle of destruction enacted before her eyes, the celestial vision and the ethereal perspective of the child established guilelessness and virtue. On the one hand, the scene suggested that Western purity and European innocence were essential attributes of empire, particularly considering the place of the little girl gazing on this past, her position on history as it happened. On the other hand, the apparition underscored that colonialism in the present was a fleeting matter of an ambivalent history, totally repudiated today. The incorruptible child descended to earth to offer the colonial beast an apple. Peace was made with the past. The colonial moment was banished from the historical stage. Now margins moved to the center. The cultural minorities of a multicultural down under announced their presence. The panorama was made up of several, distinct scenes. Brightly clad in “traditional” costumes and bearing the signs of “native” guise, the first inhabitants of the continent and the recent migrants to Australia sang, danced, and laughed, separately but together. This was in tune with authoritative understandings of the culture-concept (Dube 2004). Thus, the body of culture came to dwell in dress and dance, its heart to reside in color and costume, its soul to inhere in myth and music, all enacted under the sign of the state, the mark of the majority. The minority cultures were many. The multicultural nation was one. The severalty secured the singularity. The singularity stipulated the severalty. Not only unity in diversity, but also diversity in unity—contingent upon the imperatives of the nation, complicit with the terms of the state, and predicated upon the provisions of progress.

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This idea of improvement, a palpable passage founded upon anterior advancements, found its culmination in the last tableau. Here progress kicked in through the depiction of hard-working. Australians constructing a novel present and a new future. Hard hats on their heads, visors shielding their faces, and tools in their hands, a young antipodal generation engendered a present and presented a posterity that was technologically sophisticated and materially handy. In the final scenario in the Sydney stadium, these cherished ideals were shaped by majoritarian premises and populist representations of an industrious nation and a productive people—mainly working-class and predominantly white. What do we learn from the diverse tableaus and the singular strand of this media spectacle? On the one hand, following the imperatives of the multicultural nation, culture was shaped to signal issues of (the) minority, contained within reifications of tradition and community— enchanted spaces. On the other hand, in tune with the determinations of statist progress, history was made to signify attributes of (the) majority, concatenated within representations of modernity and nation—modern places. But this is not all. It is the precise separation of the enchanted and the modern, the reason of difference, which served to crucially conjoin these two metaphors and arenas in the passage of progress, the fetish of singularity.13 The opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games was not an exotic exception or a rational rarity. In its own way, the ritual simply brought together the persistent affinities between difference/distinction and singularity/sameness— animated by historical progress (incorporating culture and nation) and articulated by universal history (aggregating community and state)— that is to say, enchanted spaces and modern places. And so we return to Heidelberg. In the case of the two performances that initiated this chapter we are truly in the presence of the timeless primitive, the enchanted native. Yet, as I have argued, these two presentations are not mere exceptions. Actually, the problem has deep roots. For a very long time now, mired as we have been in colonial, postcolonial, and Western modernities, our thinking has been governed by the oppositions and binaries discussed above. To think through these antinomies is to seek to elaborate an alternative space beyond two influential and competing conceptions, questioning dominant Eurocentric imaginings without succumbing to facile strains of antiEnlightenment rhetoric in Western theatres and non-Western arenas (for examples of this effort see, e.g., Bhabha 1994; Herzfeld 1997; and Dube 1998). Easier said than done.

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Therefore, toward this end, let me ask three questions. Behind diverse theoretical frameworks, what implicit cartographies of enchanted spaces and modern places authorize different but common conceptions of colony and culture? Beyond particular subject positions, what underlying mappings of the sacral and the temporal speak through the several specific analyses of modernity and history? In other words, what anterior idea and which prior image imbue representations of history and modernity, colony and culture with the distinction of voice and the privilege of vision? CODA There is reason behind my posing these questions.14 It should be evident that the cartographies of enchanted spaces and modern places discussed above simultaneously turn upon assertions of historical identity—in the sense of sameness in modular imaginings of history— and the fetish of cultural difference. Now, beyond statist schemes, stagist spectacles, and stilted scholarship, influential strands of critical writing can themselves posit difference as an ethical a priori, a cure to reason and an answer to power. My response here concerns a twin endeavor. On the one hand, precisely having learned much from critiques of legislative reason and aggrandizing analytics, I seek to highlight the importance of questioning assumptions of historical identity—of interrogating modular designs of the past, present, and posterity—recognizing the salience of critical difference. On the other hand, I wish to suggest that to privilege difference or alterity might be to reinstate the dualities of history versus difference, power versus alterity. In concluding, therefore, let me emphasize that the critical stance of this chapter has not simply been directed toward sometimes shadowy but frequently palpable positions and propositions that at once endorse sameness in universal designs of history and fetishize difference in the exotic parade of cultures. Rather, I also wish to register that quite often in critical analysis the force of power—for instance, the terms of colony and nation, the imperatives of modernity and globalization—can appear as a totalized terrain, a dystopic totality. It follows that not infrequently within radical understandings the work of difference tends to be articulated as an unrecuperated particular, split apart from power. It is precisely here that I wonder about different possibilities of reading and writing.15 I speak of understanding that attends to the spirit and sensibilities of critical thought that is ever suspicious of totalizing power and

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legislative reason, but analyses that do not succumb to the tendency to render the “despised totality” as monolithic. Such moves question the projection of power as “totalized terrain” and eschew the “celebration of difference wherever it appears,” even as they reject the autonomy and integrity of the singular subject and the identity and sameness of history. They position themselves alongside but also apart from influential tendencies that reproduce heterogentiy as “unrecuperated particulars,” the antidote to the terms of power.16 They argue rather for the constitution of subjects within social relationships, defined by provisions of meaning and shaped within crucibles of power. Instead of submitting to the idea of difference as a priori inclusive intactness, ahead of the work of reason and in front of the productivity of power, the terms of heterogeneity are thus sown in the substance of the constitution and the practice of social subjects. If the constitutive practices of social subjects are embedded within and enacted through the density of meaning and the gravity of power, such modalities of meaning and profiles of power are rarely finished, ever subject to distinction, deferral, and displacement. Here it is important to trace the impassioned interest, incessant instability, and agonistic ambivalence at the heart of dominant projects of meaning and power. But it is equally essential to recognize that such operations are tied to the contradictory and constitutive actions of social subjects. In practice, spectacular recalcitrance can be conjoined with terms of power and quotidian routines can exceed dominant meanings, both subject to change and reworking, ever marked by possibilities of the intonations of older truths and the inflections of newer varieties. Before the constant clamour for autonomy and agency, the very definitions of democracy, meanings of modernity, and purposes of pluralism cannot be separated from the inherently different formations of social subjects in inescapably heterogeneous worlds, shaped by the past and emergent in the present. Beyond vanguardist visions, technocratic blueprints, and scholarly conceit, the terms for realizing and/or rejecting the terms of modernity, plurality, and democracy rest upon ethics and politics that inhere in practices of social subjects in the here and now—tied to the past, turned to the present, and trafficking in the future. In other words, in exploring the interplay of power and difference— in thinking through the stipulations of enchanted spaces and modern places—I consider it imperative to enunciate the play of power within the labor of difference and to articulate the place of difference in the work of power, the two together, never separate, ever entwined.

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NOTES 1. I borrow the term metageographies from Lewis and Wigen 1997, extending and using it in distinct ways. 2. Two clarifications are in order from the outset. First, although it may appear that I use space and place interchangeably in this essay, the terms have distinct meanings. In general, the tendency is to deploy place to refer to a particular, determinate locale, while space connotes an idea and/or entity that is at once more abstract and more developed. Following such usage, one would speak of “enchanted places” and “modern spaces.” Instead, I wish to put a question mark on the telos entailed by such measures, and to emphasize rather the dense interconnectedness between the abstract and the concrete in the naming of places and spaces. Therefore, I speak here of enchanted spaces and modern places. Second, as I will discuss, such mappings are connected to dominant apprehensions of the “disenchantment of the world,” which constitutes the watershed between custom-bound “tradition” and rationality-driven “modernity.” (Indeed, these authoritative apprehensions need to be understood as constituting the horizon of the modern, whether in scholarly schemes or in commonplace conceptions.) This means that the enchantments of enchanted spaces certainly refer to a happy, fairy-tale universe within, say, nativist, primitivist, and (certain) antimodernist understandings, but they equally connote superstition and backwardness, or the precise other of reason that forms part of the “coloniality of power” in Aníbal Quijano’s (1999) formulation. By the same token, for some centuries now the modern of modern places has been construed as a privileged terrain acutely reflecting the bright light of reason or/and Western civilization, and it has been instituted as the fundamental fall of humanity under modernity. This essay discusses how the antithetical usages and contending elaborations of enchanted spaces and modern places are bound to each other, revealing the constitutive conjunctions between these charged antimonies. 3. Parts of this essay recall materials and arguments presented at different moments in Dube 2004, rearranged and reframed here for the purposes of my discussion. 4. Lest it appear that I am concealing my interlocutors behind the cloak of anonymity to surreptitiously further my own ends, allow me to introduce the authors of the papers under discussion. The first presentation has now appeared in print as Mallebrein 2001; the second as Pfeffer 2001. It is a testimony to the innate diversity of scholarship that the book in which both these essays appear is nonetheless an excellent one. 5. On the missionaries and mandarins invoked here, see, for example, Dube 1999a. 6. The exegesis is that of Paul Ricoeur, cited in Bauman 1992, ix–x.

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7. Questioning the telos that makes all modernities and distinct histories appear the same, these arguments form part of what Chakrabarty (1992) defined as the project of “provincializing Europe.” First, this project is not a call for a simplistic rejection of modernity and science, reason and liberal values. Nor is it a plea for cultural relativism or the construction of a new nativism. Rather, the project of provincializng Europe entails the recognition that Europe’s acquisition of its status as the foundational seat of the modern is an outcome of the dialectic between European Enlightenment and Western empire(s). Second, this project is premised upon the understanding that the equation of a certain version of Europe with authoritative visions of a singular modernity is a product of the joint energies of Western projects of progress and the modernizing ideologies of third-world nationalisms. Third, to provincialize Europe is to write into the history of modernity its attendant ambivalences and contradictions, violence and terror, ironies and tragedies, including not just the empowerment of marginal group through sovereign states but equally, the undemocratic foundations of democracy. Fourth and finally, this project embodies what Chakrabarty has called a “politics of despair.” In other words, “a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own representative strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with narratives of citizenship in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibilities of human solidarity” (Chakrabarty 1992, 23). The task of provincializing Europe points toward imaginings of the world as radically heterogenous, pluralizing too the many contradictory and checkered modernities of human histories over the past few centuries. It also bears emphasizing that against the grain of dominant imaginings of Indian history as an incomplete transition to modernity, Chakrabarty (1992, 11) rehearses a “chapter in the history of bourgeois domesticity” in colonial Bengal. The essay shows that the engagement of the Indian middle class with the project of modernity ushered in by the British Empire exceeded the trichotomous ideational division of modern political structures—into state, civil society, and family. At stake here were challenges and modifications to the fundamental tenets of the nuclear family based on companionate marriage, on the one hand, and the secular, historicist construction of time, on the other. A longer discussion of these issues is contained in Dube 1999b, part of a volume that also includes a Spanish translation of Chakrabarty’s (1992) seminal essay. For a revised assessment of his own earlier views on “the politics of despair,” see Chakrabarty 2000, 46; and Chakrabarty 2002. 8. To trace in this manner the play of the oppositions under discussion is not to suggest that modernity begins only in the latter half of the

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eighteenth century in “North Europe,” which ignores the critical presence of an anterior Spain, a prior Portugal, and the “New World” in formations of what is described by Walter Mignolo as the “modern/ colonial world” or by Enrique Dussel as the moment of the “first modernity.” Nor is it to overlook the fact that related antinomies— for example, between the barbaric and the civilized—formed part precisely of the “modern/colonial world” since the sixteenth century, a point implied by Quijano’s notion that the “coloniality of power” is central to this terrain. Indeed, it would be interesting to explore, for example, the stipulations of exclusion that defined the “coloniality of power” within the “first modernity” in conjunction with the “liberal strategies of exclusion” that Uday Mehta discusses as fundamental to nineteenth-century British India. Here it would be important to keep in view the connections as well as the disjunctions of the terms, criteria, and imperatives of “exclusion” in these distinct contexts, particularly of the ways in which the very “exclusions” of different colonial projects were variously premised upon civilizing the colonized, thereby “including” these subjects through particular procedures in emergent hierarchies of otherness and civilization. My effort in this essay is to show how certain dualities in their distilled form have haunted mappings of the world over the past two centuries, and given the nature of the exercise I confess to not having examined the transformations over time of the enchanted and the modern. See Enrique Dussel’s contribution to this special issue; as well as Mignolo 2000; Quijano 1999; and Mehta 1999. 9. This is not to deny important exceptions within and significant overlaps across these academic endeavors or to overlook the significant changes that have been under way in humanist and social scientific conceptions. Rather, I seek only to indicate the wider formative orientations and broader founding dispositions of these disciplines, with lasting legacies over time. Moreover, it bears pointing out that the enduring binaries under discussion have critically informed analyses of religions in the modern West, founded on the dominant assumption that since the Christian Reformation, in the modern West, religion has undergone a profound transformation, becoming a largely tolerant and broadly private affair. Here the traditions, rituals, and beliefs of these religions in the West have been often implicitly cast as at once outside of and encompassed by processes of modernity, disenchantment (of knowledge), and secularization. Finally, approaches inclined toward establishing a “universal grammar of religions” have tended to mark out a separate domain of the “sacred,” before and beyond all that lies outside this heuristically privileged domain; Asad 1993; McCutheon 1997. See also van der Veer and Lehmann 1999.

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10. At the same time, it seems to me, both Chatterjee and Prakash tend to underplay the critical implications of the presence of such binaries. 11. Some of these questions are discussed in interesting ways in McClintock 1995. 12. Indeed, many of the issues that I am raising here find critical elaboration in Dube 2002. 13. Arguably, such conjunction was also evident in the ceremonial bearing of the Olympic torch by Australian women athletes and the eventual lighting of the Olymptic flame by Kathy Freeman, an athlete of aboriginal ancestry—the last an enormously touching if token and troubling gesture. 14. I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting that I further spell out the implications of my arguments in this essay. 15. Further developments of these arguments and emphases are contained in Dube 2004, esp. chap. 1. 16. The terms in quotation marks all come from McGowan 1991; see esp. 15–16.

REFERENCES Amin, Shahid. 1996. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992. Berkeley: University of California Press. Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1992. Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Brown, Norman. 1959. Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1992. “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History. Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations 37:1–26. . 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. . 2002. “Presence of Europe.” Interview by Saurabh Dube. In Dube 2002. Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Comaroff, John, and Jean Comaroff, 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder, CO: Westview. Coronil, Fernando. 1997. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dube, Saurabh. 1998. Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity, and Power among a Central Indian Community, 1780–1950. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. . 1999a. “Travelling Light: Missionary Musings, Colonial Cultures, and Anthropological Anxieties.” In Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary

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Cultural Politics, edited by Raminder Kaur and John Hutnyk. London: Zed. . 1999b. “Introducción: Temas y intersecciones en los pasados poscoloniales.” In Pasados poscoloniales: Colección de ensayos sobre la nueva historia y etnografia de la India, edited by Saurabh Dube. Mexico City: El Colegio de México. , ed. 2002. Enduring Enchantments. Special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4. . 2004. Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hartman, Saidiya H. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Herzfeld, Michael. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge. Lewis, Martin, and Karen Wigen. 1997. The Myth of the Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mallebrein, Cornelia. 2001. “Constructing a ‘House within the House’: Reading the Wall-Paintings of the Lanija Sora from Recitations.” In Jagannath Revisited: Studying Society, Religion, and the State in Orissa, edited by Hermann Kulke and Burkhard Schnepel. Delhi: Manohar. McClintock, Ann. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. McCutheon, Russell. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press. McGowan, John. Postmodernism and Its Critics. 1991. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mehta, Uday. 1997. “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion.” In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 1999. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pfeffer, Georg. 2001. “A Ritual of Revival among the Gadabas of Koraput.” In Jagannath Revisited: Studying Society, Religion, and State in Orissa, edited by Hermann Kulke and Burkhard Schnepel. New Delhi: Manohar. Prakash, Gyan. 1990. Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labour Servitude in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 1999. Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Quijano, Aníbal. 1999. “Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina.” In Pensar (en) los intersticios: Teoría y práctica de la crîtica poscolonial, edited by Santiago Castro-Gómez et al. Bogotá: CEJA.

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Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1992. The Nervous System. New York: Routledge. . 1997. The Magic of the State. London: Routledge. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard J. Fox. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Van der Veer, Peter, and Hartmut Lehmann, eds. 1999. Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

chapter five

Postmodern Geographies of the U.S. South Madhu Dubey

I

n a 1990 essay, Cornel West identifies a key shift in U.S. cultural politics since the 1960s, the era widely termed “postmodern,” arguing that the “new cultural politics of difference” is distinguished by its emphasis on particularity and diversity as part of a reaction against the universalizing bent of modern politics (19). Drawing on West, Edward Soja and Barbara Hooper assert, in “The Spaces That Difference Makes” (1993, 184), that the emphasis on locally based micropolitics is a defining feature of the postmodern turn in U.S. culture, and that a renewed focus on spatiality is central to this politics. The postmodern emphasis on space is intended to highlight the situated nature of all political knowledge and action, and to disavow the view from nowhere—the global and disembedded claims of modern knowledge and politics. It is not surprising that postmodern cultural politics takes space rather than time as the dimension within which social differences can be made visible and active, given that the self-definition of European modernity has monopolized time, subsuming varied histories into a singular and teleological narrative of History. The hitherto underprivileged category of space offers a way of interrupting modernity’s global march as well as of restoring the divergent histories that have contributed to the modern legacy. The renewed interest in the regional specificity of the U.S. South in recent years offers an instance of this kind of spatialized cultural politics of difference. Since the mid-1970s, U.S. historians, sociologists, novelists, literary critics, and cultural commentators seem to

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have become obsessed with the South, reviving the enduring debate about what makes the region distinct from the rest of the nation. In this essay, I examine the turn south in U.S. postmodern culture as a distinct response to recent processes of economic and political modernization that are dramatically transforming the region. Using southern regionalism as a test case, I also attempt to draw out the political implications of the spatialized cultural politics of difference said to be distinctive of the postmodern era. As West and Soja and Hooper suggest, one of the defining features of postmodern culture is its thoroughgoing critique of socioeconomic processes of modernization as well as universalizing ideologies of modernity. Accordingly, movements to establish southern difference typically construct the region as a premodern or not quite fully modern space that can ground social and cultural critiques of modernity. One reason the South can function in this way is that it has remained more rural and less thoroughly industrialized than the rest of the nation for most of its history. The region’s status as a hinterland left behind by uneven national processes of modernization bolsters contemporary claims that the South constitutes an “elsewhere” to a fully globalized capitalist system. In all instances of southern regionalism, across various disciplines, the South is represented as a nucleus of certain values that are pitted against modern existence: localism or rootedness in place, close-knit racial communities, face-to-face forms of social interaction, and folk-cultural traditions. This cluster of values is clearly displayed in Why the South Will Survive, a collection of essays by “Fifteen Southerners” published in 1981. Asserting that the South has special lessons to teach a nation caught up in a giddy pursuit of material progress, most of the contributors portray the region as a place of refuge from the alienating and fragmenting conditions of modern U.S. life. In order to function in this way, the South must be characterized as a primarily rural region. William Havard (1981, 39) thus argues that, because the South was “arrested in a preindustrial state for the greater part of America’s century of ‘modern development,’” it has managed to preserve unique traits that may prove greatly valuable to a nation hurtling into a “postindustrial” era. Havard identifies these regional traits as a strong sense of place and history, emphasis on family and local community, and preference for “face to face” over abstract and contractual social relations (41). Accounts of southern cultural difference typically highlight localism and face-to-face communal orientation as the main features that set the region apart from the rest of the nation. These are the two features

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broadly perceived to be most seriously at risk today, when all locales and social relations are more thoroughly imbricated than ever before in a global economic order that can only be known as an abstraction. As one of the most passionate advocates of southern regionalism, John Shelton Reed (1981, 21), acknowledges, the southern values of localism and community are those typical of any “folk,” “peasant,” or “pre-modern” society with a “traditional value orientation,” and are bound to be menaced by the processes of urbanization and industrial development. For the South to operate as an Archimedean lever for social critique, it must be discursively constructed as a zone of arrested social and economic development. This sort of construction of the South—as a residual rural space— can only be maintained at a discursive level, for exactly contemporaneous with culturalist assertions of southern regional specificity is the dissipation of material distinctions between the South and the rest of the nation. Economic studies of the South concur that since the mid-1970s virtually all economic indicators reveal a closing of the gap between the South and other regions of the country. Southern industrial development took off in the 1970s, aided by industrial decline in the Northeast and the Midwest, which spurred relocation of manufacturing to the South. Private capital was lured south by the promise of abundant natural resources, tax subsidies, cheap labor, and weak labor unions (Cobb 1984; Kasarda, Hughes, and Irwin 1991; Weinstein and Firestine 1978). James Cobb’s studies of the industrialization of the South provide an important corrective to the tendency, in accounts of southern distinctiveness, to hinge cultural value on economic underdevelopment. If the regionalists claim that southern backwardness in material matters translates into an antimaterialist cultural posture, Cobb (1984, 67) shows, to the contrary, that during the 1970s the “South found that its heritage of underdevelopment had suddenly become beneficial.” Precisely because of its relative underdevelopment, the South, like many parts of the third world, became a profitable new site for industrial relocation and capital investment. The southern economic boom of the 1970s hastened the region’s convergence with the rest of the nation, stoking all kinds of anxieties about “the Americanization of Dixie,” to borrow from the title of John Egerton’s (1974) well-known book. If claims of southern cultural distinctiveness typically rest on rural grounds, such claims became untenable by the end of the of the 1970s, by which time patterns of urbanization in the South had fallen in line with the rest of

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the nation. By 1980, two-thirds of the southern population lived in metropolitan areas, which had been the prime beneficiaries of the industrial boom. Not only did the South’s rapid urbanization compromise its agrarian-based cultural identity, but the very forms of southern urban development had begun to replicate northern trends of suburban sprawl and inner-city decay, further diminishing the South’s capacity to function as an elsewhere to contemporary urban existence (Boles 1995, 547–49: Miller 1988, 1–20; Larsen 1990, 140–59). In his lament for a disappearing Southern culture, Egerton (1974) equates “Americanization” with urbanization (73), which in turn he associates with a “steady erosion of the sense of place, of community, of belonging” (xx). Admitting that “the South is just about over as a separate and distinct place” (xxi), Egerton notes that the Americanization of Dixie is most visibly apparent in the urban centers of the South (109). Numerous other observers also have noted the dramatic transformations of southern landscape, architecture, and culture since the 1970s, pointing to the increased presence of shopping malls, apartment complexes, and skyscrapers as disturbing evidence of the standardization of the South (Grantham 1994, 262; Hobson 1981, 46). Of course, it is no accident that a resurgent regionalism celebrating the distinct folk culture of the South has emerged precisely as the South is becoming a fully industrialized and urban region. Accelerated economic changes, of the modernizing kind that have occurred in the South since the 1970s, often spark reactive quests to conserve cultural values associated with an older way of life. As Immanuel Wallerstein (1988, 12) has pointed out, movements affirming cultural differences usually accompany the integration of peripheral regions into the capitalist world-system: “many ‘cultures’ will be born or renewed in the decades ahead. The growing worldwide attacks on the capitalist system include attacks on the ‘universalist’ system of values which is used to sustain it. This encourages thereby the reassertion of ‘particularisms.” Accordingly, the idea of a culturally distinct South was “created as a mental construct only a short time before it was historically eliminated as a material construct” (11). David Harvey (1990) takes a much harsher stance than does Wallerstein toward the regional cultural politics that have mushroomed in recent years. Although Harvey is not concerned with the U.S. South in particular, he argues, like Wallerstein, that the global scale of capitalist reorganization since the 1970s has spawned cultural movements seeking to preserve the specificity of locale. The latest round of

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economic modernization has severely disrupted people’s experience of place; as all places are subsumed within a global economic order, no place can be understood instrinsically, immediately, or in purely local terms. Reacting to this increasing abstraction of space, cultural politics in the postmodern era are marked by regional resistances, or efforts to conserve values said to be rooted in particular places. Harvey is critical of this spatial turn in contemporary cultural politics because its quest for cultural conservation can all too easily veer into political conservatism. Nostalgic celebrations of old ways of life being swept away by economic modernization often enshrine traditions that supported deeply inequitable social orders, while emphasis on localism tends to breed cultural insularity and ethnic chauvinism (Harvey 1990, pt. 3). Harvey’s worries about the regional revivals of the postmodern era are well justified in the specific case of U.S. southern projects of cultural reclamation. The social and political conservatism implicit in most accounts of southern distinctiveness is made explicit in historian Eugene Genovese’s (1994) brief for maintaining the cultural traditions of the Old South. Genovese’s defense of the South follows the predictable track, pitting southern localism and community values against the increasing abstraction of social relations characteristic of the era of multinational capitalism. Genovese makes his case for localism in the context of “worldwide economic integration that is taking place under the aegis of multinational corporate conglomerations” (98). This process of global economic integration was certainly transforming the U.S. South in particularly dramatic ways during the 1970s, by which time the region claimed at least half of all foreign capital investment in the United States. A consequence of this process is “cosmopolitanism,” which Genovese fears is eradicating local communities and standards of cultural value (98). Among the factors that have contributed to the new cosmopolitanism of the South is the recent influx to Southern cities of immigrants from Asia and Latin America, spurred by economic expansion (Kasarda, Hughes, and Irwin 1991, 62–67). The increased presence of these racial minorities in the Sunbelt is radically changing southern urban politics. In contrast to the earlier southern political model based on a rigid biracial caste system and supported by violence, southern cities since the economic boom of the 1970s have begun to switch over to a northern model of competitive multiethnic politics (Baylor 1988, 127–42). Once we specify the bases and effects of contemporary southern cosmopolitanism, and grant that the “one provincialism . . .

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most characteristic of the South is race” (Preston 1991, 189) , Genovese’s argument for localism cannot but appear as a call for preserving the racial order of the Old South. Genovese is quite frank about the fact that what he is defending is southern “conservatism,” but he seeks to elude its more disquieting ramifications in two ways. First, Genovese (1994, xi) simply asserts that white racial supremacy is not inherent to southern conservatism, leaving readers to conclude that it is merely by accident that the social order of the South has historically required the economic exploitation, political exclusion, and social repression of its AfricanAmerican population. Second, Genovese claims kinship between his politics and broadly leftist ones on the grounds that southern conservatism has always supported a powerful critique of advanced capitalism (31, 34). But the stories of racism and capitalism in the South are far more tangled than is suggested by Genovese’s account. The dismantling of legalized racial segregation in the South both cleared the way for the economic modernization of the region and was in turn facilitated by advocates of economic development. As various scholars have pointed out, business leaders in southern cities often functioned as “the advance agents of peaceful desegregation” (Cobb 1984, 112). Modernizing economic elites sought to distance themselves from traditionalists on racial matters and to promote the image of a region eager to relinquish its conservative racial past in the interests of economic growth (Luebke 1991, 236–53). To acknowledge that racial desegregation and economic expansion occurred in tandem in the South is by no means to suggest that the processes of capitalist modernization inevitably produce social changes of a progressive sort and usher in a more equitable racial order. Scholarship on the southern economic boom provides overwhelming evidence to the contrary, demonstrating that the economic modernization of the South since the 1970s has been highly uneven and has in fact bypassed the majority of African Americans living the South. Many of the industrial firms relocating to the South during its boom period simply avoided “Black Belt” areas of concentrated African-American residence, and the expanded labor markets of the Sunbelt developed along racially segmented lines, with African Americans concentrated in the lowest-wage occupations (Bullard 1989, 7–15; Cobb 1984, 85–86; Lyson 1989, 148–50). Capitalist modernization of the South has obviously not eliminated racial inequality, and the demise of de jure racial segregation did not occur as

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a logical consequence of structural economic changes but was forced by a political movement for civil rights. Without subscribing to the view that capitalist development is inherently socially progressive, it is important to note that relatively progressive positions on racial desegregation became expedient for proponents of economic modernization in the South of the 1960s and 1970s. The forces of economic and racial conservatism have been clearly aligned in the South, with traditionalists who oppose economic modernization explicitly defending a racist social order. Take as an example Fred Hobson’s (1981) critique of the rapid economic development of Atlanta during the Civil Rights movement and the decades immediately following. Business boosters and the city administration sought to project an image of Atlanta as the “city too busy to hate,” one unwilling to allow racial conservatism to impede its quest for economic growth. Hobson condemns Atlanta for selling its soul to business, giving up racism for “purely economic” and “utilitarian” reasons rather than moral ones, and actually asserts that “for all its cruelty and inhumanity, racism possessed a certain integrity, a commitment, however distorted and twisted. It would never sell out” (49). Contrary to Genovese’s unargued claims, then, racism is integral to the U.S. southern tradition, and the “integrity” of this tradition can only be maintained by preserving the old racial order of the South. Racism has historically formed the core of the Southern mystique, and in fact most of the elements said to define a uniquely southern tradition are inextricably tied up with the conservation of white racial privilege. Take, for example, Genovese’s affirmation of southern antistatism or Havard’s emphasis on face-to-face rather than abstract and legal social relations as distinctive of southern culture. Southerners have often contrasted the racial order of their region to the more abstract racism of the urban North and justified it precisely for its face-to-face quality, which presumably gave southern racism a more warm and intimate countenance than its northern counterpart. Nostalgic celebration of organic, face-to-face communities is a common reaction to the increasing abstraction of social relations in modern times, and, in the case of southern regionalism, has decidedly conservative political ramifications. Social justice cannot always be immanently derived from concrete, face-to-face relations and often requires mediation by abstract political principles as well as extralocal adjudication: in the case of the South during the Civil Rights era,

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federal legal and military intervention was required to secure racial desegregation and black enfranchisement. Crucial to the evaporation of the southern mystique in the post Civil Rights era was the fact that racism could no longer be considered a solely southern problem. By the mid-1970s, for the first time in the history of the South, incoming African Americans began to outnumber those departing the region. This reverse black migration was widely cited as proof that “racism no longer defines the Dixie difference” (Boles 1995, 584). The migration of African Americans to the South from the mid-1970s onward was spurred primarily by economic decline in the Rustbelt and by transformed economic and political conditions in the South following the Civil Rights movement and the industrial boom. Social science scholarship on the migration clearly documents that it was directed mainly to metropolitan areas of the South, where expanded electoral and political power as well as enhanced employment opportunities could be more fully accessed by African Americans than in the rural regions (Goldfield 1990, 221, 244-45; Preston 1991, 190). However, culturalist accounts of the reverse migration tell an entirely different story. For example, anthropologist Carol Stack, in her book about the black southern migration tellingly titled Call to Home (1996), presents an interpretation that flouts all available evidence indicating that it is changed social, political, and economic conditions that are fueling the migration. According to Stack, African Americans are returning to rural and largely segregated areas in the South that the federal government characterizes as counties of “persistent poverty” (xv). Stack argues that cultural rather than economic factors are driving the migration, which she describes as an effort to “redeem a lost community” (xv). Stack’s representation of the rural South quite closely mirrors that of the regionalists discussed above in that she, too, polarizes the rural South against modern and postmodern urban life. Stack claims that, by returning to “homeplaces” in the rural South, African-American migrants are turning their backs to a “postmodern world” typified by a pervasive experience of “rootlessness” (197). These “homeplaces” are distant from big cities and Sunbelt industry, linked to traditional southern cash crops, with majority black populations, and with income levels far below national averages (19). Stack’s ethnographic research for her study was focused on the rural Carolinas, and her conclusions based on this area cannot be taken as representative of patterns of black reverse migration, which has been predominantly directed at

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urban areas with booming industrial economies. Like the southern regionalists, Stack can only sustain her image of the South as a refuge from urban modernity by constructing it as a rural and economically backward region mired in poverty. The actual migration of African Americans to the South has been exactly concurrent with the black literary turn south since the 1970s. This development may initially seem puzzling because, as Farah Griffin (1995, 145–46) observes in her study of black migration narratives, it reverses the geographical direction (from south to north) established in African-American literature over the course of the twentieth century. The South in this tradition has for long been represented as “the scene of the crime” (Jones 1963, 95), a site of racial horror and brutality. But following the region’s political transformation in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, AfricanAmerican literature began its migration south. This literary turn has been manifested at various levels—in the academic reclamation of Zora Neale Hurston’s southern folk aesthetics, which began during the mid-1970s; in essays and fiction by novelists such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, and Gloria Naylor; in the criticism surrounding this fiction, which consolidates the idea of a uniquely black folk tradition rooted in the rural South; and in a spate of memoirs and travel narratives about the South of a bygone age. The reclamation of the South in African-American literary studies overlaps with Stack’s account in several key respects, not least in its portrayal of the South as the place where a lost racial community can be redeemed. For example, Alice Walker declares, in a much-quoted passage from her essay, “The Black Writer and the Southern Experience” (1984, 17), that “what the black writer inherits as a natural right is a sense of community. Something simple but surprisingly hard, especially these days, to come by.” If community is surprisingly hard, to come by these days, especially in modern urban settings where community can only be imagined through the difficult work of mediation and abstraction, the rural South furnishes community as the African-American writer’s “natural right”. Like Carol Stack’s migrants, recent African-American literary-critical works are returning “South to a very old place,” to borrow the title of Albert Murray’s (1971) southern travelogue—to a putatively premodern, rural, and racially segregated South predating the economic and political transformations of the 1960s and 1970s. Toni Morrison (1993, 370–71), for example, characterizes African Americans as an essentially rural people, referring to the black community as “my

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people, we ‘peasants.’” Equating “community values” with “village values” (Morrison 1981, 38), Morrison curiously claims to write “village literature, fiction that is really for the village, for the tribe. Peasant literature for my people” (Morrison 1993, 370). Aside from the fact that Morrison’s novels circulate quite profitably within global metropolitan markets, her desired literary constituency, which she describes as a peasant people, was largely settled in metropolitan areas even in the South by the 1970s (Goldfield 1990, 203). Terms such as “village” or “peasant” literature shift the scene of African-American writing away from the modern metropolitan conditions that form its inescapable context, and in so doing, begin to clarify the cultural ambitions that are staked in the southern folk aesthetic, best captured by Morrison’s (1984a, 389) statement that she wishes to write a “literature that is irrevocably, indisputably Black.” Morrison has remarked that her first three novels are set in “closed, back worlds” (much like the homeplaces Stack describes as being left behind by twentieth-century life), and that even though Song of Solomon goes up to 1963, “it’s sort of back there somewhere” (in Taylor-Guthrie 1994, 110). The novel’s evocation of a rural and racially segregated southern past supports its “quest for roots.” Morrison explains that black cultural tradition exists “in a kind of village lore” that is vigorously sustained over time because “an ethnic group that is culturally coherent and has not joined the larger mainstream keeps very much intact for survival. The consequences of the political thrust to share in the economy and power of the country were to disperse that” (ibid). The Old South is a logical destination for Morrison’s quest for roots because here a distinct black folk culture developed in relative isolation from the national mainstream as a result of legalized racial segregation and systematic exclusion from economic power. This racially specific culture would necessarily be put at risk by political moves toward racial integration and participation in national economic life. Consequently, Morrison cannot take as her fictional setting the rapidly urbanizing and industrializing South of the post Civil Rights decades; the return to conditions of racial segregation and economic marginalization is essential to the recovery of discrete black cultural traditions and communities. The links between black cultural community, poverty, and racial segregation are reiterated by most of the key contributors to southern folk aesthetics. Houston Baker Jr. (1991), for example, describes the “Old South”—or the South of the era of racial segregation—as the site of an authentically black folk tradition. Baker opposes to

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the “mulattoization” of black urban northern culture (35) “a field of ‘particular’ or vernacular imagery unique to the Afro-American imagination” (61), a field he situates squarely in the rural South of the past (30). Throughout his study, Baker asserts an inverse relation between the value of black southern culture, on the one hand, and economic and political power, on the other. African-American folk culture in the South operates at what Baker calls a “meta” rather than a “material” level: southern blacks developed a rich and resourceful cultural tradition as a direct consequence of their exclusion from political and economic power (38). Baker presents the northern urban migration as an aesthetic compromise that follows from racial integration. By his account, as by Morrison’s, the affirmation of integral black cultural traditions seems contingent on the foreclosure of material opportunities for African Americans. Even one of the most prominent advocates of the self-avowedly politicized Black Aesthetic movement of the 1960s, Addison Gayle (1992) has recently endorsed the literary move toward southern folk culture. In keeping with the urban emphasis of the Black Arts movements, Gayle (1970, 61) had proclaimed that “the new Afro is to be found . . . in the Black ghettos of America.” In its commitment to a politically transformed future, Black Aesthetic ideology had urged artists to supersede cultural traditions associated with the oppressive racial history of the rural South. At the peak of the Black Power and Black Arts movements, Gayle asserted that, in the interests of political change, black art “demands the allegiance of men who are capable of transcending the past and challenging the future” (79). But in a more recent essay titled “Reclaiming the Southern Experience: The Black Aesthetic Ten Years Later,” Gayle (1992, 559) exhorts AfricanAmerican writers to “return to the intellectual past, to undertake the odyssey back into one’s cultural heritage,” and this odyssey entails a reassessment of the South. In this essay, Gayle regrets that the Black Aesthetic movement of the 1960s discouraged literary explorations of the South, which he now defines as an authentic black cultural domain starkly opposed to “the West.” Gayle contends that the South supports “the genesis of a racial literature” (559) because it is here that African Americans are closest to “the Africa of their ancestors” (558) and can therefore manage to live “wholly and fruitfully outside the ethical system of the West” (563). Although Gayle acknowledges “the fact that modernization, urbanization, and all the concomitant evils have come to the South” (563), he nevertheless identifies the South as

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the cultural terrain that can authenticate the contemporary AfricanAmerican writer’s literary project: the writer who taps into southern folklore can be “one with his community, and his works . . . validated and legitimized by the community itself” (560). The set of moves Gayle performs here is reprised in much recent African-American literary criticism on the South. In his introduction to the anthology Black Southern Voices , published in 1992, John Oliver Killens echoes Gayle in asserting that black southern literature projects a “system of values” that “is different from white America’s.” Like Gayle, Killens claims that the “people of the black South are much closer to their African roots” (3). An imaginative affiliation with Africa is motivated by intense pessimism about political prospects for African Americans in the United States today: “The black Southern literary tradition gives the lie to the American profession of freedom and humaneness and democracy” (4). The political implications of the southern folk aesthetic become clearer in light of Paul Gilroy’s distinction between the politics of fulfillment and the politics of transfiguration. In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy argues that the politics of fulfillment operates within a discursive mode, immanent within the modern public sphere, and is impelled by the demand that democratic society live up to its promise. In contrast, the politics of transfiguration is a utopian mode that expresses its “unsayable claims to truth” wholly outside the rational and discursive terms of modern politics. Gilroy (1993a, 37–38) contends that this kind of politics, best exemplified by Afro-diasporic cultural forms, exposes the fissures and contradictions of modern democratic politics. The disaffection with “America” fueling the southern turn in AfricanAmerican literary studies can easily be understood, in Gilroy’s terms, as a politics of transfiguration aimed at developing a “counterculture of modernity” (36). A central device used to establish this counterculture that supposedly operates wholly outside the modern West is “conjuring,” or practices of folk religion and healing that are traced back to West Africa. Through conjuring, African-American novelists including Morrison, Shange, Naylor, and Toni Cade Bambara attempt to recover a uniquely black epistemology that is explicitly advanced as an alternative to modern Western (i.e., rational and scientific) forms of knowledge. Morrison (1984b, 342) has described these other ways of knowing, based in intuition and other suprarational faculties, as “discredited knowledge.” The use of conjuring often supports essentializing claims about the culture, epistemology, and cosmology common to

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all people of African descent, such as, for example, when Morrison flatly asserts that “Black people believe in magic. Once a [white] woman asked me, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ I said, ‘Yes. Do you believe in germs?’ It’s part of our heritage” (Taylor-Guthrie 1994, 46). The southern folk aesthetic is conservative in the literal sense that it seeks to conserve forms of cultural particularity associated with a putatively premodern era, forms that were inextricably embedded in conditions of political and economic marginalization resulting from racial segregation. As Morrison’s remarks on Song of Solomon (quoted earlier) clarify, she wishes to salvage a cultural lore that is threatened by “the political thrust to share in the economy and power of the country.” Here, as in Gilroy’s preference for the politics of transfiguration, racially distinct forms of cultural value can be shored up only by precluding modern forms of politics, such as the Civil Rights movement, which clearly exemplifies Gilroy’s politics of fulfillment in its effort to extend democratic rights to African Americans. The politically conservative implications of the literary turn south are further evident in its decisive gendering of modernity and tradition, social change and cultural stability. Not only was the southern turn initiated and established in African-American women’s fiction and literary criticism during the 1970s, but even as it was subsequently elaborated by black male writers, the rural South was associated with a nexus of cultural values that are typically identified with women—home, cultural origin, maternal ancestry, rootedness in place, tradition, and racial authenticity. In novels such as Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Naylor’s Mama Day, Shange’s Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo, and Walker’s Meridian, just to name a few, it is women characters who guarantee the continuity of southern folk traditions. Recall that for Baker, the Old South is home to a racially pure cultural tradition, which is subjected to “mulattoization” as it travels to the urban North. In addition to employing a reproductive metaphor for racial purity and corruption, Baker (1991, 36) explicitly feminizes the notion of a racially authentic culture, describing the rural South as the space of black mothers and the urban North as the white father’s territory. Baker’s polarized equations perform the all-too-predictable move, surely disturbing to feminist readers, of imposing on women the symbolic burden of vouchsafing racial and cultural integrity. As feminist scholars writing about a range of national contexts have shown, periods of rapid modernization are attended by social and cultural conflicts that are often managed or resolved around the

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symbolic figure of woman. As transmitters of durable communal values, women become cultural bulwarks that can stay the dislocating consequences of social change, which is widely perceived to be occurring at accelerated rates in the postmodern era. But while we must acknowledge the troubling political implications of the southern folk aesthetic, we should also understand why it seems compelling to so many contemporary African-American writers. The southern turn in African-American literary studies may be seen as a historically specific response to the trajectory of urban modernization in the United States. Southern regionalism more broadly speaking has cropped up periodically for over a century, and usually at those moments when the South is on the brink of industrialization, but for much of its history African-American literature has refused to entertain agrarian or pastoral retreats from modernity. In fact, as I noted earlier, this literary tradition has been powerfully propelled by the promise of modernization, which has demanded journeys out of the rural South into the urban North. The atypical contemporary return to a premodern, rural South bespeaks the exhaustion of the promise of modernity, which has galvanized African-American literature for over a century. Writing in 1925, Alain Locke (1992 [1925], 6) hailed the black urban migration out of the South as a deliberate flight from “medieval America to modern,” as a “mass movement toward the larger and more democratic chance.” Not surprisingly, the hope of gaining access to modern U.S. democracy was couched in emphatically urban terms and required aesthetic distance from the “plantation traditions” of the rural South (Johnson 1969 [1921], 41–42). In the late twentieth century, disenchantment with the only partial success, as well as the uneven terms, of African-American integration into national life fueled the reverse literary movement away from “America” toward an Africanized rural South. The South must be constructed as a rural place in order to ground a critique of the racially uneven processes of urbanization and modernization. And the impulse to withdraw from modern America, where putatively universal human rights have not been easily extended to African Americans, impels the Africanization of the South, rendering the region a breeding ground for racial specificity and difference. In all these respects, the southern folk aesthetic exemplifies a critical recoil from ideals of political modernity, which, despite their avowed universality, have not been equally available to all. When Morrison remarks to Gilroy (1993b, 178) that African Americans began

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confronting postmodern dilemmas long before the term became current, I take her to mean that African Americans have long been aware that the political rights vested in the modern humanist subject have not been universally applicable. The southern folk aesthetic emerged as an identifiable literary movement during a historical conjuncture, the 1970s, in which disillusionment with the failed promise of urban modernity reached a peak. The Watts riot occurred only a few days after the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, signaling the movement of the struggle for racial equality out of the South into the cities. Outbreaks of urban racial violence across the nation during the late 1960s prompted the 1968 Kerner Commission Report on Civil Disorders, which, highlighting the prevalence of racial segregation and discrimination in the urban North, officially certified that the racial problem had shifted away from the South and had in fact become nationalized. The next decade witnessed the emergence of racialized rhetorics of urban crisis that attributed the socioeconomic problems plaguing U.S. cities in the postmodern era to a collapse of black urban culture and community. Because these discourses exert such severe pressure on the categories of black culture and community, it is hardly surprising that imaginative restoration of black cultural community has seemed so fraught and urgent to African-American writers since the 1970s. Literary critic Hazel Carby (1991, 41) has argued that the recent academic revival of Hurston’s southern folk aesthetic effects a “discursive displacement” of the urban crises confronting black America. In other words, by locating authentic black culture and community in a bygone rural setting, African-American literary critics are shying away from a frontal encounter with contemporary urban problems. Yet, like most forms of literary pastoralism, the southern folk aesthetic in AfricanAmerican literature is obliquely responding to contemporary urban conditions through its very pointed retreat from these conditions. Depicting wholesome black communities and cultural traditions, novels such as Morrison’s Song of Solomon or Naylor’s Mama Day directly dispute the alarmist claims (rife in the media as well as academic scholarship) about the pathology of black culture in the postmodern period. At the same time, by situating their positive images of community in the rural South of the past, such literary texts interrogate the equation of modernization with racial progress and clarify the cultural costs of urbanization for African Americans. The southern folk aesthetic in black literary studies shares much with the broader trend toward southern regionalism. Taking the

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spatial turn typical of postmodern cultural politics, both movements construct the South of the past as a countermodern site, pitting local cultural traditions against recent processes of economic, political, and social modernization. Each posits an inverse relation between the realms of culture and political economy. Affirmation of cultural particularism in each case requires a foreclosure of political and economic change, specifically the changes in southern social order wrought by the Civil Rights movement and the industrial boom. The cultural traditions each movement attempts to consolidate are inextricably embedded in the deeply inequitable conditions of racial segregation. Hinging cultural integrity and community on racial segregation, both movements deploy the trope of segregationequals-congregation that recurs in recent historical studies of the Jim Crow South. In a scathing critique of this trope in his essay “Romancing Jim Crow: Black Nostalgia for a Segregated Past,” political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. (1996, 26) contends that the “current nostalgia for the organic community black Americans supposedly lost with the success of the civil rights movement is so frighteningly shortsighted and dangerous.” Texts romancing the Jim Crow South, Reed argues, are “propelled by a naïve trope of modernization that presumes our world to be constantly increasing in complexity and divisiveness, contrasting it to a comfortingly static past” (ibid.). Among the charges that can be leveled at texts idealizing the Old South is that they “falsif[y] the past” (24), substituting a partial memory for historical truth. This sort of objection can be applied to nonfictional texts such as the memoirs Reed discusses in his essay, which claim to accurately reconstruct an actual past. However, novels that romance Jim Crow cannot be justly censured for misrepresenting a historical past that they do not purport to be recapturing in the first place. Much of the black fiction that takes the Jim Crow South as its setting in fact italicizes its own fictive nature. For example, though Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Naylor’s Mama Day both contain idealized portrayals of black cultural traditions and communities flourishing in a segregated South, they also guard against literal interpretations of these portrayals by stressing that they are aspiring to imaginative transcendence rather than mimetic fidelity. That Morrison’s Shalimar cannot be found on a Texaco map or that Naylor’s Willow Springs is located off the map of the United States indicates that their rural South is not meant as a supposedly real place that existed in the past but instead as a terrain charted by the literary imagination. Mama

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Day in particular emphasizes that its South is a literary construct through an overload of pastoral allusions. An insistence on their historical impossibility (and on literary invention) deflects the type of political critique that can be leveled against recent nonfictional romancers of the Jim Crow South. A key distinction, then, between the southern folk aesthetic as practiced by novelists and nonliterary southern regionalism (under which category I would include African-American literary criticism, as distinct from literary fiction) is that the one celebrates a blatantly fictive South, whereas the other seeks in fact to recuperate the traditional social order of the region. After all, Morrison’s and Naylor’s novels are not recommending an actual return to racial segregation and political and economic exclusion. It is precisely because the material conditions of possibility for organic racial community have become irretrievable (if they ever existed at all) that these literary texts strive to recover such community at an imaginary level. Also important here is the fact that most of the novelists associated with southern folk aesthetics have published fiction squarely treating contemporary urban realities—for example, Morrison’s Jazz, Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child, Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills , or Shange’s Liliane. But such urban fiction is almost entirely overlooked in recent African-American literary criticism, and in fact this erasure is what makes possible the canonization of a black literary tradition rooted in southern folk experience. Many AfricanAmerican novelists have also published fiction set in the South that depicts the social upheavals of the Civil Rights era, notably Walker’s Meridian and Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (as well as lesser-known and more recent works such as Thulani Davis’s 1959 and Maxine Clair’s Rattlebone). These novels explicitly grapple with the question of which past cultural practices can spur projects of political change and which can survive such change. However, literary criticism on African-American fiction dealing with the South concentrates on identifying and affirming authentically black cultural practices (such as “conjuring” and oral tradition) associated with folk life in the days of segregation. In this respect, what I have been calling the “southern folk aesthetic” is a construct of a literary criticism that partakes of the broader tendencies of postmodern cultural politics. The literary criticism that is institutionalizing southern folk cultural values as most authentically African American is, in common with other strains of southern regionalism, also reifying an internally diverse region that

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is in the throes of dramatic transformation. As I have argued in this essay, such postmodern projects of regional resistance can yield incisive critiques of the uneven geographical and racial development of capitalist modernization. But the utopian dimensions of such projects—as evinced in their models of organic community drawn from the past—are fraught with political risk. In postmodern cultural politics, it is the places most conspicuously left behind by economic processes of modernization that are typically identified as spaces of greatest cultural resistance to advanced capitalism. This logic of the residual often entails an aestheticized view of material deprivation as a necessary condition of cultural value. Underdeveloped geographical regions are romanticized as the most effective sites of social critique, as is the case, for example, in the turn of intellectuals such as Fredric Jameson (1988, 16, 19–20, 21) to “third-worldism” as the most appealing strategy for opposing advanced capitalism. Another instance that I have discussed here is Gilroy’s work, which discredits the “politics of fulfillment” for its implication in Western modernity and valorizes a “politics of transfiguration” that can only be realized in the sphere of culture. When cultural resistance is identified with forms and practices that somehow wholly escape the modern, and when modern politics is regarded as thoroughly compromised, the category of politics is inevitably surrendered to the modern West. The postmodern romance of the residual tends to construct spaces of resistance as pure elsewheres to the dominant socioeconomic system. For example, the very title of Soja and Hooper’s essay, “The Spaces That Difference Makes,” which is a manifesto of sorts for postmodern cultural politics, implies that social differences occupy determinate spaces. As Stephen Connor (1989) has pointed out, the spatial metaphors of postmodern cultural theory seem oddly anachronistic, offering the false reassurance that the line of power and resistance, dominance and difference, are visible in this or that place—or that the spaces that difference makes are clearly identifiable. Connor goes on to argue that what may define the era of multinational capitalism is precisely that nodes of power and resistance are not so readily separable (254–55). When critical alternatives to modernization are identified with residual modes that putatively operate entirely outside the logic of modernity, it becomes hard to imagine the mediated relations between different domains and constituencies that would be necessary for progressive social change. This also curtails the critical reach of recent discourses of southern difference, which seek to

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conserve particularistic and countermodern forms of cultural value at the steep cost of stalling economic and political change. REFERENCES Baker, Houston A., Jr. 1991. Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baylor, Ronald H. 1988. “Race, Ethnicity, and Political Change in the Urban Sunbelt South.” In Shades of the Sunbelt: Essays on Ethnicity, Race, and the Urban South, edited by Randall M. Miller and George E. Pozzetta. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Boles, John B. 1995. The South through Time: A History of an American Region. Vol. 2. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice–Hall. Bullard, Robert D., ed. 1989. In Search of the New South: The Black Urban Experience in the 1970s and 1980s. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Carby, Hazel. 1991. “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston.” In History and Memory in African -American Culture, edited by Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally. New York: Oxford University Press. Cobb, James C. 1984. Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877–1984. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Connor, Stephen. 1989. Postmodernist Culture. London: Blackwell. Egerton, John. 1974. The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America. New York: Harper and Row. Fifteen Southerners. 1981. Why the South Will Survive. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Gayle, Addison, Jr. 1970. The Black Situation. New York: Horizon. . 1992. “Reclaiming the Southern Experience: The Black Aesthetic Ten Years Later.” In Black Southern Voices, edited by John Oliver Killens and Jerry W. Ward Jr. New York: Meridian. Genovese, Eugene D. 1994. The Southern Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993a. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. . 1993b. Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures. London: Serpent’s Tail. Goldfield, David R. 1990. Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Grantham, Dewey. 1994. The South in Modern America. New York: Harper Collins. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. 1995. “Who Set You Flowin’?” The African-American Migration Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell. Havard, William. 1981. “The Distinctive South: Fading or Reviving?” In Fifteen Southerners. Hobson, Fred. 1981. “A South Too Busy to Hate?” In Fifteen Southerners 1981. Jameson, Fredric. 1988. “Regarding Postmodernism: A Conversation with Fredric Jameson.” By Anders Stephanson. In Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, edited by Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Johnson, James Weldon. 1969 [1921]. Preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry, edited by James Weldon Johnson. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka). 1963. Blues People. New York: Morrow. Kasarda, John D., Holly L. Hughes, and Michael D. Irwin. 1991. “Demographic and Economic Restructuring in the South.” In The South Moves into Its Future, edited by Joseph S. Himes. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Killens, John Oliver. 1992. Introduction to Black Southern Voices, edited by John Oliver Killens and Jerry W. Ward Jr. New York: Meridian. Larsen, Lawrence H. 1990. The Urban South: A History. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Locke, Alain. 1992 [1925]. “The New Negro.” In The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke. New York: Macmillan. Luebke, Paul. 1991. “Southern Conservatism and Liberalism: Past and Future.” In The South Moves into Its Future, edited by Joseph S. Himes. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Lyson, Thomas A. 1989. Two Sides to the Sunbelt. New York: Praeger. Miller, Randall M. 1988. “The Development of the Modern Urban South: An Historical Overview.” In Shades of the Sunbelt: Essays on Ethnicity, Race, and the Urban South, edited by Randall M. Miller and George E. Pozzetta. New York and Westport, CT: Greenwood. Morrison, Toni. 1981. “City Limits, Village Values.” In Literature and the Urban Experience, edited by Michael C. Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. . 1984a. “Memory, Creation, and Writing.” Thought 59, 235: 385–90. . 1984b. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” In Black Women Writers, 1950–1980, edited by Mari Evans. New York: Doubleday. 1993. “The Language Must Not Sweat: A Conversation with Toni Morrison.” By Thomas LeClair. In Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad. Murray, Albert. 1971. South to a Very Old Place. New York: Vintage. Preston, Howard L. 1991. “Will Dixie Disappear?” In The Future South: A Historical Perspective for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Joe P. Dunn and Howard L. Preston. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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Reed, Adolph, Jr. 1996. “Romancing Jim Crow: Black Nostalgia for a Segregated Past.” Village Voice, April 16: 24–29. Reed, John Shelton. 1981. “The Same Old Stand?” In Fifteen Southerners 1981. Soja, Edward, and Barbara Hooper. 1993. “The Spaces That Difference Makes: Some Notes on the Geographical Margins of the New Cultural Politics.” In Place and the Politics of Identity, edited by Michael Keith and Steve Pile. London: Routledge. Stack, Carol. 1996. Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South. New York: Harper Collins. Taylor-Guthrie, Danille. 1994. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Walker, Alice. 1984. “The Black Writer and the Southern Experience.” In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. New York: Harcourt. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1988. “What Can One Mean by Southern Culture? In The Evolution of Southern Culture, edited by Numan V. Bartley. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Weinstein, Bernard L., and Robert E. Firestine. 1978. Regional Growth and Decline in the United States. New York: Praeger. West, Cornel. 1990. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson et al. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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chapter six

Orientalism, Anti-Orientalism, Relativism Rubén Chuaqui

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he question of Orientalism, as everyone knows, has been the subject of intense debate in the last quarter century. Figuring most prominently in these discussions are the contributions of Edward Said and the reactions they have inspired. But these contributions themselves have a long history. Said’s Orientalism (1980 [1978]) is the first work in a trilogy that also includes The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam (1981).1 On various occasions, Said has reconsidered and refined the positions he took in Orientalism. Almost seventeen years after the first edition of this book, Said wrote the article “East Isn’t East: The Impending End of the Age of Orientalism” (1995).2 In fact he had already reassessed the question in “Orientalism Reconsidered” (Said 1985).3 Orientalism has met with unique fortune. The culmination of several decades of critical research, the book has served as the point of departure for new contributions by authors from different parts of the planet—and not only from the territories, nations, and ethnic groups that have endured the centuries-old expansion of Europe and of Europe’s extensions. Participants have also come to this project from the ex-colonial metropolises themselves, and more generally, from what we usually call the West or the Occident. Among the most conspicuous of these authors is, of course, Noam Chomsky. Others, from different areas of the globe, are not as well known but, as is the case with Talal Asad, they have contributed greatly to the clarification of these questions.

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As the public at large is aware, the term Orientalism is reserved in certain sectors for describing a distorted way to encounter phenomena pertaining to other cultures or civilizations, or to peoples, still subjugated or only recently liberated, located for the most part to the east of Europe. Perhaps this usage of the term has been excessive. The excess may reside in the fact that, although the term has been traditionally used in European countries and in countries influenced by Europe, it does not always designate activities performed to the detriment of the countries studied. However, one could argue that, at a certain point in time, the majority of people carrying out such studies were in the service of the imperial enterprise or, at least, exhibited a tendency to distort and diminish their subjects. There are even specialists who would not hesitate to call themselves “Orientalists” but whom the “anti-Orientalists” (including Said himself) would not include in their general charge of Orientalist distortion. Still, it remains debatable whether it is justified to divide the world into Orient and Occident or, worse, to leave out of this imperfect dichotomy vast regions of the planet, thus creating a limbo-esque third zone or third world. The names used, however, are secondary. What is important is ascertaining the degree to which the phenomenon of Orientalism has taken place—what its dimensions have been or continue to be—and, finally, how it came to happen and how it can be overcome. Of course, in general terms, for half a century critics have denounced bias in the study of other cultures, demonstrating that such biases are not gratuitous (at least potentially not), but, rather, that they work (or can work) toward specific ends of subjugation and exploitation. I am thinking here of critiques of ethnocentrism (and, more specifically, of Eurocentrism) or of racial or cultural prejudice.4 We should not ignore the fact, however, that prejudice and ethnocentrism can be innocent in intention, that is, without ulterior motives—despite the advantages they usually confer on certain groups, and despite the distortions that ethnocentrism and prejudice entail. On a more local level, I recall a couple of seminars directed by Prodyot Mukherjee about thirty years ago, whose participants included many of us from what is now known as the Colegio de México’s Center for Asian and African Studies. In these seminars, intended to introduce participants to Asia and its problems, we examined subjects such as Eurocentrism and its connections with the colonial enterprise, the question of the observer’s neutrality, the observer’s commitments, and the difficulty of attaining objectivity.

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I recall discussions of texts by Jean Chesnaux and Anouar AbdelMalek, among others. Though it could be said that today the debate on Orientalism has faded from the forefront, it is still there. The same could be said for similar debates about the role of researchers and their environment in relation to peoples, cultures, and civilizations to which they do not belong. At the same time, I believe the idea is gathering acceptance that being aware that we can detect Orientalist biases, and that there are scholars who contribute to the subjugation or destruction of people and cultures (in their own societies or in others), is not something that necessarily invalidates the possibility of scholars (or people in general) sharing some approaches, in spite of different origins, cultural backgrounds, and nationalities. I recognize that I am leaving aside a real and important phenomenon, the one sometimes called “Orientalism in reverse” or “Occidentalism”, which is performed in reaction to Orientalism. I will simply call attention to the enormous power differential that persists between the regions from which researchers come. Nor will I be able to pay much attention here to studies of Christianity and of Europe done from “the other side.” If we go back nearly a millennium, we find an example of this approach in the work of an inhabitant of Europe, Ibn Hazm, the Andalusian author of The Ring of the Dove: A Treatise on the Art and Practice of Arab Love. In another work, his Critical History of Religious Ideas,5 Ibn Hazm points out, among many other things, the internal contradictions of Christianity (and Judaism), basing his analysis on the Bible. I do not intend to lay out here a history of the debate. Nor shall I summarize the progress made in assessing it, a job which in any case is far from concluded. I would, however, like to refer briefly to some epistemological issues that have come up around the discussion, or that found their way into it from other fields. The question of cultural relativism stands out among these issues. More generally, the question of the relativity of knowledge, when taken literally to mean the denial of the possibility of reaching an objective truth, has in my opinion serious consequences. Clearly, this issue is not unrelated to the question of the commensurability or incommensurability of cultures. In more general terms, we could cast the question as one about the possible commensurability of the difference between subjects, be they collective or individual—and this is the perspective I will take up in this essay. I believe essentially in the truth of the arguments put forward by Said and countless men and women from the academic and

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nonacademic worlds. That is to say, I am certain about the widespread character of the distortions wrought by the official or officialist (or even unofficial) cultural enterprise of the so-called Occidental countries (in our time, especially the United States) on non-European countries—and not just the so-called Oriental ones. I also believe that often such distortions serve identifiable purposes, and that they tend to be subordinated to the interests of power. However, I think that founding such assertions on what is usually presented as gnoseological relativism leads to an untenable situation, weakening these positions. With or without justification, the theoretical or ideological apparatus of this brand of relativism tends to ally itself with the positions of illustrious thinkers such as Michel Foucault. I am also aware that the term relativism is multivalent, and that cultural relativism and the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge do not emerge in response to the superstructural activities of the dominant groups. In my opinion—and in that of many—we can come to know substantial stretches of human and nonhuman reality, although we should at the same time be cautious and prepared to revise what we know. I believe, furthermore, that not everything that we can learn about human beings and societies depends on a knowledge of their institutions and cultures, although vast portions do depend on them. Similarly, I believe that other cultures are knowable, though perhaps with some remainder of unknowability. I believe the same thing with respect to beliefs we do not share, despite the problems involved in approaching them. I claim, then, both that biases exist and that this does not make them inevitable. But not only do biases exist; there are also aggressive and unjust acts, especially against the weak. Strictly speaking, the problem is that if we adopt, say, a relativist position in the style of Prothagoras, or radical skepticism in the manner of Gorgias (both of which we could describe as “sophist,” without pejorative intent), then there is no way to warrant the existence of exceedingly serious phenomena such as torture, executions, or the “disappearances” of people. Two other practices arguably essential to colonialism and imperialism—deception and espionage—would not be possible within an extreme form of relativism: deception presupposes truth and successful espionage requires knowledge. Of course, there are less extreme positions that claim to meet objections by positing a few metatruths (pushing things to the limit, just this one: “It is true that there is no certainty of anything—except of this”). Other positions try to sidestep the obstacle by invoking

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a hierarchy: We can only know (objectively) what belongs to the domain of the merely factual (that is, what does not depend on theories). But this, according to some, means knowing only what is least important, inasmuch as the farther-reaching claims and those systems of statements are themselves relative (and, in the view of some people, depend on the characteristics of those who advance them: in which case, how can we know those characteristics?).6 For a time I was convinced that Said held a relativist position. Today I think that a number of passages in his work admit two readings, one relativist and one nonrelativist, but I also believe that at least in some passages in which Said has been able to elaborate on his ideas, the differences separating him from extreme relativism are clear. Toward the end of Covering Islam, for example, Said makes a distinction between matters on which everyone agrees and ones that are subject to interpretation. He takes the example of Bonaparte: on the one hand, there is no disagreement about certain objectively verifiable biographic data (including some facts related to the exercise of power); on the other, there is no agreement on Bonaparte’s historical importance, the ethicalness of his actions, and so on. Said concludes, however, by admitting that, in spite of the difficulties, it is possible to gain knowledge about other societies. Not only that, but he calls attention to the importance of objectivity.7 Others hold a position that is not completely transparent but that has a distinct relativist cast. One such critic is Renato Rosaldo (1989, 21), who states, in putting forward the ways in which he thinks cultural anthropology and the social sciences in general have changed (for the better): The truth of objectivism—absolute, universal, and timeless—has lost its monopoly status. It now competes, on more nearly equal terms, with the truth of case studies that are embedded in local contexts, shaped by local interest, and colored by local perceptions. The agenda for social analysis has shifted to include not only eternal verities and lawlike generalizations but also political processes, social changes, and human differences. Such terms as objectivity, neutrality, and impartiality refer to subject positions once endowed with great institutional authority, but they are arguably neither more nor less valid than those of more engaged, yet equally perceptive, knowledgeable social actors. Social analysis must now grapple with the realization that its objects of analysis are also analyzing subjects who critically interrogate ethnographers—their writings, their ethics, and their politics.

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INCOMMENSURABILITY, KNOWABILITY, RELATIVISM It is common knowledge that the debate about commensurability and incommensurability among philosophers and historians of science was spurred by the publication of T.S. Kuhn’s The Scientific Revolutions (1962). And this debate was centered, naturally, on theories and their paradigms, and specifically on the relation between successive paradigms. Although cultures are neither theories nor, strictly speaking, paradigms, we can establish some analogies between cultures, on the one hand, and theories and paradigms, on the other. For several years, Kuhn held that paradigms are incommensurable (and therefore untranslatable), even defending the idea that the passage from one to another produced a sort of gestalt switch. Kuhn ended up retracting that position, but the influence of the book has spread over many fields—an influence complicated by the intervention of the idea of language games inspired by the “second Wittgenstein,” especially by the author of the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1953). From there some have jumped to the idea that everything depends on the rules governing those games, that they have an autonomous status, and that they are unjudgeable from the standpoint of other games. And from this point, it would be more or less easy to move on to the discussion of cultures, given that in related fields ideas like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has already opened conceptual space for such a transition. The idea of commensurability between theories or paradigms or cultures results from a kind of metaphor derived from the idea of a common measure between physical magnitudes. Theories can be “measured” to determine which is superior. In the case of cultures, it is not usual to say (in public) that one is looking to establish which is superior. Be that as it may, if one wishes to decide on their relative capacity for knowledge it is necessary to understand them, which, in the judgment of some, is equivalent to finding a “common measure.” We must distinguish incommensurability from relativism, even when these concepts tend to be used interchangeably. Indeed, it is possible to subscribe to both relativism and commensurability at the same time. One way (perhaps the principal way) in which it is possible to subscribe jointly to incommensurability and relativism is to say that, although cultures or theories or paradigms may not be authentically knowable from without, they can be equally valid, each one relative to its own domain from the perspective of truth or knowledge. To complicate matters a bit, we could consider the possibility that only one of the entities in question is valid, even

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though we may not be in a position to say which one, precisely for lack of commensurability. Needless to say, for cultures the notion of validity would thus have to be extended so that it goes beyond the merely epistemological. Of course, these are not the only distinctions we must make before proceeding. We must also tease out, among other things, (1) the knowability of cultures (and peoples) from without, (2) the epistemological value of cultures, (3) the relativism of cultures (in the sense that supposedly there is an interior truth for each one, and even that there is no transcultural truth or knowledge), and (4) distortion of the method of presenting other cultures. SLANTS: ALTERNATE (ALTERED) PERSPECTIVES Now I would like to comment (all too briefly) on some questions that touch on commensurability in different areas but that do not fundamentally depend on culture, even though they often have cultural dimensions. In general terms, I am speaking of pairs or trios of subjects (individual or collective), states, and conditions. In each case one can discern, more or less, what is on the other side—which would seem to necessitate that in some way the observer be able to leave the side to which he or she belongs, at least provisionally. That is to say, a task that bears a family resemblance to the impossible task of which Wittgenstein speaks in the preface to his Tractatus (1988, 27), the one that seeks to “draw a limit to thinking,” or rather to the possible task of tracing the limits “to the expression of thoughts,” when we seek to “be able to think both sides of this limit.” And the examination of these alterities (in some cases, alterations), which are perhaps even more difficult to address than differences of culture (inasmuch as cultures are in principle open to all human beings, at least before they are exposed in childhood to a particular kind), may lay the groundwork for examining the problems of cultural diversity. The questions to which I will refer are related to (1) the sexes, (2) blindness, (3) visual distortions, (4) old age, (5) madness, (6) dreams, (7) delusion, (8) mysticism, and (9) error. THE SEXES In recent decades studies of gender have occupied, quite justifiably, the forefront of academic debates. Despite their enormous importance, I will say little about them precisely because they constitute a field

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that has been extensively and intensively explored in its different manifestations, especially in women’s studies. This scholarship emphasizes the social dimensions of the problems it investigates. At times, it includes proposals intended exclusively for women—either because the aim of such endeavors is simply for women to know the state of affairs, or in rare cases because an incommunicable way of knowing, unique to women, is claimed. However, the dominant idea here is clearly that for the state of affairs to change, the most important thing is that society as a whole increase its knowledge, and for this it is indispensable that men also understand, which in turn supposes the communicability of knowledge. Here the basis of the inquiry is above all a matter of justice and rights. Between individual women there are probably as many differences as between individual men, but of course all women, or the majority of women, or large groups of women, do share certain experiences. In order to understand other’s experiences, imagination is vital. But not just imagination, since we are dealing with a form of knowledge. The notion of women’s getting to know fully the workings of inequality would seem to imply that this knowledge is completely genderneutral, accessible by all. But one could also acquire consciousness of the difference, and someone could argue that the consciousness that men have of women’s difference is different from the consciousness that women have of their own difference. In any case, this alone does not make the content incommunicable. BLINDNESS AND SIGHT People endowed with sight can simulate blindness simply by closing their eyes. But this is not the whole story, of course.8 Those who do not have the ability to see know that they are lacking something, and the awareness of this lack may come through the remaining senses, but especially through the use of the mind. Now, the interesting thing is that those who can see and those who cannot both understand, at least in large part, the other’s point of view (so to speak). In this respect what is important is not the difference of experiences or emotions, nor the fact that one party, the blind one, has no access to the experiences of the other. There is an incommensurability, we could say, between the experiences of the two parties, but not in the understanding of general information about those differences. There is an essential intercommunicability between both types of people (supposing that they share a common language, obviously). Either type can set itself

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in a higher position—speaking figuratively—that would allow it to understand the other party, and in a substantive way.9 DISTORTIONS AND NORMAL VISION It has been said that in the work of El Greco, the elongation of faces and other peculiarities are due to a sight deficiency, specifically, astigmatism. There are children who claim—even some adults long ago said this in writing—that the painter saw everything in a way that normally sighted people would describe as distorted, so that in order to produce the same effect on him, the image in the painting would have to be without distortions for people with normal vision. But if this were so, how could astigmatism have been discovered? There must be a clue or set of clues that would allow us to detect this sight defect in people of the artist’s time or of any time. If it were not possible to detect it, if the affected person or an external observer had no means of noticing anything, then, one would say, it would be difficult or impossible to conclude that there was such a distortion. Consequently, the reasoning sketched out here seems to be defective. It is not that it is impossible for someone to possess some exclusive, unobservable characteristic, simply that the characteristic would not manifest itself to a third party. There is, however, an analogy to be made with myopia, based on the idea of distance, which can provide us with a way out of the problem. Just as myopia does not distort everything that the nearsighted person sees, astigmatism’s effects change according to the distance between the observer and the object. So if the same treatment is applied to figures in the foreground and background, we must look elsewhere for the reason for the supposed distortion in the figures. A partial key is the artistic environment from which El Greco comes, influenced to a certain degree by the traditional style of Byzantine painting (see Huguet del Villar 1928, 56–59 esp. 58–59). As for unobservable characteristics or properties, there are children or adults who tend to think that there are “private colors”; and they even generalize, saying that no one sees exactly the same colors as anyone else, although it is impossible to prove that this is so. In reality, it is possible that our perceptions do not coincide absolutely, or that they are different from anyone else’s; it is probable that there are groups genetically determined with respect to the range of colors visible to them, and with respect to the individual colors they see. What is interesting is that although we cannot be sure either of what colors

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others see or of what those colors are like, in certain cases we can prove that some people see colors that are different from those that others see. Take for example the well-known test applied to detect different varieties of color blindness: in a multicolored image made of dots, some see a figure—for example, a numeral—and others do not see it. (We cannot prove that we will never be sure, however, of what colors our fellow humans see. Perhaps in time we will be able to induce directly into the brain sensations that we cannot perceive naturally.) AGE Toward the end of his productive life, Santiago Ramón y Cajal wrote El mundo visto a los ochenta años (1934). The book covers a range of themes, including physiological decay. It considers old age, properly speaking, to start at approximately seventy-five years of age. It may presuppose that twenty-five-year-old readers, from their perspective, will understand in a perfect manner what (probably) awaits them half a century later, as in Cicero’s dialogue De senectute, where Laelius and Scipio ask the old man Cato to speak to them of old age, as if to prepare them for it. Or in the quasi-dialogue Hiero, by Xenophon. Recall that in it the poet Simonides asks the tyrant of Syracuse about the differences between his life as a private person and his life as a tyrant—states or conditions that Hiero experienced successively. Most interesting for us, Xenophon is imagining the second state from his own perspective, which lacks such experience; although he has commanded troops (for example, in the March of the Ten Thousand), he was never a ruler, much less a tyrant. As with Cato and Hiero, Cajal has had both experiences, he is acquainted with both stages, one of which is mediated by a relatively better or worse memory. Young people, however, can only imagine, or learn from what they are told by those who have the experience of having lived to the age of eighty or so. Again, it bears mentioning that experience is not all there is to understanding.10 MADNESS AND SANITY Insanity complicates the matter, and not only because there are many ways of being insane. It has often been pointed out that the definitions of madness and sanity are culturally specific, but it seems sure that culture is neither always the only factor, nor always the determinant one among many.

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Everything seems to suggest that the loss of reason looks different before and after it happens, which leads us to the question: What does sanity look like from the perspective of insanity? Seemingly, from the perspective of sanity, there are varieties of insanity, such as some kinds of schizophrenia, that allow one to see through to the other side. There are also people who have recovered from dementia: they usually recall it in horror. It seems improbable that this same horror was not present during the dementia. DREAMING AND WAKEFULNESS From what we know of them, we can say that dreaming and wakefulness are normal states for our species: they do not constitute a distinguishing criterion between classes or types, as blindness and color vision do. Of course, they can allow us to classify individuals according to different ways of dreaming or being awake. From ancient times on, the possibility of not knowing if one is dreaming or awake has been worrisome. In sleep and in dreams, the characteristics of the waking world (which we usually consider to be simply the world) are no longer in effect, leaving us to think that sleep is an altered state that excludes us from normal perception and normal reasoning, a state that while awake we see as a way of restoring ourselves physically so that we may live normally. Also, it seems that we each dream alone, that our dreams belong to nobody else, although different people might dream the same thing. Is there a vision or a conception from within dreams, and not from within the mere memory of dreams when one is awake? It is rare to dream that one is dreaming. And nightmares have a certain reality although what is dreamed in them does not. In any case, they do not seem incommensurable, at least if we consider the question from the side of wakefulness. HALLUCINATION AND INEBRIATION Hallucination, so they say, is a close cousin of dreaming. One difference between them is that in some instances of hallucination consciousness (what we usually call consciousness) is not completely lost—as opposed to the effects of total inebriation and other substance-induced states. However, it would be difficult to argue that there is no access at all to an unintoxicated state (sobriety or, if you prefer, lucidity) from the other side, although the methods of access do not present regularities similar to those that one could observe from the perspective of sobriety

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or lucidity. Here there seem to be cultural differences with respect to the position occupied by such states and the ways in which they are valued and even the circumstances under which they may be induced. Could there be such a thing as a drunken science? Or a hallucinated vision of the world (in the strictest sense)? Whatever the case, different cultures (all of them, probably) agree that some states are normal and others not, although they do not always agree on which ones those are. From the perspective of normality, there are one or more ways of understanding the states of delusion and inebriation, even for those who have not experienced these states. Consider two famous texts, Aldous Huxley’s classic The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. Hallucinating people do not always know that they are hallucinating and, more important, they do not always know that they were. Therefore, there is no guarantee of separation between what is hallucinated and what is not. We may think of the phenomenon of revelation or the privileged contact with the Holy, among other phenomena. MYSTIC STATES AND DAILY LIFE Here, then, we find ourselves drawn into the notion of mysticism. A compelling paradox of mysticism is that we lose consciousness of our daily lives in order to gain access to a supposedly higher form of reality in some modalities or tendencies, communion with this higher reality is attained by performing specific exercises or by ingesting certain substances. There are mystical visions of the world, in the widest sense, that still hold up in nonmystic states. There are also the testimonies left by some mystics, such as Ibn al-‘Arabi, Juan de la Cruz, and Teresa of Avila. Disturbingly, there are also cases of mystical behavior in people suffering from brain tumors. But from this we may not conclude that all mystical experiences have a physiological cause. The mystic lives in two worlds, usually alternating between the two, but it could be argued that both are part of a single reality, although one of them is deemed less rich or of lesser value. Mystics, when not in trance, commonly describe the difference between the two worlds as the contrast between the apparent or the “here,” and the “real” or the “absolute.” ERROR, CERTAINTY, DOUBT The experience of error is, indubitably, universally human. Sometimes we feel certain, but that does not mean we are not wrong. We may be in error without realizing it. When we do realize it, we lose the

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certainty of what we believed. We may be certain of our error (at times) and at other times even incorrectly certain that we are wrong: we come to realize (or think we do) that there was no error to begin with. Our realization can be a way out, but it can also be the start of an endless anxiety. I can locate myself outside of certainty, and of course outside of error, and examine both; I can do the same with doubt. That is, I can know them (at least partially) from the outside. From within, or from what I perceive to be within them, I can know or think I know what it is like not to be within them. Some instances of doubt come and go. Allowing for most cases, where this fails to happen, doubt itself is a frequent visitor—and a very sociable one.11 And yet it can be overcome (undoubtedly). CONCLUDING REMARKS What are the limits of our ability to access others and otherness? In this, as in all else, it would be reckless to affirm that human nature is absolutely unbounded. It is more probable that there are limits, in spite of the infinite possibilities at the disposal of our species, an infinity within boundaries. Almost all of us feel certain that there are limits. Furthermore, there are cases in which it is possible to point out those limits without falling prey to a contradiction (whether or not limits exist, one can speak consistently of them, even if they are only possible, that is, unrealized). In our own species, for example, a person can say that he or she is incapable of running four hundred meters in less than a minute. Less trivially, in order to defend the idea that something is unimaginable, we do not have to imagine it (and therefore succumb to incoherence). To say that something is unthinkable is more difficult: it turns on our being able to specify what we are discussing. We could be referring to the impossibility of one clear and distinct thought, starting from what is obscure and indistinct—then there would be no inconsistency. And even in this metacomparison there is not necessarily a vicious circle or some form of incoherence. There are cases in which there is, and cases in which there is not. It matters, then, that we be able to characterize both kinds of cases, generally and sufficiently. If we manage to achieve our task, then we will be in a position to avoid infinite regress, because the matter is resolved in its very enunciation. We locate ourselves on a higher level to decide that something possesses certain qualities—now, is it necessary to know all the qualities of this higher level?

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Let me illustrate with an elementary example from the world of classical physics. In I due massimi sistemi del mondo, Galileo argues in favor of the idea that the Earth rotates, and uses the example of a ball thrown into the air from a moving boat. Interestingly, from his perspective there are two movements happening (this is also, obviously, the dominant perspective of modern times, including our own). In convincing his readers of the first double movement, he also convinces them (or at least hopes to convince them) of the second double movement: the boat is moving on an Earth that is itself moving. We have here what some would call a dialectic. In the same way that a ball thrown into the air from a moving boat does not fall into the sea (barring some other force pushing it in that direction), the fact that the Earth rotates does not mean that when we jump we must land on a point different from our take-off point, contrary to the claims of Copernicus’s detractors. One could say that Galileo’s argument is adequate in that it does not rely on the audience’s granting that the Earth rotates. If it did, it would be an example of circular reasoning. Seen from off the boat, on dry land, the ball’s trajectory traces a parabola. From the perspective of someone on deck, the trajectory is simply vertical. Summing up, I believe that in the field of epistemological differences between individuals, or within an individual, and among groups of people, the fact that some phenomena are relative to others does not imply an endless chain of relativism from which it is impossible to escape. In other words, it does not imply an absolute relativism. At most, we could argue for a “relative relativism.” That is to say, without paradox, a relativism rooted in the nonrelative. NOTES 1. A large number of the themes discussed in the trilogy reappear in the author’s other publications, such as Said 1993. The positions expressed in Blaming the Victims (Said and Hitchens 1988) do not diverge from this line of thought. Blaming the Victims is a collective work dedicated to one aspect of the dispossession of the Palestinian people—a phenomenon on which he has published articles in several journals, beginning with the Journal of Palestine Studies. (We may recall that the author was born in Jerusalem.) Also important is The World, the Text, and the Critic (Said 1983), which, although dedicated to literary criticism, has points of contact with the problems that concern us here. 2. This is an edited extract of the epilogue to the then-forthcoming reedition of Orientalism. The issue contains, moreover, several contributions

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related to the Islamic world, within the context of what the cover calls Orientalism Revisited. 3. In this, and in the previously mentioned article, one finds responses to what the Palestinian scholar judged to be misreadings or mistaken interpretations, as well as replies (or attacks) made by some of the authors criticized in the book’s first edition. Most notable among them is Bernard Lewis, who has sustained a long polemic with Said through various publications. 4. See, for example, Allport 1954, a rich book that nonetheless does not completely escape a prejudiced perspective itself. 5. Historia crítica de las ideas religiosas is the title given by Miguel Asín Palacios to his Spanish edition of the Fisal (Ibn Hazm 1927). 6. A particularly instructive collection of essays on the social sciences is Gellner 1984. The distinction between natural and social sciences is a recurring theme. I find areas of agreement with this work, particularly with the essay “Relativism and Universals”; nevertheless, I disagree with Gellner on many points. 7. See Said 1981; the second and final section, “Knowledge and Interpretation,” of the third and last chapter (“Knowledge and Power”) is especially relevant to this discussion. 8. And not just because even with eyelids closed we can perceive light sensations. 9. In this regard, consider the following enlightening passage from The Days [Alayyâm ], an autobiography in the third person by Egyptian writer Taha Husayn (1997, 15–16): He was the seventh of the thirteen children of his father, and the fifth out of the eleven children of his father’s second wife. He used to feel that among this enormous number of youths and infants he had a special place distinct from his brothers and sisters. Did this position please him or did it annoy him? The truth is that he cannot definitely say, nor is he now able to form a correct judgment about it. He experienced much tenderness and consideration from his mother, and from his father lenience and kindness, and his brothers he felt were somewhat reserved in their conversation and dealings with him. But he found side by side with this tenderness and consideration on the part of his mother a certain amount of negligence sometimes, and at others even harshness. And side by side with the lenience of his father he found a certain amount of negligence also, and even severity from time to time. Moreover, the reserve of his brothers and sisters pained him because he found therein a sympathy tainted with revulsion. However, it was not long before he learnt the reason of all this, for he perceived that other people had an advantage over him and that his brothers and sisters were able to do things that he could not do and to tackle things that he could not. He felt that his mother

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permitted his brothers and sisters to do things that were forbidden to him. This aroused, at first, a feeling of resentment, but ere long this feeling of resentment turned to a silent, but heartfelt, grief—when he heard his brothers and sisters describing things about which he had

no knowledge at all. Then he knew that they saw what he did not see. 10. Of course, there are other ways of showing, besides speaking. Many, many years ago I saw a documentary prepared by a team of doctors led by the pathologist E. Letterer, from Tübingen. The documentary was a discussion of the physical and mental changes brought on by aging, and the methods then available for dealing with infirmity and the decay of faculties, among which, naturally, were disorders such as arteriosclerosis. The physical aspects were not difficult to make understandable to the general public. This was more difficult with some of the mental aspects. Others were easy to communicate: no matter our age, all of us can understand memory loss even though we may not experience it systematically. But in order to show changes in vision to the not-yet old, the filmmakers used some visual effects. To show the presumed dulling of colors that comes with age, they showed a handful of flowers, first with their real colors and then in paler shades. The assumption was that even when the loss was gradual and those undergoing it did not notice it, the loss contributed to the general impoverishment of their lives. What happened when old people saw the film? One would think that they saw the artificially dulled colors as duller than those meant to be natural. Thus, in the end the same message would be conveyed to them as to young or adult viewers. But some older viewers may have not been able to perceive the difference between intensities of color. Curiously, for me, on the threshold of “the fourth age,” colors do not seem to have dulled at all . . . 11. Let us consider a story by Balzac, “La messe de I’athée” [The atheist’s mass]. It interests us here because, although a work of fiction, it has a certain verisimilitude. One day, Dr. Bianchon sees the surgeon from whom he learned his art go into a church to attend mass. This greatly surprises Bianchon since Desplein, the surgeon, is a declared atheist. Days later, he hears Desplein making his usual declarations against religion, and for a moment Bianchon thinks he must have misidentified the person he saw attending mass. But the situation changes later when someone else asks Desplein what he was doing in the church of Saint-Sulpice, and Desplein gives an answer which is, by all appearances, false. Then Bianchon goes back to thinking that it was indeed Desplein he saw kneeling in the pews. He decides to get to the bottom of the mystery. At first glance, Desplein is a false atheist (the inverse of a false believer) who intends to deceive everyone. But if this is the case, why such behavior?

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REFERENCES Allport, Gordon. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Gellner, Ernst. 1984. Relativism and the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huguet del Villar, Emilio. 1928. El Greco en España. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Husayn, Taha. 1997. The Days. Translated by E. H. Paxton, Hilary Wayment, and Kenneth Craig. Cairo: American University of Cairo Press. Ibn Hazm, Ali ibn Ahmed. 1927. Abenházm de Córdoba y su “Historia crítica de las ideas religiosas.” Edited and translated by Miguel Asín Palacios. Madrid: Tipografía de la Revista de archivos. Kuhn, T. S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ramón y Cajal, Santiago. 1934. El mundo visto a los ochenta años: Impresiones de un arterioesclerótico. Madrid: Tipografía Artística. Rosaldo, Renato, 1989. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon. Said, Edward W. 1979. The Question of Palestine. New York: Times Books. . 1980 [1978]. Orientalism. New York: Random House. . 1981. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Pantheon. . 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. . 1985. “Orientalism Reconsidered.” Race and Class 27.2: 1–15. . 1993. Culture and Imperialism: The T.S. Eliot Lectures at the University of Kent, 1985. New York: Knopf/Random House. . 1995. “East Isn’t East: The Impending End of the Age of Orientalism.” Times Literary Supplement, 3 February. Said, Edward, and Christopher Hitchens, eds. 1988. Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question. London: Verso. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: B. Blackwell. . 1988. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden. New York and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

chapter seven

Henry S. Maine History and Antiquity in Law Andrés Lira

T

he oeuvre of Henry Sumner Maine (1822–1888) would seem a perfect fit for this book; or, one might better say, Unbecoming Modern accords with Maine’s oeuvre, itself a manifestation of that colonial present in which an English scholar of law and the social institutions visible in juridical texts clarified the European past, stimulated by the discoveries and descriptions of travelers, by the explanations of historians, and above all by his own experience in India. Maine’s work continues to be valued, primarily by anthropologists working on social change; but in the Spanish-speaking world he is under-appreciated. And this despite the publication, by Mexico City’s Editorial Extemporáneos, of El derecho antiguo (1980), a new translation of Maine’s first, most famous book, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (1861), and despite the 1986 publication in Spanish of Paolo Grossi’s splendid Un altro modo di possedere: L’emersione di forme alternative di proprietà alla coscienza giuridica postunitaria (1977), translated by Juana Bignozzi and published by Barcelona’s Editorial Ariel under the title Historia del derecho de propiedad: La irrupción del colectivismo en la consciencia europea.1 (Grossi’s book, a clear appreciation of the significance of Maine’s work in the context of European ideology, and particularly European historiography, goes beyond the juridical issue announced by its title, reason enough for me to recommend it without hesitation.)

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I will limit myself here to considering one of Maine’s books that appeared in Spanish like a ghost, conjured up out of a business and publishing opportunity, under a title quite different from the English original and with no name of translator or year of publication. The English original was Maine’s second important book, VillageCommunities in the East and West (1889 [1871]), which he first published in 1871 and was based on the Lectures in Comparative Jurisprudence that he had given at Oxford University the previous year. Like El derecho antiguo, the new volume was very successful, with expanded editions (amplified by other Maine works) published in 1876 and 1889. España Moderna released the main part of this book in an edition titled Historia del derecho (Maine n.d. 1), which deleted some of the later works and added others that the author had included in different volumes. The translation was doubtless published in this way to take advantage of the interest it would arouse among Spanish-speaking readers who were familiar with Maine’s work, or at least with two books whose titles the Madrid edition’s own title tried to approximate, completely disfiguring the original. The first of those two works is the 1861 Ancient Law already mentioned, which was published in Spanish in 1893 in two volumes with the full title El derecho antiguo, considerado en sus relaciones con la historia de la sociedad primitiva y con las ideas modernas, the translation having been done from a French version apparently authorized by Maine. The second was El antiguo derecho y la costumbre primitiva (Maine n.d. 2), which España Moderna released, again without indicating a translator’s name or year of publication. With similar omissions, this house published a posthumous book by Maine, La guerra según el derecho internacional (n.b. 3), compiled from the last lectures he gave at Cambridge University in 1887. Surely other works by Maine were translated into Spanish. The leading Spanish scholars of legal history, comparative legislation, political law, and other disciplines that required historical reflection frequently cited Maine and appeared to be familiar with his work (see, for example, the prologue by Gumersindo de Azcárate in Maine 1893a). In Mexico one finds references to Maine in the work of historians and jurists such as Justo Sierra (1848–1912) and Jacinto Pallares (1845–1904), and I have seen old copies of Maine’s books in French and Spanish in the personal libraries of learned lawyers. I should observe here that the French version of Dissertations on Early Law and Custom (Maine 1883), Etudes sur l’ancien droit et la coutume primitive (Maine 1884), seems more carefully done and more exact than El

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antiguo derecho y la costumbre primitiva, and all evidence indicates that, unless otherwise indicated, the Spanish translations of these works were done from the French, a language more familiar to the hurried translators of España Moderna, whose ranks included such notable figures as Miguel de Unamuno and Adolfo Posada, as well as others who sought neither recognition nor any satisfaction greater than pay for the pages they hastily turned in to the publisher. But the fact of this translation, whatever its quality, shows the interest of Maine’s contemporaries and of subsequent generations in the contributions of a man who maintained an active correspondence with such thinkers as Charles Darwin, Lewis Henry Morgan, John Ferguson McLennan, and Herbert Spencer, among other noted authors of his time. It is appropriate, in the context of this volume, that we consider his books more closely, since in them Maine maps out the intersections of histories and the problem of knowledge as it faced the modernity of his Victorian era, the golden age of the British Empire. Maine’s world was one that believed in progress, one dominated by the conquests of civilization. In the years in which he gave the lectures from which his books were compiled, it seemed that everything could be explained through the diversifying and integrating process of evolution, according to models from the biological science then rapidly developing, which allowed one to observe the distant past of nature (through paleontology) and even of humanity in which, thanks to ethnology, phrenology, and diverse methods of physical appraisal, one could find enduring vestiges of remote, truly “primitive” epochs. From his vantage point of Roman law, Maine observed that rather than speak of the primitive, we should consider history as the uninterrupted present of humankind. The ancient was part and parcel of that present, an element in a process that left no place for marginalization or isolation, since however distant the realities were, their meaning was perceptible and their explanation possible if one did not confuse the moments by imposing a single scale or approach. Beneath the technically perfect juridical reasoning of the late Roman jurisconsults and codifiers, one should see elements of much earlier—but not strange—eras, which were evidence of diverse societies. Observation allowed one to see superpositions, that is, the results of a process. The process was the object of the observation and the superpositions and compositions were there, not as immovable unities sealed off from each other, but as testimony to evolution itself, which one had to figure out by using different means and assuming different perspectives.

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Henry Summer Maine was educated at Cambridge, where at the age of twenty-six he became a professor of civil law. He taught Roman law at the Inn Court of London (an academy associated with the courts). Though all his books were derived from his teaching, it is his first that made the smoothest transition from collection of lectures to literary text. As the book’s subtitle (in the 1861 original and in the 1893 Spanish translation) made explicit, Maine’s goal in Ancient Law was to clarify the history of antiquity in its juridical institutions as well as these institutions’ relationship to modern ideas (or modern mentality, as we might say today). The most abundant and revealing testimony comes from Roman law, from Gayo’s Instituta (second century C.E.) and Justin’s Juris civilis (sixth century C.E.). In comparing these testimonies to evidence from other IndoEuropean peoples, such as accounts by Eastern European scholars and especially descriptions coming from the India of his day, Maine noticed that the family group was predominant, and this became increasingly obvious to him in the more modern formulas of the European past and present. This was evidence of mentalities and moral textures that were different but related insofar as they had common origins, which one found grouped in the most elaborate testimonies of Roman law, such as the Instituta and Corpus, which date back to the first and second centuries C.E. These monuments of rational organization are characterized by discernment and by the predominance of individual will, the object of the jurists’ technical elaborations, but the pieces used to assemble these technical works and the obstacles overcome to reach the construction site suggest worlds in which the individual as such did not exist. In this study, which cannot be summed up through simplification, since each step reveals an erudition leavened by penetrating thought, Maine notes that “the positive duty resulting from one man’s reliance on the word of another is among the slowest conquests of advancing civilisation” (Maine 1861, 312). This conquest, which he explained in terms of social structure and change, signified the “movement from Status”— the situation within the group to which one belongs—“to Contract ”—an agreement among individual wills that is recognized and given the means necessary to make it effective (ibid., 170). This statement by Maine, reduced to a formula, “from Status to Contract,” has led to his being labeled a schematic evolutionist, a fate that has also befallen other authors of supposedly “facile formulas” (such as Ferdinand Tönnies of Community and Society and Emile

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Durkheim of “Organic Solidarity and Contractual Solidarity”), a categorization that fails to take into account how and when these authors composed their books, or the validity of the process in which they described, developed, and published them. After all, if evolutionistic references and assumptions clearly can be found in these works (how could they not be, given the period in which the texts were written), it is just as certain that this fact in no way diminishes the perspective of a thinker like Maine. For Maine questioned evolutionary models according to the requirements of historical investigation, inspired by August von Haxthausen’s descriptions of Slav communities and by the writings of other writers who, like Georg Ludwig von Maurer in his studies of Germanic communities, had clarified collective forms of land ownership and organization. He was also motivated by his experience in the assessment of problems related to these social forms, which were still found in Scotland and, above all, in India. Maine was in Calcutta from 1862 to 1869, distinguishing himself as a civil servant in the colonial administration and as a professor and the Vice Chancellor of the University of Calcutta, founded in 1857 (as were the universities in Madras and Bombay). It was in 1870, after his return from India, that Maine gave the lectures that make up Village-Communities in the East and West, essays which were poorly translated into Spanish and collected, as I have said, under the different but not completely misleading title Historia del derecho. In these lectures Maine spoke as a professor of “comparative jurisprudence,” giving the term a wider significance than it had in traditional courses. That is, he was not satisfied with analyzing juridical figures related to practical questions in order to find the formula most effective for solving a given problem; for Maine what was most interesting was finding the roots and historical dimension of a problem, as was being done in the philology and comparative mythology of his time. Like his counterparts in these disciplines, Maine used sciences and techniques that allowed one to identify parallel phenomena in order to show how he believed the phenomena he identified were to some extent dependent on others in an order of historical succession. In this initial moment of the lectures in comparative jurisprudence, Maine appeared to be limiting himself to perspectives determined and accepted by evolutionism. But he quickly broke through those limits, which he had in any case already surpassed in Ancient Law ten years earlier, except that now he was invoking his experience

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or, if you prefer, his direct observation as an auxiliary in historical investigation, as he notes in this passage: When in truth we have to some extent succeeded in freeing ourselves from that limited conception of the world and mankind, beyond which the most civilised societies and (I will add) some of the greatest thinkers do not always rise; when we gain something like an adequate idea of the vastness and variety of the phenomena of human society; when in particular we have learned not to exclude from our view of the earth and man those great and unexplored regions which we vaguely term the East, we find it to be not wholly a conceit or a paradox to say that the distinction between the Present and the Past disappears. Sometimes the Past is the Present; much more often it is removed from it by varying distances, which, however, cannot be estimated or expressed chronologically. (Maine 1889 [1871], 7)

Maine did not reject evolutionist postulates; to do so was impossible in the scientific climate of his time. But nor did he limit himself to them, as we have seen and as Grossi (1981 [1977], 14) eloquently observes: “The evolutionistic interpretative models which were in the air in English culture during the 1850s and which Maine adopted are always balanced and corrected by a historicism that he learned through the pages of the German scholars and that attenuated and softened the rigidity of a strictly evolutionistic interpretation . . . and the dialectic between evolutionary certitude and rigidity and historicist relativity and plasticity was constantly repeated, with a clear predominance on the part of the latter.” We have thus an affirmation of history as a permanent process in which the ancient can be detected by using scales that are always relative, but that in the final analysis are still scales. Although well aware of evolutionistic postulates and the value of progress manifested by “civilisation,” Maine focused attention on the ancient as part of realities that were contemporary in presents determinable solely because of the positions of the person who was able to distinguish and locate the ancient. This position’s first requirement was a revision of the observer’s postulates. In this manner Maine arrived at his point of departure—that of law conceived as objective order and endowed with a greater coactivity than other orders—without confining law within the narrow limits imposed on it by the analytic jurisprudence of his day. In this respect Maine’s thought contrasts sharply with that of writers like John Austin and Jeremy Bentham. Austin saw the law’s clear expression as the mandate of the sovereign, while for Maine ordered societies existed that had neither visible sovereign nor expressed and convincing mandates. Bentham (whose work like

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Austin’s is a culminating moment in European rationalism) believed that the attainment of happiness by the greater number was a quality to which any social order could aspire, while there was evidence of cases in which the “number” were not conceived as individuals, since they disappeared into the community, the object and sustenance of orders in little or no way utilitarian and therefore inconceivable in the individualistic and utilitarian projections of European rationalism. If Maine’s perception of the family community had been clear since Ancient Law, ten years later, in 1871, it was even more so, since by then he had put to profit the lessons learned in India, where he had found, first and foremost, other sources of law, that is, other manifestations of order and of the assertion of interests. The second chapter of Village-Communities Maine titles “The Sources of Indian Law” (“Las fuentes del derecho indio” in Historia del derecho ). We have here a formal concept, from the clearest European juridical tradition, put to the test in those days of the British Empire in India, where direct government, with intervention by Parliament, was imposed late, in 1858, relieving an East India Company supposedly heir to the various rulers [señores ] of the country. Be this as it may, the British system of penetration and domination consisted of seeking not to alter the native organization of villages or to change it as little as possible, the goal being to maximize the efficiency of the extraction of taxes or revenues and the obtaining of material for industry and commerce. According to Maine, this was a “quasi-judicial” system of government since it did not impose authorities in the localities but only named distributing commissioners, who were charged with keeping track of communities’ production and establishing the tax owed by the localities according to the villages’ agreement with and commitment to the British authorities, through their own organization and leaders. The primary source of law for the imposition of administrative and (like it or not) political order in terms of dominion and organization through revenue came to be the Record of Rights, established by agents in the “Settlement.” This document, in case of disagreement, was impugnable in the revenue courts, whose decision could be appealed to higher courts (a “High” or “Supreme” court). These judicial bodies were to rule in keeping with the custom of the villages, avoiding the application of outside norms, since the distance, inaptness, and rigidity of the latter could make them prejudicial. But what occurred, warns Maine, is that the customary (or what was considered as such, since often what the British authorities received was the falsified testimony of the villages agents or supposed authorities) became

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extremely rigid when brought into legal argumentation, thus losing its condition as a native and original order and even becoming the over-conceptual, over-elaborated artifice of frequently corrupt intermediaries. The quasi-judicial model of government, according to which the British authorities would supposedly only act to resolve conflicts by appealing to the traditional order, was overwhelmed by the circumstances, since this real or supposed order was subjected to situations and experiences never foreseen by the villages and their inhabitants. In putting themselves under the protection of British authorities in English forts, the villagers considered themselves beyond the order of their communities. Furthermore, given the inherited traditional order—or, better, traditional orders—in which the familial, local group dominated, it was difficult to determine degrees and levels of responsibility in instances of conflict, and even in situations that were only conflictual because means of agreement were not understood. Maine notes that the agreements between contracting parties were not considered obligatory unless they had been ruled on by an outside authority, with the result that the simplest agreements would be carried to the highest judicial instance in order to give them the force of obligation, even when there was no previous conflict (see Maine 1889 [1871], chap. 2 and 110–11). In this way, Maine found in his experience of India further evidence of the ancient as part of present history. The force of obligation in the word, characteristic of the contract and a fruit of the great step forward that humanity had taken in the West, as Maine had noted in Ancient Law, was absent in India. “Authority, Custom, or Chance are in fact the great sources of law in primitive communities as we know them, not Contract” (Maine 1889 [1871], 110–11). Thus functioned this formal approach, which began at the sources of law and ended at the communities. But which communities were these? Maine broadened his vision of the community based on evidence he found in Roman law and in other well-known texts, such as the descriptions of Haxthauser and Maurer that he had already treated in his initial phase, but which he came to reappreciate when he considered them alongside the works he incorporated into his observations until the end of his life. As a professor of civil and Roman law in the years he was assembling Ancient Law (i.e., 1847–61), Maine found the basic unity of the patriarchal family in mechanisms that seemed to privilege the individual, the individual will that manifested itself in the contract and other legal acts, and also

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in modern conceptions of the political doctrine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which posited that at the origin of society was a contract or pact, something that could only occur to authors who lived in societies with an advanced jurisprudence, in which technique guided by intentions with respect to the disposition of goods—which were the result of enormous progress in the world of commerce—aimed to make possible the manifestation of individual wills and their obligatory agreements. Nevertheless, even in Maine’s day, the masculine figure, a reminder of the chief of a group rarely present, was conspicuous in the designs directed at increasing the use of these techniques; even in the most “civilized” countries, like France and England in that period, clear limitations were placed on women. The texture of elements made dynamic by technique revealed the collective consistency of property, conceived by juridico-political doctrines of the day as an individual right par excellence. But most illustrative for Maine, upon his return from India, was observing the existence of village-communities in regions of Eastern Europe that were more or less distant from the West, or even in his own isle, as was shown by studies carried out in Scotland since the 1840s and into the years Maine gave his lectures at Oxford, with the aim of alleviating problems then facing the British Isles2. If in his first book he had offered as a present evidence of antiquity the presence of certain fossilized holdovers [supervivencias], upon return from those climes (which he referred to out of political convention as if they were a single country), Maine, supported by his observations and a growing bibliography (1889 [1871], 103), was able to say that “the Indian and the ancient European systems of enjoyment and tillage by men grouped in village-communities are in all essential particulars identical.” Now, the roots of this community lay in the patriarchal family, the specific subject of Maine’s final studies and, we could say, the result of his first approach to ancient society. The agricultural community proved vigorous and sufficient in its ability to absorb outside elements—as could be seen in clientèle, in the adoption of children, and other testimonies clear in Roman law—and to be a self-sufficient organization in its own environment. When this wasn’t the case, when an effective government imposed itself (even without trying to do so) upon the internal order of the communities, a process of feudalization could be observed, that is, the village-community’s passage into a regime of suzerainty. It sometimes happened that, even when they wanted to preserve the original organization, governments—

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like the British government in India—that were more interested in administrating in order to obtain income than in dominating and converting or acculturating peoples, promoted the formation of different power structures that favored a particular class: as Maine observed speaking of “the process of feudalisation” (the Spanish translation has “el origen . . .” [Maine n.d. 1, 108]), when the British, in their effort to preserve the communities’ customs and organization, designated the persons and groups responsible for the collection and payment of rents, they found themselves “compelled to confer on the selected class powers co-extensive with its duties to the soverign. Not that the assumption is ever made that new proprietary powers are conferred on it, but what are supposed to be its right is in relation to all other classes are defined; and in the vague and floating order of primitive societies, the mere definition of a right immensely increases its strength” (Maine 1889 [1871], 149–50). “It is found, however, that when an official appointed by a powerful government acts upon the loose constitution of a primitive society he crushes down all other classes and exalts that to which he himself belongs” (151). In this manner, the process of feudalization imposed itself where an external power worked on a community, even when the power wanted to preserve the community or change it as little as possible. “The fund out of which rent is provided is in fact a British creation—the fruit of the peace which the British have kept and of the moderation of their fiscal demands” (ibid., 179–80). True, but in order to do this, even while conceiving and respecting the village-community as a unit and as a property owner, it was necessary to situate and control the community. To this end it became indispensable that persons be named who would be responsible to the government, necessarily ignoring in these appointments certain internal components and making arrangements. The community thus began to lose its ability to assimilate and incorporate certain external elements since, conditioned to the requirements of a government (which was lax in appearance but effective and coactive in its operation), the community’s action ceased to serve its own development and permanence. For this reason, Maine warned, “these properties [of assimilation] may be perpetuated in [village-communities] for any time by bad government [i.e., an inefficient government, the communities]. But tolerably good government takes away their absorptive power by its indirect effects, and can only restore it by direct interposition” (168). Direct intervention, I should point out, was a step beyond the process of feudalization.

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When we appreciate this penultimate lecture in the six that make up the first part of Village-Communities, we better understand the urgency of establishing comparisons, or at least of suggesting that texts be read alongside it which are more distant in time but closer to us in Latin America, as are the writings of sixteenth-century Spanish chroniclers and functionaries. In concluding, I will pick up these other alterities and modernities at the historical intersections, but first we should consider the last of these six lectures, “The Early History of Price and Rent,” both key elements in the individualizing conception and, necessarily, in the community’s process of disintegration (albeit one compensated in quite different times and chronological distances). We are talking here about the alterity of the market, in which territorial rent is adjusted as the deferred price of property that, as a matter of principle, is not considered transferable. That is, even if rent is established with every intention of preserving, in this case, a collective entity called a community, the community in the end disintegrates. This is because the shaping of the power of a class that will gain control of resources through rent will in the end have the effect of causing the property used and maintained by its original owners to pass into the hands of those who claim it and want more freedom to dispose of it. In this process, only the express design of the government will keep the community apart and allow it to be preserved within artificial limits, as an operating piece with very relative degrees of autonomy, as Maine observed in other works. Into the third edition of Village-Communities, published in 1876, Maine incorporated texts that predated and postdated the 1870 lectures. Among these is an interesting talk, “The Effects of Observation of India on Modern European Thought,” in which he insists on and presents further arguments for the need to study comparative history. Part of one passage, which I will reproduce here, encompasses the two extreme points of his professional interest, the Roman Empire and the British Empire of his day, in which one finds the village-community as an institution: How was it that some institutions of the Provinces were crushed down and levelled by the Roman Imperial system, while others, derived from the remotest Aryan antiquity, were kept in such preservation that they easily blended with the institutions of the wilder Aryan races who broke into the Empire? British India teaches us that part of the destroying process is inevitable; for instance, the mere establishment of a Court of Justice, such as a Roman Court was, in Gaul would alter and transform all the customary rights of the Gallic Celts by arming them with a sanction. On the other hand,

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certain institutions of a primitive people, their corporations and villagecommunities, will always be preserved by a suzerain state governing them, on account of the facilities which they afford to civil and fiscal administration. (Maine 1889 [1871], 235–36)

Such an idea is defensible in the case of the Imperial state, in which the problem of nationalities was relegated or resolved (as one prefers) by the unity of the Crown, by a traditional legitimacy that transcended time, ethnic character, and space; but something quite different occurs in national states, which arose out of the declaration of a national unity rooted in an assumed and demanded equality. This was the situation that Spanish America found itself in, and it led to a crisis, requiring precisely the legal abolition of indigenous communities as the national state’s motivating factor. In fact, if we look at Spanish America in the years that Maine composed Village-Communities, we see that the sovereign states were working as never before to destroy the indigenous corporations and communities. In Bolivia, where the indigenous tax had accounted for a substantial portion of national revenues, these entities were legally maintained until their dissolution in the 1870s, something that had occurred long before in other countries on the continent (in Mexico, for example, it happened by 1810). Of course it is true that, thanks to administrative and legal sleight of hand or as a result of open opposition, the communities survived into the twentieth century, and communities in the Americas reflect different degrees of “Indianness” (revived by external movements of widely varying strength and effectiveness)— and I am leaving aside here the labyrinthine questions of authenticity (Bonilla 1991; Ovando Sanz 1985; Platt 1982; Miranda 1972). In Mexico, as is well known, the dissolution—which had been in the making for some time, beginning in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when the emergence of a “protecting action” imposed greater rationality on the governance of the village-communities, and continuing through the openly contrary liberal legislation promulgated by the Spanish Cortes at Cádiz in 1810—was radicalized starting in 1856 as a result of the Disentailment Law of 25 June. In other words, as I have said, Maine’s use of “always” in reference to the suzerain state seems to apply only to the imperial multinational state and not to the liberal uninational one—a question of scale for different times or political/administrative measures. And yet, the political and temporal differences do not prevent but rather seem to require that in the context of comparative jurisprudence—

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as Maine conceived it in the first lecture of Village–Communities—I call attention to something that has interested me since I began my readings and my composition of this essay. Despite the chronological distance between Maine and the early Spanish American colonial world, his ability, as a jurist and a functionary, to accumulate and fruitfully reflect on his academic experience and public service in India recalls and suggests constant parallels with figures of that era. Especially suggestive in this context is the work of Alonso de Zorita (ca. 1511–ca. 1585),3 who wrote, with the practical end of responding to requisitions of the Consejo de Indias, such interesting works as the Summa de tributos (lost today) and the Breve y sumaria relación de los señores y maneras y diferencias que había de ellos en Nueva España (Zurita 1941), which has given substance to the best-informed historiographical reflections. What Zorita calls attention to in the latter text, probably written at the beginning of the 1560s, is the disintegration of the indigenous villages [pueblos ]4 as a result of the efforts of an efficient government (to use Maine’s adjective) to regulate the tax on the basis of a supposed respect for the villages’ ancestral forms of tribute and their native organization. The indigenous tribute was nonetheless adjusted (so as to avoid arbitrariness and excess), reduced to and expressed through money or certain goods (as in the case of the “chickens of Castile”) produced in villages organized under the regime of “republic” or elected town council, in which “señores naturales” were replaced by “principalejos.” In this as in other Zorita texts there appears an ingredient that is absent from and, one might say, opposite of what we find in the British policy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that is, religious proselytism or, to use the term of the time, evangelization, which supposedly legitimated Spanish domination in the West Indies. Moreover, in Zorita’s writings there appear the complaints of the missionary monks, specifically those of the Franciscans as principal authors of the “conquista espiritual.” In the Breve y sumaria relación, as in the Relacion de Nueva España (Zurita 1999), which he wrote in his final years after returning to Grenada, most of the information comes from the work of Friar Toribio de Benavente (or Motolinía), whose writings Zorita transcribes with little summary or alteration. This difference does not diminish the possibility of comparison. Using the above materials and those of other authors, recounting their experiences as if they were his own, Zorita the retired magistrate reflects as jurist and historian on how the daily action of the Spaniards

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has changed indigenous peoples. He thus articulates what in institutional experience will be part of the history of the General Indian Court (Juzgado General de Indios), an instance formally defined in 1592 but that already had been operating for some time with the goal of not altering or of altering as little as possible the customs of the villages in the resolution of conflicts (Borah1983). More than one of the essays collected in Village–Communities in the East and West—and not found in the Spanish translation, Historia del derecho —could profitably be compared with texts by Zorita in order to better our understanding of colonial histories as process. They could also help us approach the history of European historiography, since one cannot help noticing, in the testimonial current of nineteenth–century Europe, demonstrations of collective life as a response to the excesses of triumphant individualism. The Breve y sumaria relación was first published in 1840 in French, under the title Rapport sur les différentes classes de chefs de la NouvelleEspagne, by Artus Bertrand, a book dealer and publisher in Paris, as part of the collection “Voyages, relations et mémoires originaux pour servir à l’histoire de la découverte de l’Amérique,” a group of texts that any work following the lead of this volume would do well to consider. Finally, I should note that this translation of Zorita’s Breve y sumaria relación, along with other eyewitness and more distant testimonies—such as those that Maine consulted—fed the hopes and strengthened the arguments of socialist activists (whom Maine could never be accused of frequenting) in their affirmation that one could move directly from the communist organization of villages to a socialist economy, without going through the tribulations of capitalism. The community was there as both proof and historical possibility in quite different eras. The socialists saw it as a political option, Maine only as a part that was present. NOTES 1. Ediciones Extemporáneos called its translation the “primera edición en castellano,” a claim that should be qualified, as we will soon see. Grossi’s book was translated into English by Lydia Cochrane and published in 1981 by the University of Chicago Press as An Alternative to Private Property. 2. On Maine’s reading of studies of Scotland from the 1840s, see his citation of the evidence given by Erwin Nasse before the Select Committee of 1844 in Maine 1889 [1871], 97; on his reading of later studies, see

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his citation of “Return of Boroughs or Cities in the United Kingdom, Possessing Common Land,” Appendix 1, House of Commons, 10 August 1870, in ibid., 96. 3. His name has also been spelled “Zurita,” but “Zorita” is preferred in modern scholarship. A zorita is a bird native to Mexican forests, and indigenous Mexicans of Zorita’s era drew the head of this bird to represent him in their codices. 4. In day-to-day Spanish of the period, pueblo was used to refer to a settled community with its own powers. This is the closest Spanish term to village–community.

REFERENCES Bonilla, Heraclio, comp. 1991. Los Andes en la encrucijada: Indios, comunidades y estados en el siglo XIX. Quito: Ediciones Librimundi, Enrique Grosse Luemern, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales—Sede Ecuador. Borah, Woodrow Wilson. 1983. Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grossi, Paolo. 1981 [1977]. An Alternative to Private Property: Collective Property in the Juridical Consciousness of the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lira, Andrés. 1995. Comunidades indigenas frente a la ciudad de México: Tenochtitlan y Tlatelolco, sus pueblos y barrios, 1812–1919. Mexico City: Colegio de México. Maine, Henry Sumner. 1861. Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas. London: J. Murray. . 1883. Dissertations on Early Law and Custom: Chiefly Selected from Lectures Delivered at Oxford. London: J. Murray. . 1884. Etudes sur l’ancien droit et la coutume primitive. Translated from the English with the permission of the author. Paris: Albert Fontemoing. .1889 [1871]. Village-Communities in the East and West: Six Lectures Delivered at Oxford, to Which Are Added Other Lectures, Addresses, and Essays. 3d ed. New York: Henry Holt and Company. . 1893a. El derecho antiguo considerado en su relación con la historia de la sociedad primitiva y con las ideas modernas. Vol. I. Prologue by Gumersindo de Azcárate. Biblioteca Jurídica de Autores Contemporáneos. Madrid: Escuela Tipográfica del Hospicio. . 1893b. El derecho antiguo considerado en su relación con la historia de la sociedad primitiva y con las ideas modernas. Vol. 2. Translated from the French and compared with the original English version by A. Guerra. Madrid: Tipografía de Alfredo Alonso. . 1980. El derecho antiguo. Introduction by J. H. Morgan. Translated from the English by Pastora de la Peña. Mexico City: Editorial Extemporáneos.

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. n.d 1. Historia del derecho. Biblioteca de Jurisprudencia, Filosofía e Historia. Madrid: España Moderna. . n.d. 2. El antiguo derecho y la costumbre primitiva. Biblioteca de Jurisprudencia, Filosofía e Historia. Madrid: España Moderna. . n.d. 3. La guerra según el derecho internacional. Madrid: España Moderna. Miranda, José. 1972. “Importancia de los cambios experimentados por los pueblos indígenas desde la conquista.” In Vida colonial y albores de la independencia. Colección SEP-Setentas, no. 56. Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública. Ovando Sanz, Jorge. 1985. El tributo indígena en las finanzas bolivianas del siglo XIX. La Paz: Comité Ejecutivo de la Universidad Boliviana. Platt, Tristan. 1982. Estado boliviano y Ayllu andino: Tierra y tributo en el norte de Potosí. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Smith, Vincent Arthur, and Thomas George Percival Spear, eds. 1964. The Oxford History of India. 3d ed. Oxford: Clarendon. Zurita [sic for Zorita], Alonso de. 1941. Breve y sumaria relación de los señores y maneras y diferencias que había de ellos en Nueva España. In Relación de Texcoco y Breve relación de los señores de la Nueva España, by Juan Bautista Pomar and Alonso de Zurita. Vol. 3 of Nueva colección de documentos para la historia de México, edited by Joaquín Garcia Icazbalceta. Mexico City: Hayhoe. . 1999. Relación de la Nueva España: Relación de algunas de las muchas cosas notables que hay en la Nueva España y de su conquista y pacificación y de la conversión de los naturales de ella. Edited, with paleographic version and appendixes, by Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, Wiebke Ahrndt, and José Mariano Leyva. 2 vols. Mexico City: Conaculta.

chapter eight

Uncertain Dominance The Colonial State and Its Contradictions Sudipta Sen

Political struggle is enormously more complex: in a certain sense, it can be compared to colonial wars or to old wars of conquest—in which the victorious army occupies, or proposes to occupy, permanently all or part of the conquered territory. Then the defeated army is disarmed and dispersed, but the struggle continues on the terrain of politics. —Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks

I

t has been held for a long time now that certain historic and enduring facets of the modern European nation-state reached their most telling limits in the colony. A large part of the world under colonial rule, by the very same token, would also seem to have its political fate tied to histories that are intimately European. Among other institutions that arose in the particular context of Europe and sought their universal form outside Europe, the most fundamental was perhaps the modern form of statehood itself. In this brief consideration I further explore what is by now a familiar direction of thinking in the abundant recent work on the rich and diverse history of colonial modernities (Barlow 1997; Burton 1999; Chakrabarty 2000). The query I take up here is not so much how the universal structure of polity, consisting of the relationships among state, civil society, family, and political economy, was compromised and beleaguered as it spread across the non-European world in the age of expanding empires, but rather how colonial forms of domination

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impacted forms of the European state and its association with civil society. I address these questions with British India in mind, but I shall hazard a few comparative notes on the Spanish imperial moment in Latin America, especially Mexico. These contexts are very different indeed, removed in both time and space, but they suggest that acts of conquest initiate, though hardly resolve, what Gramsci describes as an ongoing war within the depths of all colonial societies. Crucial questions still remain on the nature of European state formation away from the terroir of European politics, and on the conditions, limits, and historia specifica of various forms of political dominance implanted in the colonial world in the period under consideration here, roughly the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My observations draw on Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (1971), especially the chapter “State and Civil Society,” where he considers the following question: To what extent can a state be identified with governance, thus underlining its basic political economic aspect—or, as Gramsci terms it, “the economic-corporate form” —and creating a fortuitous confusion between civil and political society (262–63)? A general idea of the state, remarks Gramsci, must include elements of civil and political society joined together, a “hegemony protected by the armour of coercion” (263). It is tempting to describe the colonial state at the height of its powers as a coercive apparatus masked by trappings of hegemony. I will argue, nonetheless, that in many respects the ideology of colonial state formation straddled the line between acts of dominance and ambitions of hegemony. This question has received increased attention in recent years from historians of colonialism, most notably Ranajit Guha (1989, 1997) in his work on British rule in India. Guha (1989, 277) writes of colonial domination as the historical limit to the universal tendency of capital and the development of the bourgeoisie beyond the context of the European nation-state. That the particular achievements of the bourgeoisie in England should appear as the universally significant ideal, especially in the context of a “liberal” colonialism, marked by the prominence of law, order, and social reform, strikes Guha as the “hallucinatory effects of ideology” (ibid.). Such a universal account of a colonial extension of capital then fabricates a “spurious hegemony” sanctified through an endless exercise of history that attempts to harness events of conquest to the progress of liberal imperial rule (283). Guha (1997, 5) is also concerned with the nature of the Indian bourgeoisie “spawned and nurtured

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by colonialism itself” which failed to “measure up to the heroism of the European bourgeoisie in its period of ascendancy.” Indigenous liberalism thus emerges in this analysis as a “caricature of the vigorous democratic culture” of Europe, a kind of imitative, surrogate formation limited by the very political economy of imperial rule. There is much to mull over in Guha’s formulation, especially the shifting line drawn between dominant and hegemonic accounts of colonial rule. It is difficult to separate the essential coercive apparatus of the colonial state, its instrumental violence, its need for survey and surveillance, and its attempts at suasion, from its quotidian, functional idioms, or the social-historical forms of its moral legitimacy. One way to study the form and ambition of such a polity might be to measure state formation at home against state formation in the farther reaches of the colony, and the homology of the state form stretched across colony and metropole (Sen 1994). It can be even argued that these templates intersected, and that the techne– of domination traveled between India and the British Isles. An example of this would be utilitarian reform pace Bentham and Malthus kept alive as the 1830s graduates of Hailebury College, Hertfordshire, a new generation of civil servants who left for service in India trained in both the classics and in Eastern languages. Another, later instance would be when the forensic art of fingerprinting—derived from the revenue experiments in the Bengal countryside pioneered by Henry Faulds and William James Herschel in the 1880s, and experimentally verified by Sir Francis Galton and Sir Edward R. Henry (chief commissioner of the London police)—was officially introduced by Scotland Yard in 1901. What concerns us here, however, is not the realization but the limits of the possibility of development of an indigenous civil society under colonial rule. In part this may be regarded as an outcome of the purported universalism of the colonial state and its institutions. It was also the structure of political economy, the constraints on the development of capital and its attendant social formations that provided the confines within which a new, arguably “modern,” conception of social collectivity could emerge. An early example of the latter was the East India Company’s version of a landed society in Bengal, crafted by Lord Cornwallis, that was based on the creation of a new mediating and loyal gentry, in the context of physiocratic and Whiggish ideas also studied brilliantly by Guha in A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963, 125—26). My emphasis in this essay, however, is not so much on the conflicted origins of a dominant indigenous

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class as on the new civil society that was anticipated, though it did not come to fruition, in the rise of a colonial state in India. DEVISING A COLONIAL SOCIETY The specific histories of colonialism, it could be argued, disrupt a universal history of the rational development of the European state, especially the one found in Hegel’s postulation that the family was transformed into civil society, and that civil society was the original foundation of the state. Accounts of colonial conquest, almost as a rule, deny each of these attributes to the vanquished. As we shall see below, following the triumph of British arms in India, early commentators condemned the natives’ cultures as bereft of a true state and civil society, while at the same time proclaiming the beginning of colonial institutions de novo, as a new Promethean undertaking. It is hardly surprising that no colonial state has ever fully relinquished its relationship with civil society at home and tried to attach wholly original rules or values to new prospects acquired in the colony. What makes the case of early colonial India intriguing is the very fact that it was never really seen as a settler colony, and so the moral and political conception of rule remained primarily an exercise in legitimacy rather than one in self-interest. The English in India pronounced that the extant community of inhabitants was entirely incapable of constituting a class of subjects who could animate the representative functions of the state. India was inherently unfree, lacking in the most important attributes of “liberty” and “property.” Early colonial commentators on the British Indian political economy believed what would be put forward unabashedly by James Mill in the early nineteenth century, namely, that Indians as subjects were passive instruments and not full and conscious participants in their own polity. Their lack of liberty, and perhaps also their loss of autonomy in conquest, had reduced the Indians to a state of perpetual unfreedom. Every freeborn Englishman, in contrast, had liberty and the right to property as his birthrights. Indians were hardly capable of apprehending the sanctity and the institution of true property. The absence of these cardinal virtues, liberty and property put together, was indicative of an “uncivil” society in India, making all forms of indigenous rule illegitimate. As Alexander Dalrymple (1772, 20–21) of the admiralty underscored, in a forceful late-eighteenthcentury pamphlet examining the East India Company’s rule in India, the principles of law relating to a common government could not

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be applied to “a class of a conquered people,” who in this regard were no more than a class of slaves governed happily by a despotic power tempered by “impartial justice.” Extending liberty to Indians would be tantamount to relinquishing the very legal foundations by which the Company had acquired territorial authority in the Mughal dominions. Such assertions that Indians were not fit to rule themselves would only become stronger as the decades of British rule passed. In negating the possibility of the emergence of an indigenous civil society, the architects of colonial India drew on the ideational foundation of the state and civil society in England, especially its three most important aspects: fiscal militarism, the patrimonial oligarchy of a covenanted bureaucratic service, and the absolute autonomy of the imperial-national sentiment in the formulation of the state and its political economy. Thus the East India Company could raise money, wage wars inside and outside of India, provide the sons of the gentry with jobs and prestigious country houses for their retirement, and, most important, give honorable national burials to those who died in service. Such fundamentals of colonial rule made it possible to defend the fickle barriers of race, because the rulers were armed with the idea that the liberal ends of rule fully justified the paternalism of empire. As long as Indians’ ulterior and best interests seemed to be in agreement with these ends, what need had they of direct political representation? THE SPECTER OF PRECOLONIAL SOCIETY: LESSONS FROM THE NEW WORLD In order to resolve the seeming paradox of a state without a civil society in the colonial context, a certain concept of uncertainty and alienation between dominant and subordinate subjects needs to be elaborated. The colonial state, one could argue, created a unique set of relationships with the indigenous communities in its grasp, communities that were not represented by any direct means in the making or exercise of law. This fundamental disjuncture between native society and the dominant political structure implies that the colonial state-form, neither constituted by the subjects under its rule nor engendered fully through an indigenous history, could relate to that society only through a series of closures and limitations. The first and foremost of these strictures derived from the right of conquest. For most modern European empires, argues Anthony

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Pagden (1995, 22–23), the Roman ideal cast a long shadow of both legitimacy and doubt. For Rome, civitas was perceived to be perfectly harmonious with the ends and means of the Imperium, giving the state a mandate to enslave, convert, and incorporate all who entered or were brought into its sphere. The Spanish occupation of the New World was justified principally on the grounds of what Pagden describes as the “just war” of the Christian and righteous conquistador against the heathen Indians, sanctified through blood and the Spanish Crown’s a priori prerogatives to seize native people, their goods, and their land as encomiendas (91–95). In the case of the English conquests, articulated first in the context of North America, a major premise of usurpation was the clause of res nullius (that is, all “things,” such as land unsettled as common property of all mankind, that remained “empty” until they were converted into the property of whoever worked and claimed them for use), drawn from Roman law. In instances when this did not seem just or liberal, as would be the case in the eighteenth century, political commentators saw the acquisition of colonial territories as undertaken with a degree of consent on the part of the original occupants: purchase, concession, and agreement. The latter form was crucial in the case of India, where the territorial jurisdiction of the Company remained entangled with the de jure authority of the nominal Mughal Empire in Delhi until India became a direct crown colony. Military advances in India, therefore, were always dressed up in the legality of signed treaties. The primacy of conquest notwithstanding, the notion of native groups’ consent, acquiescence, or sufferance emerges as one of the most powerful moral conditions on which the state was erected in the colonial world. No history of attempted hegemony, I believe, can be reduced easily to its bare bones of domination. Advocates and critics of empire bestowed a degree of both volition and agency to the victims of European ascendancy, and thus granted them, even if by default, a residual order of “society,” “civilization,” or at least “culture” (to which I would add “nationhood,” in the premodern sense of the word). Beyond the history of conquest, this acknowledgement led to the invention of a colonial society, somewhat in the spirit of what Jacques Donzelot (1984, 20–21) has called “faire du social,” especially the replacement of a society based on a given “natural order” with a mutable society fabricated through human thought and action. Colonial rule thus precipitated something like an apparition of civil society—a realm at times fictive, at times supposedly juridical—

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where the compliance of the subject population could be imagined and elicited. Such an all-embracing understanding of conquest is clearly evident in the case of the Spaniards. Bartolomé de las Casas inveighed against the conquistadores’ excesses in his celebrated Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1992, 6), but he nevertheless dedicated the book to Prince Philip with the assurance that the New World comprises of “kingdoms granted and entrusted by God and His Church to the Spanish Crown so that they might be properly ruled and governed, converted to the Faith, and tenderly nurtured to full material and spiritual prosperity.” Conversions made possible a new society of the baptized under Spanish imperial tutelage, although according to las Casas the unreasonable acts of violence had nearly destroyed this covenant. Even Hernán Cortés (1971, 279) wrote unreservedly in his third letter that near the provinces of Tascalteca and Guaxocingo, the natives were “of much greater intelligence than those of the other islands” and that they “appeared to us to possess such understanding as is sufficient for an ordinary citizen to conduct himself in a civilized country ” (my emphasis). Of course, for Cortés, their state of advancement meant they could be made to serve the Spaniards without direct enslavement. Imperial Spain may very well have provided the first outlines of a colonial crusade where the conscience of Christian humanism was translated into the recognition that a residual “society” of the indigene could be distinct in nature from his or her primordial state. This is perhaps also the moment when a distinctive ethnography was emerging, an exercise that had to bestow at least some social and cultural attributes to human subjects brought within its field of observation and commentary. Thus Alexander von Humboldt, attempting, in his Political Essay (1972 [1809], 48–49), to accurately portray the inhabitants of New Spain, declared that “it is not enough to paint them in their actual state of degradation and misery; we must go back to a remote period when, governed by its own laws, the nation could display its proper energy.” The hieroglyphs, stones, and sculpture, although in the “infancy of the arts,” still bore a “striking analogy to several monuments of the most civilized people” (49). It has been argued that earlier in the sixteenth century aspects of the material and spiritual culture of Mesoamerican society had been revealed through naturalistic description, humanistic sensibilities of the Renaissance, and the radical Christian ideal of a new Indian republic of Christ (Klor de Alva 1988, 36–37). José Jorge Klor de Alva has richly illustrated the complicity between confession and

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subservience, and the long history of a penitent Christian consciousness with its accompanying guilt, fear, and devotion being rapidly made to serve the goals of domination and social control (ibid., 40). The work of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, among others, thus represents a moment where ethnography and conversion were fused together, and the authority of the historical and natural witnesses satisfied the ultimate criterion of dominance (84–85). And yet, in his very condemnation of Mexicans, Sahagún fleetingly acknowledges a pre-Columbian past, and a bygone society and culture. In the Historia General, he exhorts: “And confusion, in which you have lived in all past time, came to you. It has misled and deluded you. But by the means of the brightness, the light, you may attain true faith” (Sahagún 1953, 55). Sahagún’s translations of Nahuatl documents, the questions he asked his Mexican subjects for his study of their pre-Christian beliefs, and the testimonials he obtained in order to form a view of their idolatrous past, speaks to both the ascription and the denial of a civil society in the New World. In his Fourth Book, for example, on the subject of divination, the questions become clear as he tries to distinguish the various strands of native society through familiar societal categories. What kind of hierarchy was there in the priesthood? What kind of fate would noblemen and commoners have suffered had they been born under particular clusters of thirteen days within the 260-day calendar (Austin 1974, 129–30)? By translating what he must have considered implausible and impermissible idioms of indigenous Mexican faith, Sahagún brought pre-Columbian life into the universally construed and normative realms of society. REORDERING NATIVE SOCIETY: THE CASE OF BRITISH INDIA Colonial ethnography from this standpoint may very well have been a mode of inquiry and description that brought into a realm of print and governance the categorical substratum of what we historians take for granted as the “social.” In the case of Spanish expansion the possibility of conquest through conversion implied that the articulation of the social could take place within the institutional framework of organized religion. During the formative years of British ascendancy in India, religion was given a rather limited role in the creation of a colonial society, with indigenous beliefs, customs, and manners therefore seen as retaining a pointedly un-Christian character. Thus Robert Orme, in his Historical Fragments (1974 [1782]), the first major treatment of the history and political economy of India postconquest,

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quickly declared that India was but a country of two nations, Muslims and Hindus, one dominant and the other subordinate. From Orme in the eighteenth century to Mill in the nineteenth century, descriptions of India were replete with “Oriental despotism,” which had supposedly aborted the development of a proper relationship between state and civil society. Luke Scrafton, in his Reflections on the Government of Indostan (1763, 17), attempting to provide a short sketch of the religion, customs, and manner of government among newly conquered Hindus or Gentoos, saw them as “a meek, superstitious charitable people,” their character formed by their “temperance, customs and religion.” The Hindu political ambition was severely restrained by their religion, and they were consequently “strangers to that vigor of mind,” and the “virtues grafted on those passions,” that animated an Englishman’s active spirits. “Their temperance, and the enervating heat of the climate, starves all the natural passions,” wrote Scrafton, leaving only avarice, a predisposition that was encouraged by “the oppression of the government” (ibid.). Because of these fundamental flaws in the character of indigenous society, stymied by Oriental despotism, Indians in general displayed no noble virtues of loyalty or patriotism; and thus the “mutual good faith, the bond of society, is broke” (30). Other contemporary observers held the Mughal Empire patently responsible for the state of despotism prevalent in India. John Shore, a founding architect of the early settlement of land revenue in Bengal, held that the Mughal “dominion” was essentially a government subservient to the individual “discretion” of the emperor, and the “safety of the people, the security of their property, and the prosperity of the country, depended upon the personal character of the monarch” (Shore 1917 [1789], I). In the period immediately prior to the introduction of British rule in India, a weak monarchy and a corrupt administration had encouraged widespread disorder. The institutions of property and patronage had been abused, justice had been perverted, and “unrestrained oppression” had prevailed. Such a situation, according to Shore, was typical of Islamic governments, where “practice is for ever in opposition to the theory of morals” (ibid.). It is possible that some of these pronouncements regarding native society, forged in the underlying presumption of Oriental despotism, were simply a ruse or convenience to lay down the minimal grounds for a legitimate usurpation of territory. I would suggest, nevertheless, a different reading here. Along with the legal and moral foundations

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of the colonial government, there was a much deeper anxiety in early colonial years about the nature and status of Indians as true subjects of the British Empire, and also about whether they had been acquired through just or fortuitous war. Indians were unfree, but their unfreedom could not be construed as tantamount to slavery under the British, for, in the era of abolition, that would have been censured by either the elders of the Company or their supervisors in Parliament. The purported model of colonial governance in India was from the very beginning liberal and humanitarian, and thus fraught with every contradiction between tolerant attitudes and despotic practices. There is no doubt that when the Select Committee of the House of Commons deliberated on the fate of Indians under the authority of the East India Company, and declared that their aim was to secure the “welfare and order of the country” and end the “unremitting anxiety” that had stifled the “efforts of those to whom the government of our Indian possessions has been consigned,” they were not invoking progress in vain (Firminger 1917, vol. 1, app. 1). It is important to see the language with which the committee swore to uphold the interest of Indian subjects, urging the Company to “establish a system of administration best calculated to promote the confidence and conciliate the feelings of the native inhabitants” by reforming their own institutions, and instill “such improvements as might shield, under the safeguard of equal law, every class of people from the oppressions of power, and communicate to them that sense of protection and assurance of justice, which is the efficient spring of all public prosperity, and happiness” (ibid.). Critics such as Nathaniel Halhed (1782, 1–3), scholar of Persian, grammarian, and advisor to Governor-General Warren Hastings, pointed out that England’s devotion to the welfare of millions of newly acquired subjects in India was imperiled by the narrow ends of Company and parliamentary politics, which was a pity, for the “honor of the British nation was staked on its impartial execution.” Halhed considered the work of Parliamentary investigation to be a “most important national purpose” which had come to little because of the “miserable abuse” of the delegated authority of the investigators. To be sure, he was attempting to vindicate the character of Hastings, his friend and mentor, but his remonstrance employed the nobler rhetoric of the public ends of governance; these men had wasted their time in “recording the officious insinuations of intriguing partisans” and prostituted “the dignity of their public character” (52–53).

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THE STRANGE, THE FAMILIAR, AND THE COLONIAL The very same Halhed, in the preface to his Grammar of the Bengal Language (1980 [1778], i), dedicated his work to the wisdom and purpose of the British parliament, which had taken a “decisive part in the internal policy and civil administration of its Asiatic territories.” Much effort remained, according to him, before the “completion of this grand work,” an indispensable aspect of which was the “cultivation of a right understanding and of a general medium of intercourse between the government and its subjects; between the natives of Europe who are to rule, and the inhabitants of India who are to obey ” (ii; my emphasis). Unlike the Romans, who took to Greek learning and adopted Greek laws after their conquest, the English in India were harbingers of an advanced polity. They acquired the languages of India in order to “explain the benevolent principles of legislation” to the native inhabitants, so that they may “convince while they command ” (Halhed 1782, ii; my emphasis). The very refinement of England, H. T. Colebrooke (1977, 1) would tell the members of the Asiatic Society on 15 March 1823, made her beholden to Asia, and her dominion bound her by a close tie. England was obliged to turn her magnificent but rude possessions in India into a vastly improved state. Halhed’s project of “command” and “conviction” points to an unshakable faith in a universally applicable, liberal project of social improvement early in the history of British ascendancy in India. In spite of the general Orientalist sympathy toward the antiquity and grandeur of Indian civilization, the voice of universal reason and progress seems to have asserted itself at a time when the East India Company had barely consolidated its territorial possessions. The language of liberalism, as Uday Mehta (1999, 20) has shown convincingly, was tied to the “urge to dominate the world.” The larger discourse of improvement inevitably pitted the inferior, backward, and lower India against the superior, progressive, and higher Britain, and by doing so threatened to erase the very difference—or perhaps one should say the very opacity—of culture. Mehta points out that it was perhaps only Edmund Burke who offered an approach different from the one based on the primacy of reason, freedom, and individuality, where India and Indians could be appreciated as truly unfamiliar, strange, and therefore not amenable to change simply because they were placed under the aegis of empire (22–23). In the era of utilitarian reform that swept British India in the nineteenth century, under the

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auspices of Lord William Bentinck as governor-general, with Thomas Babington Macaulay as its champion, vestiges of traditional Indian culture would be seen, if anything, as hindrances to advancement. The colonial will to power, then, was in part based on assumptions of the strength of the metropolitan culture, which compensated for the weakness and retrogression of the indigenous order. The very idea of a colonial civilizing mission in India was founded on the absolute faith that Britain in particular, and Europe in general, could exhume the archaic life-world of India and mold it into a civil society after its own image. A colonial civil society that extended the particular history and political economy of Europe to absorb the world of the vanquished thus also placed the dependent community of the colonized outside the frame of discourse, what Enrique Dussel (1981, 7) has called “the metaphysical exteriority of peripheral cultures.” I see this exteriority also in terms of the alienation of the state form from the existential life-world of society at large under colonial rule. The extent and nature of this estrangement bears directly on my discussion of the question of dominance and the discovery of a new civil society. The Spanish inquisitorial state, which aimed at the spiritual incorporation of the Americas’ Indians as subjects of a monarchy (which was also the dominus mundi),1 is different in this respect from the British Empire in India, where the subject population was seen as endowed with a certain degree of autonomy in regard to habits, manners, and modes of worship. In the case of India, the conversion of Indians, either from within, that is, by the selective edition and codification of the native canonical tradition (as championed by the Orientalists), or from without, through the imposition of European institutions (as propounded by the utilitarian reformers in the nineteenth century), was seen not as the precondition of domination, but as necessary ideological work toward domination. CONCLUSION: FLEETING HEGEMONIES Edmundo O’Gorman (1961, 141), reflecting on the meaning of American history as the history of the New World, proposed that the ideational work of history endowed the idea of America with spiritual content, namely, “the possibility of becoming another Europe.” In the case of English America, this may have become more of a reality than in the Creole world of Spanish, and later Latin, America. In the political imagination of British India, the idea of such mimicry

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had quite a different appeal. It is not simply that Macaulay’s idea of creating a race of brown, Anglophile, and loyal Indians through intellectual conversion was a project limited in its scope, especially due to its reliance on the hierarchy of race. Rather, the invention of a new civil society in British India under the spell of the colonial state led to the redefinition of a society uniquely Indian in character, and was thus fraught with the possibility of nationhood from the very beginning. It does not come as much of a surprise, as Francis Hutchins (1967, 140–43) points out, that in the early nineteenth century the English spoke of India as a nation like any other, while in the later years of the Raj, after the mutiny of 1857, Sir John Strachey, John Seely, and Fitzjames Stephen went to great lengths do deny any such nationality. The material and ideological fabrication of Indian society under colonial rule, if the above arguments hold, leads to this question: What does this history tell us about the kind of modernity that was unleashed by the colonial state? One could briefly respond by recasting what Marx concisely but suggestively proposed in his journalistic writings: England was the engine of change that would violently restructure society as it uprooted India’s traditional political economy. There may be another way of regarding the political-economy of the colonial state, not so much as an agent of transformation, but as a form that evolved over time. The disjuncture between this form and its substrate, what I have been loosely calling the life-world or the vie quotidienne of the various Indian communities under colonial rule, enables us to appreciate the license with which the colonial state went about describing, surveying, counting, mapping, collecting, and reorganizing the land and the people of the Indian subcontinent. This is not to declare that the colonial moment in Indian history was a parody or a distortion of a quintessentially European modernity. One should tread carefully here to delineate where certain universal experiments that are associated readily with modernity took place, and it could very well be that just like the technology of Herschel’s fingerprint, a few very intimate practices of the colonial state became available to the British Empire as instruments of universal discipline, but that surely is beyond the purpose of this essay. The only comment on Foucault that the brevity of this excursus allows is that various moments in the growth of the disciplinary appetite of the modern state are scattered beyond the particular history of Europe, and that the exogenesis of the state form disrupts the effortless permeability of power in any given society that came under the shadow of imperial

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or colonial rule. Colonial histories are thus always burdened with the cumulative legacy of the confrontations between the state and the indigenous society that it tries to shape. Divergence between state and society, to be sure, is a familiar story, especially in the case of England, where the state had been involved for centuries in shaping and transforming social and cultural identities. The ability of the state and its agents to act in the name of the people, but not necessarily for them, has been illustrated very well by Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer in The Great Arch (1985). My reflections on the colonial extensions of the English state spring from this very idea of the state as a live organ of society and culture, an entity that assumes a pivotal power to shape morality, law, property, gender, religion, and indeed all conceivable facets of everyday existence. The history of the creation of a modern society in England is of immense import to the history of the making of a colonial society elsewhere, and later a national society in India. In asking such questions about the insularity of society as a concept, as much as a set of relations in the context of colonial India, one can only echo Eric Wolf’s (1988) warning that the notion of a “Society” immemorial, as a bounded and homogenous entity, can become a stumbling block in our search for further ethnographic—and by implication, historical—understanding. As Wolf saw it, it was crucial “to recognize that the concept of Society has a history, a historical function within a determinate context, in a particular part of the world” (759). This question, recast in the historiography of colonial domination in India, enables us to place the organic limits of the state form in a clearer perspective. For the class of Britons who came to rule India, an adequate translation of the morality of domination, to convince their Indian subjects, remained a perennial problem, most conspicuously exhibited through racial bars to the sharing of power later in the nineteenth century. As for the Indians, the unfathomable distance of the political idioms of alien rule only furthered the anarchic and the antinomian in their efforts at resistance and their search for autonomy. NOTES 1. The Spanish conquest of the New World was defended by the jurist Juan de Solórzano Pereira in his De indiarum jure as an extension of the principle of dominus mundi.

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REFERENCES Austin, Alfredo López. 1974. “The Research Method of Sahagún.” In SixteenthCentury Mexico: The Work of Sahagún, edited by Munro S. Edmonson. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Barlow, Tani, ed. 1997. Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Burton, Antoinette, ed. 1999. Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities. London: Routledge. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 2000. Provincializing Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Colebrooke, H. T. 1977. Essays on History, Literature, and Religions of Ancient India: Miscellaneous Essays. New Delhi: Cosmo. Corrigan, Philip Richard D., and Derek Sayer. 1985. The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. Oxford: Blackwell. Cortés, Hernán. 1971. Letters from Mexico. Translated and edited by A. R. Pagden. New York: Grossman. Dalrymple, Alexander. 1772. A General View of the East India Company, written in January 1769, to which are Added, Some Observations on the Present State of Affairs. London: n.p. Donzelot, Jacques. 1984. L’invention du social: Essai sur le déclin des passions politiques. Paris: Arthème Fayard. Dussel, Enrique. 1981. A History of the Church in Latin America: Colonialism to Liberation (1442–1979). Translated by Alan Neely. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Firminger, Walter Kelly, ed. 1917. The Fifth Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Affairs of the East India Company. Vols. 1 and 2. Calcutta: R. Cambray. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International. Guha, Ranajit. 1963. A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement. Paris: Mouton. . 1989. “Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography.” In Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Ranajit Guha. Vol. 6. Delhi: Oxford University Press. . 1997. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Halhed, Nathaniel Brassey. 1782. Letters of Detector: On the Reports of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, Appointed to Consider How the British Possessions in the East Indies May Be Held and Governed with the Greatest Security and Advantage of This Country, and How the Happiness of the Natives May Be Best Promoted. London: n.p. .1980 [1778] A Grammar of the Bengal Language. Calcutta: Ananda. Hutchins, Francis G. 1967. The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Klor de Alva, José Jorge. 1988. “Sahagún and the Birth of Modern Ethnography: Representing, Confessing, and Inscribing the Native Other.” In The Work of Bernardino de Sahagún: Pioneer Ethnographer of Sixteenth-Century Aztec Mexico, edited by José Jorge Klor de Alva, H. B. Nicholson, and Eloise Quiñones Keber. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, University at Albany, State University of New York; Austin: University of Texas Press. Las Casas, Bartolomé de. 1992. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, edited and translated by Nigel Griffin. London: Penguin. Mehta, Uday Singh. 1999. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. O’Gorman, Edmundo. 1961. The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Orme, Robert. 1974 [1782]. Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire, of the Morattoes, and of the English Concerns in Indostan. New Delhi: Associated Publishing House. Pagden, Anthony, 1995. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500-c. 1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de. 1953. General History of the Things of New Spain: Florentine Codex. Book 1, The Gods. Translated by A. J. O. Anderson and Charles Dibble. Part 2. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. Scrafton, Luke. 1763. Reflections on the Government & c. of Indostan: With a Short Sketch of the History of Bengal from the Year 1739 to 1756; and an Account of English Affairs to 1758. London: Richardson and Clark. Sen, Sudipta. 1994. “Colonial Frontiers of the Georgian State: East India Company’s Rule in India.” Journal of Historical Sociology 7: 368–92. Shore, John. 1917 [1789]. “Minute of John Shore, 18 June 1789, Respecting the Permanent Settlement of the Lands in the Bengal Province.” In Firminger 1917, vol. 2, app. 1. von Humboldt, Alexander. 1972 [1809]. Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, edited by Mary Dunn. New York: Alfred Knopf. Wolf, Eric.1988. “Inventing Society.”American Ethnologist 15: 752–61.

chapter nine

World-System and “Trans”-Modernity Enrique Dussel

I

n this short text I begin anew a reflection that has concerned me since the beginning of the 1960s. I will radicalize some theoretical options by finding in recent scholarship very plausible hypotheses that have until now been regarded as trivial. Understanding the “centrality” of Europe as just two centuries old allows us to suppose that what has not been subsumed by modernity stands a good chance of emerging strongly and being rediscovered not as an antihistorical miracle, but as the resurgence of a recent potentiality in many of the cultures blinded by the dazzling “brightness”—in many cases only apparent—of Western culture and modernity. This modernity’s technical and economic globality is far from being a cultural globalization of everyday life that valorizes the majority of humanity. From this omitted potentiality and altering “exteriority” emerges a project of “trans”-modernity, a “beyond” that transcends Western modernity (since the West has never adopted it but, rather, has scorned it and valued it as “nothing”) and that will have a creative function of great significance in the twenty-first century. To repeat: the thesis advanced in this essay is that modernity’s recent impact on the planet’s multiple cultures (Chinese, Southeast Asian, Hindu, Islamic, Bantu, Latin American) produced a varied “reply” by all of them to the modern “challenge.” Renewed, they are now erupting on a cultural horizon “beyond” modernity. I call the reality of that fertile multicultural moment “trans”-modernity (since “post”-modernity is just the latest moment of Western modernity).

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China, a privileged but not exclusive example, shows us just how recent a phenomenon European hegemony is, only two centuries old and only beginning to influence the intimacy of non-European everyday life in the last fifty years (since World War II), principally because of the mass media, especially television.1 A HYPOTHESIS THAT STILL HAS EUROCENTRIC ELEMENTS: THE “WORLD-SYSTEM” The world-system “hypothesis” emerged as a response to the first Eurocentrism, which thought that Europe, since its supposed Greek and Medieval Latin origins, produced “from within” the values and the instrumental systems (as argued by Hegel, Marx, Weber, and Sombart) that were universalized in the last five centuries, that is, in the time of modernity. This Eurocentric position—first formulated at the end of the eighteenth century2 by the French and English “Enlightenment” and the German “Romantics”—reinterpreted all of world history, projecting Europe into the past and attempting to show that everything that happened before had led to Europe’s becoming, in Hegel’s (1955, 235) words, “the end and center of world history.” The distortion of history begins with the Encyclopedists (Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws [1989{1748}] is a good example)3 but continues with the English “Enlightenment” thinkers, Kant in Germany, and finally Hegel, for whom the “Orient” was humanity’s “infancy” (Kindheit), the place of despotism and unfreedom from which the Spirit (Volksgeist) would later soar toward the West, as if on a path toward the full realization of liberty and civilization. Since the beginning, Europe had been chosen by destiny as the final meaning of universal history. Counter to this, the world-system perspective attempted to show that, starting with the discovery of America at the end of the fifteenth century, Europe began to deploy the world-system as a failed imperial world; such a “worldwide” system could not have existed before. Inspired by Fernand Braudel’s historical exposition of the “longue durée,” Immanuel Wallerstein (1974, 15) had the creative idea of writing the history of this process: “In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, there came into existence what we may call a European world-economy.” For many this perspective subsumes the older Latin American dependency theory, giving it a more plausible historical framework rather than negating it. By limiting Europe’s “centrality” to the last five centuries, world-system theory removed the continent’s

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“aura” of being the eternal “center” of world history. “Modernity” is thus the management of the world-system’s “centrality.” That is why, for me, Spain and Portugal, as a prolongation of Genoese capital (Arrighi 1994), are the “first modernity.”4 For example, Bartolomé de las Casas’s confrontation with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda marks the beginning of modernity’s antidiscourse (Ginés being a modern intellectual, an expression of the hegemonic Eurocentric vision of the time). Even James M. Blaut (1993) links the “rise of Europe” with the discovery of America in 1492, and Marx himself (quoted in Wallerstein 1974, 77) notes that the discovery is a fundamental moment for the origin of capitalism and “primitive accumulation.” In my recent book, Etica de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y de la exclusión (Dussel 1998a, 52), I show why Spain, and not Portugal, a Maghreb Islamic nation, or China, could discover America. But starting from this anti-Eurocentric hypothesis (that is, countering the “first” Eurocentrism), the “discovery of America” simultaneously and necessarily indicates the world-system, capitalism, and modernity (for me, that is, not for Wallerstein, who reserves the concept of “modernity” for the “Enlightenment”—a position for which I myself will supply an argument here, in order to give this thesis a different meaning). In any case, the world-system “hypothesis” supposed that the “rise of the West” began with the comparative advantage that modern Europe (especially the Renaissance) gained through the great scientific discoveries, precious metals (silver and gold), the new labor force incorporated into the system (Indians and, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, African slaves in the Americas), the new comestibles (the Inca potato, corn, the Mexican tomatl and chocolatl, etc.),5 the millions of kilometers incorporated by the conquest into European colonial agriculture, and the invention of new economic instruments. All of this allowed Europe to triumph in its competition with the Islamic world, Hindustan, Southeast Asia, and China. Thanks to the caravel (discovered by the Portuguese in 1441), the Europeans were also the only ones who could cross the oceans and arm their ships with high-powered canons. This in turn allowed them to dominate first the Atlantic (which, starting in the sixteenth century, was supposedly the geopolitical “center” of the world) and later the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Europe created the world-system thanks to the invasion of the Americas (the “discovery”); the displacement of this system would have to emerge “from within” the process of globalization that started in 1492 and intensified toward the end of the twentieth century.

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Without contradicting this perspective, although implying a completely different intellectual commitment, the concept of “post”-modernity (the A moment I will show in figure 2) indicates that there is a process that emerges “from within” modernity and reveals a state of crisis within globalization. “Trans”-modernity, in contrast, demands a whole new interpretation of modernity in order to include moments that were never incorporated into the European version. Subsuming the best of globalized European and North American modernity, “trans”—modernity affirms “from without” the essential components of modernity’s own excluded cultures in order to develop a new civilization for the twenty-first century. Accepting this massive exteriority to European modernity allows one to comprehend that there are cultural moments situated “outside” of modernity. To achieve this, an interpretation that supposes a “second” and very subtle Eurocentrism must be overcome.6 One can then shift to a non-Eurocentric interpretation of the history of the world-system, a system only hegemonized by Europe for the last two hundred years (not five hundred). The emergence of other cultures, until now depreciated and unvalued, from beyond the horizon of European modernity is thus not a miracle arising from nothingness, but rather a return by these cultures to their status as actors in the history of the world-system. Although Western culture is globalizing—on a certain technical, economic, political, and military level—this does not efface other moments of enormous creativity on these same levels, moments that affirm from their “exteriority” other cultures that are alive, resistant, and growing. WHAT WAS CHINA’S SIGNIFICANCE IN THE “WORLDSYSTEM” UNTIL THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY? China is one example that demonstrates the degree to which European world hegemony was impossible before the Industrial Revolution. In Etica de la liberación (Dussel 1998a, 52–54), I showed that the reason China could not be hegemonic in the “new system” that emerged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the reason it did not discover America, was not because it was inferior to the Europe of the time (either from an economic, a cultural, a technical, or even a scientific point of view), but because the “center” of the “interregional system”7 was west of China, in Hindustan and the Islamic world. America was beyond its horizon—if the Chinese did arrive in Alaska or California, they did not find anything of commercial interest. As a result, China

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was believed to have remained peripheral because, while the Italian Renaissance was the beginning of modernity (Giovanni Arrighi’s thesis), in China there was at most a proto-renaissance in a few of the large cities like Hangzhou. But this process was aborted before the expansive colonialism of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and later the English and French, arrived in China. China was thus neither modern nor capitalist, nor did it carry any weight; it remained in the “dark night” of Oriental despotism, in the “Asiatic mode of production.” In ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998), Andre Gunder Frank proposes what amounts to a new argument for the concept of “trans”-modernity (not just “post”-modernity) since, as he shows, great universal cultures flourished until the nineteenth century, totally independent of modern Europe.8 I will briefly indicate some of Frank’s more tenable arguments and, at the same time, show where I differ.9 It is a banality—and yet the obvious frequently hides great truths—that until the eighteenth century Europeans considered China to be an economic, political, and cultural power.10 In The Wealth of Nations (1976 [1776], 80), Adam Smith often comments on China’s greatness, its economic importance, and its low salaries: “China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world . . . . The accounts of all travelers, inconsistent in many other respects, agree in the low wages of labour, and in the difficulty which a labourer finds in bringing up a family in China.” Notice how Smith uses the terms industrious and wage, just as he does in referring to England or Scotland, which makes it seem unlikely that such manufacturing “industriousness” and such a “salary” would not produce for the factory owners a “surplus” in the strict sense: “The course of human prosperity, indeed, seems scarce ever to have been of so long continuance as to enable any great country to acquire capital sufficient for all those three purposes; unless, perhaps, we give credit to the wonderful accounts of the wealth and cultivation of China” (388–89). “China is a much richer country than any part of Europe, and the difference between the price of subsistence in China and in Europe is very great. Rice in China is much cheaper than wheat is any-where in Europe” (210; my emphasis). The life of the elite is much more developed in China than in Europe (this is the “luxury” that Werner Sombart (1965[1913]) requires for capitalism): “The retinue of a grandee in China or Indostan accordingly is, by all accounts, much more numerous and splendid than that of the richest subjects in Europe” (228). Nevertheless, the enormous masses

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of China’s workers are poorer: “But the real price of labour, the real quantity of the necessaries of life which is given to the labourer, it has already been observed, is lower both in China and Indostan, the two great markets of India, than it is through the greater part of Europe” (229). For Adam Smith the discovery of Spanish America permitted Europe to buy from both markets (the two richest in the world-system and the most varied in the world prior to the Industrial Revolution): “The silver of the new continent seems in this manner to be one of the principal commodities by which the commerce between the two extremities [sic] of the old one is carried on, and it is by means of it, in a great measure, that those distant parts of the world are connected with one another” (230). It is interesting to note that the “two extremities” of the old “interregional system” connected in the new system, with the “New World” constituting the “first world-system.” Europe was able to “buy,” thanks to Latin American (Peruvian, Mexican) money, in the Chinese “market”; that is to say, Europe could “sell” very few commodities (except silver) that were the fruit of its “industriousness” in the subsumption of European “wage labor” because it was a productively “underdeveloped” region that could not compete with China’s more “developed” commodity production, which included porcelain utensils, silk textiles, and so on. Europe’s colonies also gave it a cheaper source of “silver-money”: “In China, a country much richer than any part of Europe, the value of the precious metals is much higher than in any part of Europe. As the wealth of Europe, indeed, has increased greatly since the discovery of the mines of America, so the value of gold and silver has gradually diminished” (264). The crisis of the Chinese and Hindustani production and distribution system in the “old system” (the first capitalist system?), resulting from causes that need to be studied more comprehensively, permitted the “rise of the West.”11 Max Weber had the intuition that if Europe not been the region most prepared to carry out the Industrial Revolution, it would have been China or Hindustan. He thus devoted his sociological works, on a religious and ethical level, to showing why China and India did not give rise to capitalist society. His voluminous research produced the same answer time and again: China and Hindustan could not be capitalist because of their corporate property regime, because they had a bureaucracy that impeded competition, and so on. Conversely, studying the ethics of the prophets of Israel, Weber found that, as far back as this, the long road was being built that would lead to capitalist

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modernity; the last stage of this road would be the reform promoted by Calvinist ethics (the conditions for the realization of the capitalist system).12 Calvinist individualism, wealth considered as a divine blessing, competition, private property, and the discipline of an austere subjectivity made the birth of capitalism possible, conditions not found in Chinese corporatism or in the magical quasi-feudalism of Hindustani Brahmanic culture.13 In my estimation it is impossible that the millions of salaried workers in porcelain production (in the region surrounding the city of Xi’an, between the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, from which the “silk road” traveled westward) or in the silk textile mills (along the Yellow River and near the East Coast cities of Zhangzhou and Fuzhou) did not produce surplus value as defined by Marx. At the least we can say that this was a regional capitalist system—even if it had only formal subsumption of the labor process and obtained absolute surplus value, as I have already indicated—that was aborted for political reasons. This is very far from, and much more complex than, a simple “Asiatic mode of production.” It would seem, then, that until the eighteenth century, China was the greatest producer of commodities, and that the China Sea was an unequalled mercantile site within the world-system (because of the articulation of the Old World with the New World since 1492). Andre Gunder Frank has studied some of the causes of the crises in China and Hindustan in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Ming dynasty (1368–1644),14 which founded the highly developed Chinese empire (which included capitalist regions), went into a relative crisis with the arrival of the Manchurian dynasty (1644–1796). In Europe, this was a time when the rococo “Chinese style” (chinoiserie) became fashionable (porcelain utensils, lacquered paintings on wood, baldachins in the gardens to have tea, decorated Chinese pavilions, silk for wide-sleeved garments, etc.).15 We could also show the importance of the economic and cultural systems of Hindustan and Southeast Asia, for which the Islamic invasions in the north of India and Indochina were both a destabilizing factor and an unexpected commercial connection. RECONSTRUCTING THE MEANING OF “EARLY MODERNITY” (FIFTEENTH-EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES) My interpretation of a “first modernity,” with Spain and Portugal in the forefront (i.e., as the first deployment of the “world-sys-

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tem”) thanks to their “discovery” of Spanish America, needs to be profoundly reconstructed, taking into account a strong Chinese and Hindustani presence until the eighteenth century. Indeed, the “old system”—Adam Smith’s “old world,” which I have called the “third Asiatic-Afro-Mediterranean interregional system” (see Dussel 1998a, 36–42)—is prolonged by China’s enormous productive weight from 1400 to 1800 (a period in which it had mercantile or formal capitalist regions but, lacking influence over the oceans and thus being enclosed within its national horizon, no global presence). In contrast, the annexation of Indian America in 1492 by Spain initiated Europe’s deployment of the now truly “world-system.” But we should be aware that, although it was reconnected for the first time in the fifteenth century, Europe had enjoyed only peripheral significance with respect to the economic and cultural Asiatic continental space since the Islamic expansion separated Europe from Africa and Asia in the seventh century.16 Thanks to silver and, to a lesser extent, gold, Spain (and, through Spain, Europe) had the “money” to “buy” in the Chinese market. Contributing to this process were the evolving use of the “precious metals” as money (the origin of money capitalism) and the lack of silver in the Chinese system’s external market. (Although China did not have colonies, it did productively dominate the Southeast Asian economy; one purchased entry into this market with silver.) From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, American precious metals entered Europe from two directions: (1) across the Atlantic from the Caribbean to Seville, and from there to Amsterdam or Central Europe, or from Genoa and Venice to the eastern Mediterranean and, thanks to the Islamic connection, on to Hindustan and China; or (2) across the Pacific, from Peru and Acapulco, Mexico, through the Philippines and China. The “old world” was thus the extreme West of the emerging “world-system,” a secondary region in terms of commodity production: Europe could sell little to China and could only buy with the “money” of Spanish America. This period of the European “first modernity” (Dussel 1998c)— the Hispanic, humanist, pecuniary, manufacturing, and mercantile modernity—only developed with hegemony over the Atlantic, which was not yet the geopolitical “center” of the world-system (something the China Sea in Southeast Asia, continued to be). In the “longue durée” and the “world space,” European modernity was still peripheral to the Hindustanti and Chinese world, and even to the Islamic one in terms of links to the “East.”

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In this period the “coloniality of power” was produced: European power, under the weight of the East, had its own periphery, the new colonies in first Latin, then Anglo-Saxon America, a few small, slavetrading enclaves or regions on the western coast of Africa, and some islands, ports, and bases of support in the Islamic world and in the Far East, thanks to which it could “buy” in the market of Chinese and Hindustani commodities. China, having closed itself off in a nationalist project, lost is external market. Just as Greece before Alexander was a periphery of the Persian-Egyptian world and later attained hegemony with Alexandrian Hellenism, peripheral Europe would grow stronger during modernity’s first period under the weight of the Hindustani and Chinese economy. While China remained a continental power with an external market that was nearby but insignificant relative to its enormous internal market, Europe, still recovering demographically from the depopulation of the plague, turned outward.17 After the failure of its eastern territortial expansion (the Crusades), it focused on the oceans, led by Portugal and Spain (initially supported by Genoa and later overtaken by Holland, the United Kingdom, and France). Thanks to the “external” contacts of 1492 through the mid-seventeenth century, a revolution occurred in astronomy, in the sciences, and in Europe’s way of seeing the world. This ideological-scientific revolution followed the path of Spain and Portugal, where Carlos V had taken up the achievements of the Italian Renaissance, and would culminate in Amsterdam (the former Spanish colony) and the United Kingdom. Indigenous America felt the impact of the first globalization (i.e., the conquest), as well as racism, the myth of European superiority, economic exploitation, political domination, and the imposition of an external culture. All of these produced the “coloniality of power” syndrome (to borrow Aníbal Quijano’s suggestive expression): the colonizing power denied what was Amerindian and imposes what was European, based on a subtle but all-pervasive racism. In any case, the indigenous always retains a certain “exteriority” (what E represents in figure I) in relation to the world-system. This is the first colonization, part of the “first modernity.” From 1630 on, Amsterdam (Wallerstein 1980) continued the process of mercantile capitalism, in part replacing Portugal (and Genoa) in the Chinese-Hindustani world, but not fundamentally changing the structure of European dependence. Only 3 percent of Melaka’s commerce was in the hands of the Dutch, who had even less luck selling European products to Chinese or Hindustani merchants. They

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could “buy” with Spanish American silver in the Chinese market, and they militarily hegemonized the shipping routes, but this did not enable them to impose their own products. The Chinese were not interested in militarily protecting their market because in the East they had no visible enemies, and they enjoyed an almost total monopoly on global production, being the only ones who supplied the most required commodities: porcelain untensils, silk textiles, tea, and so on. ONLY TWO CENTURIES OF EUROPEAN GLOBAL HEGEMONY: THE PEOPLE EXCLUDED FROM MODERNITY European hegemony, principally British and French (although the latter to a lesser extent), was a result of the Industrial Revolution, in turn ideologically based on the “Enlightenment” and “Romanticism.” If we take the French Revolution (1789) as a symbolic starting date, this hegemony, as I have indicated, is just two centuries old. Europe was not always the “end and center of world history,” as Hegel believed; nor did it enjoy, since the prophets of Israel, ethicalpolitical superiority, as Max Weber thought. It had not even been the “center” of the “world-system” since 1492. (As I have already suggested, world-system theory, although a critical position against the “first Eurocentrism” of Hegel or Weber, and against the European Flow of Silver New World Indigenous communities (E)

Spanish America (colonial periphery) Old World

Southern/Northern Europe (periphery)

Islamic world China (mediation) India Southeast Asia Africa

Figure 1. The world-system at the end of the sixteenth century.

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“common sense” still prevalent today, can now be considered to be the “second Eurocentrism,” since European hegemony is not five hundred, but only two hundred years old.) The task now is to explain the rise of the West articulated with the decline of the East. This requires a global thinking that overcomes the “second” Eurocentrism. The world-system, which was born as such by annexing the “New World” (the Spanish American connection) to the “Old World” (comprised of two extremes: from a disconnected and secondary Europe to a prominent China and Hindustan), moves as a whole, like a heart, with its diastole and systole, whose first palpitation is situated in the East. The decadence of the East allowed the “center” of the world-system to be organized under Western control, although this did not occur instantaneously or miraculously (in this respect, Wallerstein’s criticism of Frank is correct). This reorganization also did not simply follow the exclusive conditions and attributes of previous European history (i.e., contra the method of interpretation that attempted to detect “intrinsically” Europe’s superiority over other cultures). To think “non-Eurocentrically” is to be able to imagine that the Industrial Revolution was Europe’s response to a “vacuum” in the East Asian market, especially China and Hindustan; it is the effect of a structure (China’s being that of an imperial and autocratic state which impeded the triumph of the bourgeoisie) and of a crisis (a multiple political one produced by low salaries, the demographic explosion caused by the economic wealth accumulated since 1400, etc.). This “vacuum” attracted the “possibility” of being “filled” by a European production that had been growing since the fifteenth century. Marx correctly observed that market expansion, like all exchange, can lead to the expansion of production.18 Given the high European salaries and the low population in the United Kingdom (relative to China and Hindustan) the only solution (i.e., the only way to expand production and lower the proportion of the salary in the value or price of the product) was to increase the use of the machine.19 In a few decades, the machine’s subsumption into the production process (which Marx describes adequately as the necessary means to create “relative surplus value” [see Dussel 2001]) gave Great Britain and France (and eventually all of Northern Europe) a significant comparative advantage over China, Hindustan, the Islamic world, Spanish America, and even Eastern and Southern Europe. This advantage was such that at the beginning of the nineteenth century (that is, by the 1820s, when Hegel gave his Lectures on the Philosophy of History [1970] in Berlin, scarcely five decades after Adam Smith, in

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The Wealth of Nations [1776], described China as the richest country in the world) all of the “Orient”20 would be seen as merely eternal and miserable “Oriental despotism.” At the same time, Africa was being relegated even lower, as the continent of slaves (a view that ignored Egypt’s being a black African civilization [see Bernal 1987]). During the Berlin Congress of 1885 (little more than a century ago!) Africa would be divided up among the European powers. The South of Europe would remain, in the Eurocentric memory of the (Anglo-Saxon and Germanic) North, a moment of the late “Middle Ages” or the “northern part of Africa” (“Africa begins at the Pyrenees!”), and Latin America, with its indigenous and African population, would be relegated to the status of distant colonial world, on the periphery of the already semiperipheral and preindustrial Spain and Portugal. The “Enlightenment” vision would block off like a cement wall the old “disconnected Europe,” the “Dark Age” Europe that until the fifteenth century, in the most optimistic scenario, was a periphery of the Islamic, Chinese, and Hindustani world—that “Oriental” world, much more “refined” and developed, from all points of view, that was the “center” of the old world, and the densest part of the worldsystem until the end of the eighteenth century. From Hegel, Marx, and Comte to Weber—including Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Popper, Levinas, Foucault, Lyotard, and Habermas—Eurocentrism shines unopposed. And it would dominate the colonial world with the brilliance [brillo] of “Western culture,” as humanity’s most developed center “since the beginning” (even though it may be a qualitatively irreplaceable critical conscience, as in the case of Habermas until the present). Europeans, in their “civilizing” expansion (“England has transformed itself into the missionary of civilization in the world,” Hegel [1970, 538] stated triumphantly), thus felt justified in covering over, excluding, and ignoring as nonexistent all cultures that preceded theirs, as well as those contemporary civilizations (those “peoples without history”) not worthy of notice by “Western Culture.” This process, by which modern Reason “excluded,” negated, and confined to “Exteriority”21 all it considered worthless in terms of the modern values and “universal” criteria of civilization by which it deemed everything should be evaluated, rapidly extended itself from the beginning of the nineteenth century to all the non-European cultures. The results were surprisingly effective, so much so that those who were negated—given their evident industrial inferiority—applauded

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through their neocolonial elites (educated in Europe and later in the United States) a Eurocentric ideology that until very recently has had no critical opponent. The exclusion, as a civilizing criterion, of everything non-European also gave Europe—which already had military, economic, and political hegemony—cultural and ideological domination. What was non-European finally disappeared from all practical and theoretical considerations. The Spanish and Portuguese (with respect to the first modernity) and the Chinese, the Hindustanis, and the members of the Islamic world, whether from Granada, Cairo, Baghdad, Samarqand, Delhi, Melaka, or Mindanao (with respect to their “centrality” in the Old World and to the beginning of the world-system until the end of the eighteenth century) would end up accepting the northern Eurocentric interpretation. Their Westernized elites, even those leading leftist revolutionary projects, like Mao Zedong (is standard Marxism not a modality of Eurocentric expansion?) and, according to Jean-Paul Sartre in his introduction to The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon, would become peripheral “echoes” of the superiority of Western culture, a vision today globalized by transnational corporations and global financial capital (see Hardt and Negri 2000). In this sense, postmodernity is as Eurocentric as modernity. “TRANS”-MODERNITY AS AN AFFIRMATION OF THE MULTICULTURALITY EXCLUDED BY EUROPEAN MODERNITY The phenomenon of “postmodern” thought (Dussel 1999; 1998b, 54; 1996, 129; 1985) has habituated us to a certain critique of modernity and to a modernity in terms of the domination of the cogito’s quantity and subjectivity over the radical ontological understanding of being (Heidegger), as well as to critiques of instrumental reason (Horkheimer), of abstract universality from difference and the “différend” (Derrida, Lyotard), of the “pensiero forte” (Vattimo), and so on. “Postmodernity’s” critique of modernity does not question the centrality of Eurocentrism and, in a certain way, thinks that the postconventional, urban, postindustrial, freely chosen cultural market society will install itself universally, and along with it, global postmodernity as a “situation” of general human culture in the twenty-first century. Postmodernity critiques the universalist and “foundationalist” pre-tensions of modern reasons (Richard Rorty), but it critiques it as “modern” and not as “European” or “North American.” In principle,

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postmodernity also articulates a respect for other cultures in terms of their incommensurability, difference, and autonomy, though it expresses this in general, and not specifically with respect to Chinese, Hindustani, Islamic, African Bantu, and Latin American cultures (the works of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor are examples). It is not sufficiently aware of the “positivity” of these cultures, which have been excluded by the colonial process of early modernity (1492– 1789), and by the “enlightened” industrial globalization of mature modernity (1789–1989), which Wallerstein (1995) situates under the hegemony of liberal politico-economic ideology, opposed to the conservative and socialist ideologies. Postmodernity’s “post” does not eliminate its Eurocentrism since postmodernity assumes that future humanity obviously will reach the same “cultural situation” as postmodern Europe and the United States to the degree that humanity modernizes by the process of “globalization” (which is considered irreversible and inevitable). This belief in modernizing “inevitability” makes postmodernity profoundly Eurocentric. It cannot imagine that the cultures whose positivity has been excluded by the modern (since 1492) and enlightened colonial processes (since 1789, when Europe attained industrial hegemony in the world-system due to the disappearance of preindustrial—but not premodern—China and Hindustan) might be able to develop in an autonomous, “modern,” and creative fashion their own “universal” cultures in the next stage, that is, the stage after the extinction of European-North American modernity with its claims to “sole” universality, beyond its present crisis, beyond its limit, beyond modernity’s “post”-modern moment.22 It is necessary then, to think this matter more radically. Totality’s “exteriority” (a metacategory that Marx proposed without making explicit [see Jay 1984]) was consciously and productively created by Emmanuel Levinas (1969). With it, Levinas began the critique of “modern reason” differently than Heidegger and his French successors (such as Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida). Levinas is one of the initiators of French postmodernism,23 even though he does not adhere to this movement. The metacategory “exteriority” can illuminate an analysis of the cultural “positivity” not included by modernity, an analysis based not on postmodernity’s suppositions but rather on those of what I have called “trans”-modernity. That is to say, exteriority is a process that takes off, originates, and mobilizes itself from an “other” place (one “beyond” the “world” and modernity’s “Being,” one that maintains a certain exteriority,

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as figure 2 indicates)24 than European and North American modernity. From this “exteriority,” negated and excluded by hegemonic Europe’s modern expansion, there are present-day cultures that predate European modernity, that have developed together with it, and that have survived until the present with enough human potential to give birth to a cultural plurality that will emerge after modernity and capitalism. These living and productive cultures, creative and in otherness [di-ferentes], are not just postmodern, since “postmodern” only labels a final stage of modernity. Rather, they are cultures that have developed on a “trans”-modern horizon, something beyond the internal possibility of simple modernity. This “beyond” (“trans-”) indicates the take-off point from modernity’s exteriority (arrow E in figure 2), that is, from what modernity excluded, denied, ignored as “insignificant,” “senseless,” “barbarous,” as a “nonculture,” an unknown opaque alterity, but at the same time evaluated as “savage,” uncivilized, underdeveloped, inferior, merely “Oriental despotism,” the “Asiatic mode of production,” and so on. These are the diverse names given to the nonhuman, the unrecoverable, the “historyless,” Exteriority Totality B

C

Modern system D

A

New “trans”-modern system Other cultures E F

Exteriority Figure 2. Totality, exteriority, affirmation of exteriority. Key: (A) “postmodernity” (the limit of modernity and of totality); (B) the inclusion of the other into the same (the old system); (C) the innovative interpellation before modernity; (D) the subsumption of modernity’s positivity; (E) the affirmation of the other in its exteriority; (F) the construction (as a synthesis of C + D + E) of an innovative “trans”-modernity.

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to what will be extinguished by the sweeping advance of Western “civilization” in the process of globalization. Like the tropical jungles with their immense quantity of plants and animals genetically essential for the future of humanity, the majority of humanity’s cultures excluded by modernity (which are not, and will not be, postmodern) and by globalization (because misery is “necessity without money,” without solvency, and therefore is not of the market) retains an immense capacity for and reserve of cultural invention essential for humanity’s survival. This creativity will also be needed if humanity is to redefine its relationship with nature based on ecology and interhuman solidarity, instead of reductively defining it on the solipsistic and schizoid criterion of increasing rates of profit. If it is true that European-North American modernity has had economic and military hegemony over other cultures (Chinese, Southeast Asian, Hindustani, Islamic, Bantu, Latin American [mestizo, Aymara, Quechua, Maya], etc.) for only the last two hundred years— and over Africa for only a little more than one hundred years, since 1885—then this is not enough time to penetrate the “ethico-mythical nucleus” (to borrow Paul Ricoeur’s term) of the intentional cultural millenary structures. It is therefore no miracle that the consciousness of these ignored and excluded cultures is on the rise, along with the discovery of their disparaged identities. The same thing is happening with the regional cultures dominated and silenced by European modernity, such as the Galician, Catalan, Basque, and Andalusian cultures in Spain; the diverse regions and cultural nations in Italy (especially the Mezzogiorno), Germany (especially Bavaria and the five Länder of the East), France, and even the United Kingdom (where the Scottish, Irish, and other groups, like the Québécois in Canada, struggle for the recognition of their identities); and the minorities in the United States (especially Afro-Americans and Hispanics). All of this outlines a multipolar twenty-first century world, where cultural difference is increasingly affirmed, beyond the homogenizing pretensions of the present capitalist globalization and its supposedly universal culture, and even beyond the postmodern affirmation of difference that finds it difficult to imagine cultural universalities from a millenary tradition outside of Europe and the United States. This “trans”-modernity should adopt the best that the modern technological revolution has to offer—discarding antiecological and exclusively Western aspects— and put it at the service of differentiated valorized worlds, ancient and actualized, with their own traditions and ignored creativity.

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This will allow the emergence of the enormous cultural and human richness that the transnational capitalist market now attempts to suppress under the empire of “universal” commodities that materially subsume food (one of the most difficult things to universalize) into capital. The future “trans”-modernity will be multicultural, versatile, hybrid, postcolonial, pluralist, tolerant, and democratic (but beyond the modern liberal democracy of the European state). It will have splendid millenary traditions25 and be respectful of exteriority and heterogeneous identities. The majority of humanity retains, reorganizes (renovating and including elements of globality),26 and creatively develops cultures in its everyday, enlightened horizon. The cultures of this majority deepen the valorative “common sense” of their participants’ real and particular existences, countering the exclusionary process of globalization, which precisely because of this process inadvertently “pushes” toward a “trans”-modernity. It is a return to the consciousness of the great majorities of humanity, of their excluded historical unconscious! Samuel Huntington, an ideologue of U.S. hegemony, sees as a “clash,” as a “war” between civilizations,27 what is simply and positively the irreversible uprising of universal cultures excluded by modernity (and postmodernity). These cultures, in their full creative potential and together with a redefined Western culture (European and North American culture without its reductive claim to universality), constitute a more human and complex world, more passionate and diverse, a manifestation of the fecundity that the human species has shown for millennia, a “trans-modern” world. A humanity that only spoke in English and that could only refer to “its” past as an Occidental past would testify to the extinction of the majority of historical human cultural creativity. It would be the greatest castration imaginable and irreversible in humanity’s world history! NOTES 1. The “Global Culture” section of the Human Development Report 1999 indicates that between 1980 and 1995 the number of television sets around the world rose from 121 to 235 per thousand inhabitants. Television is becoming the media with the most cultural influence: “Once-thriving film industries around the world declined in the 1970s and 1980s, a result of the rise of television” (UNDP 1999, 33). But television has had a massive world presence for only the past twenty years. I say “only” because a culture’s “ethical-mythical nucleus” (to use Paul Ricoeur’s words) takes centuries to construct and deconstruct itself.

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Also, the production of films and programs continues to be predominantly regional. India produces 84 percent of the films seen within the country; while Latin America only produces 30 percent of the movies viewed by its public (in contrast, 62 percent of films seen in Latin America are North American). But in the television industry the programming in regional languages and with local producers is absolutely predominant worldwide. The massive outside influence lessens notably in this case. 2. Until that time, as we will see, it was clearly understood in Europe that the most advanced cultural “center” was in the South (as Martin Bernal [1987] has shown, the Islamic South, from Maghreb to Egypt, was for Europeans the place of “classic” culture) and in the East (including the Islamic world starting at Baghdad, although this region had been sent into crisis by the attack of the Ottoman Empire), to Hindustan and China. Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony (1989), which starts with France and Flanders and moves eastward, is a history that begins “from Europe” without being Eurocentric. 3. In The Spirit of Laws (1989 [1748], 128), Montesquieu writes, “Therefore, China is a despotic state whose principle is fear.” In 1762 Nicolas Antoine Boulanger published his Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme oriental. This terminology, completely false and distorting, persists to the present day. 4. Now it would include Amsterdam’s intra-European hegemony, as well as France and the United Kingdom before the Industrial Revolution. 5. Ninety-four percent of the tubers used for human nourishment in the nineteenth century came from Indian America. 6. The “first” Eurocentrism is that of Hegel or Weber, who presumed the superiority of Europe, a superiority proven only by factors that were internal to that continent. The “second” type of Eurocentrism, now superseding the first, still thinks from Europe, although it accepts that Europe established its dominion by means that came from “outside” (American precious metals, for example). This “outside” allowed it to triumph in the competition that started in 1492 with the Islamic, African, and Asian world. The narrative descriptions always begin from Europe. Africa or Asia is the “external” world, far away and in the past. I am attempting to overcome this “second” Eurocentrism by showing the meaning of “trans”-modernity as an alternative project. 7. I call it the “interregional-system” (Asiatic-Afro-Mediterranean) and not the “world-system” because it does not yet include the Americas, since we are still talking about a time before 1492. 8. For critiques of Frank, see Amin 1999, Arrighi 1999, and Wallerstein 1999. I accept almost all the critiques that these authors make, but all three admit that Frank has pointed out a forgotten truth: the importance of China. And I say “forgotten” because China was the system’s largest producer until the eighteenth century, it had the largest population, and so on. The description of the world-system should take seriously and start with China; before Frank no one had done this.

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9. I accept Frank’s critiques that the “Asiatic mode of production” concept is, to use Edward Said’s term, an “Orientalist” fallacy, but it is a stretch to think this renders meaningless the concepts of “value,” “capital,” and “capitalism.” What emerges is an interesting question that Frank does not ask: Was China between 1400 and 1800 a mercantile capitalist country? I believe he has supplied sufficient reasons to begin to affirm (as a subject for future discussions) that China had regions where modes of protocapitalist manufacturing production were seriously developed on the level of the “formal subsumption” of surplus value in the labor process (but without “material subsumption,” and thus without “real subsumption”) in “capital” sensu stricto, thus obtaining “surplus value” (Mehrwert)—in the conceptual sense that Marx develops in Capital—in the factories or artisanal workshops [trabajadurias], found in so many Chinese cities, where such goods as porcelain, pottery, and silk textiles were produced. Samir Amin (1999) is correct in showing that the Chinese state—which had great organization and power—never allowed a growing bourgeoisie (the eunuchs?) to take control, and that it thus impeded the normal growth of capitalism. In any case, Frank’s work allows us to formulate creative questions that he himself asks, and others that he does not ask or answer adequately, since he has for a long time neglected Marx’s category of “value” (and not only “exchange value”). 10. It should not be forgotten that in the fifteenth century, when England had 3 million inhabitants, Spain 10 million, France 18 million, and all of Europe 69 million, there were 125 million Chinese. In 1800 Europe had 188 million inhabitants and China almost double that: 345 million (Frank 1998, 168). 11. Among these causes were China’s low salaries, which did not permit the use of machines. This left it at a capitalist level of manufacturing of porcelain and silk textiles with creation of absolute surplus value, having only formally subsumed the artisanal process of traditional production. The political crisis between the Manchurian dynasty and central China, the need to finish the colonization of the South, and the occupation of the West of China (a territory almost double China’s greatest previous size), enclosed China within its own borders, causing it to lose interest in the external market. This produced a vacuum that would be filled by Europe, especially the United Kingdom. China’s loss of the oceans and the imperial state’s repression of the emerging bourgeoisie mark the differences with England, an island with a monarchy in crisis. 12. For Weber’s study of the prophets of Israel, see Weber 1920–21; partially translated into English in Weber 1951 and 1958. For Weber on Calvinist ethics, see Weber 1952. For my part, I began a critique of Eurocentrism (in the opposite sense of Weber’s) in order to show how the “ethos of the prophets” was critical of modernity (Dussel 1969). 13. However, the capitalist development of Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan— ethically neo-Confucian in inspiration—shows us the faults in Weber’s

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hypotheses; Confucian corporate family relations are perfectly suited to the organization of a capitalist enterprise, even a transnational one, and with greater effectiveness. 14. I recently came across an art journal in which I read that on 14 December 1600 a three hundred-ton galleon, the San Diego, sailed from Manila and was destroyed by Dutch pirates. “In 1991, when the remains of the shipwreck were discovered, more than five thousand pieces came to the surface[,] . . . more than eight hundred blue and white porcelain pieces from the Ming period, twenty-four sword guards, gold, and silver coins . . . Chinese ceramics” (Campollo 1997, 59). 15. In the same art journal I just quoted we find the article “A Singular Example of English Furniture: The Windsor Cabinet” by A. de Neuvillate, who says that in 1720 John Belchier made a writing desk [secreter] (of which Neuvillate includes a photograph) “in black lacquered wood” with “legs and Japanese scenes.” In the desk’s small doors appear “two characters from Japanese mythology whose refinement speaks for the hierarchy of eighteenth-century English furniture.” This indicates that the incorporation of Oriental figures was very fashionable in eighteenthcentury England. One may suspect that the figures are Chinese, and that Belchier only polished the desk, because its execution is clearly imperial. “The mastery of the cabinetmaker and painter” that Neuvillate passes off as English was more likely Chinese. In 1996 the piece was worth $1.5 million (Neuvillate 1997, 8). The Manchu dynasty, as I have already indicated, conquered China’s West in 1724, occupying Tibet, Sinkiang (from Tarim to Dzungaria or Russian Turkestan), Mongolia, including Manchuria in the North, and in the South establishing borders—starting at the Sinkiang River—with Burma, Siam, and Vietnam. 16. Indeed, the Islamic expansion that started in 623 a.d. “separated” (cut) a good part of Latin-Mediterranean Europe, along with GermanicNorthern Europe, from the “third interregional system”—for which Baghdad was the commercial “turntable,” and in which China and Hinudstan had the greatest productive weight. 17. Hindustan turned toward Sri Lanka, Burma, Indonesia, and Melaka, which comprised the western maritimes of the Chinese market. 18. “For example if the market, i.e. the sphere of exchange, expands, then production grows in quantity and the divisions between its different branches become deeper” (Marx 1973, 99). It “expands” for the United Kingdom and tightens for China and Hindustan; “production” “grows” for the United Kingdom because it has grown tighter in China and Hindustan. 19. In New England this was not the reason for the use of machines (or for the Industrial Revolution); rather, machines were used because the U.S. North had even fewer small property owners who worked the land

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with their own hands. In New England the machine was necessary to augment the productivity of free labor (to allow the greatest number of product units or hectares to be worked by the worker-property owner). In Spanish America the existence of cheap and plentiful indigenous and African slave labor (in this way similar to the Anglo-Saxon colonies of the U.S. South) obviated the immediate need for an industrial revolution, as was the case in China and Hindustan. 20. This is how the “Orientalist” ideology was born. 21. I examine this concept in Dussel 1985. 22. By “modernization” I mean to suggest here that the millenary cultures (Chinese, Hindu, Islamic, etc.) can use certain technical and hermeneutic moments that permit them to instrumentally “actualize” their productive mediations (such as the material objects of culture, but also the production of “meaning,” with more refined scientific interpretations). The Chinese, Vedanta, Buddhist, and Islamic cultures (among others) are “universal” in the sense that they were born and have developed in dialogue with multiple regional cultures that they represent and have included in their cultural process. These regional “universal” cultures have no difficulty in “subsuming” the technological, scientific, and advanced mathematical world. Their own millenary history has creative-scientific moments of “enlightenment” (think, for example, of the Baghdad school of mathematics in the tenth century a.d., or the Chinese philosophical schools of the “warrior states” before the organization of the Han Empire). They have been “left behind” in the last two centuries . . . that is all. Their capacity for development is intact, and they are now experiencing rapid growth. 23. See, for example, Derrida’s early article “Violencet métaphysique” (1964). 24. This would be E in figure I: the Amerindian and Afro-Caribbean cultures. The same goes for the Bantu cultures and, since the “decline” of the “Orient,” for Islamic, Indian, Southeast Asian, and Chinese cultures. Eighty-five percent of humanity suffers from the market capitalist process of globalization, under the military power of the United States (since 1989). Hampered by its state of poverty, this overwhelming majority struggles to conserve alimentary traditions, architecture, clothing styles, music, everyday understanding of religious existence, and so on. The whole “qualitative” world of values that explain and motivate the day-to-day existence of the vast majorities of the poor and the impoverished (that is to say, those unable to buy global capitalism’s commodities) maintains a certain “exteriority,” and is thus “beyond” the globalized market. Globalization and exclusion are joined in one simultaneous movement. 25. When the New York Metropolitan Museum presented the exhibition “Thirty Centuries of Art in Mexico,” the “average American” could not help but be surprised and wonder how it was possible that a people

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as “underdeveloped” as the Mexicans could have so much “history,” considering that North American culture (if we begin in 1620) is only a little more than three centuries old. 26. I would like to distinguish between (1) a positive globality, which allows humanity to enter almost instaneously into contact with its historical occurrence [acontecer], a global structure that we need to know how to use for the differentiated development of the great non-Western, traditional cultures; and (2) merely “globalization” as a world strategy instrumentally controlled by transnational corporations and the central metropolitan states, all, in the last instance, under the hegemony of the U.S. military. 27. For this “warrior” intellectual (he appears as such when, for example, he writes of the need to maintain Western technological and military superiority over other civilizations [Huntington 1996, 312]) the Muslims, Chinese, Russians, and others present “dangers.” All the cultures excluded and dominated by modernity appear as military “dangers.” The warrior obsession needs to be tempered by a respect for other universal cultures, the creative fruit of the same humanity of which Huntington is part. Or does this intellectual from Harvard—where I had the pleasure of teaching in order to oppose these exclusionist ideologies—believe that humanity is a predicate only attributable to the European-North American human being? Huntington is clearly against “internationalism” and “multilateralism,” and only in favor of his country’s adopting a policy of “close cooperation with its European partners to protect and advance the interests and values of the unique civilization they share” (ibid.). All civilizations are “unique,” but Huntington believes that the “singularity” of Western culture allows it to cynically claim its right to military and economic rule over other cultures!

REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System, a.d. 1250–1350. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Amin, Samir. 1999. “History Conceived as an Eternal Cycle.” Review 22.3: 291–326. Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century. London: Verso. . 1999. “The World according to Andre Gunder Frank.” Review 22.3: 327–54. Bernal, Martin. 1987. The Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol. 1. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Blaut, James M. 1993. The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: Guilford.

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Campollo, M. L. 1997. “400 años después surgen testimonois incomparables: Tesoros del San Diego.” Casas y gente 116: 59. Derrida, Jacque. 1964. “Violence et métaphysique.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 69.3: 322–54. Dussel, Enrique, 1969. El humanismo semita: Estructuras intencionales radicales del pueblo de Israel y otros semitas. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires. . 1985. Philosophy of Liberation. New York: Orbis. . 1995. The Invention of the Americas. New York: Continuum. . 1996. The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities. . 1998a. Etica de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y de la exclusión. Madrid: Trotta. . 1998b. “Afirmación analéctica.” In Etica de la liberación: Ante el desafío de Apel, Taylor y Vattimo. Toluca: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México. . 1998c. “Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity.” In The Cultures of Globalization, edited by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. . 1999. Posmodernidad y transmodernidad: Diálogos con la filosofía de Gianni Vattimo. Puebla, Mexico: Universidal Iberoamericana—Golfo Centro. . 2001. Towards an Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1861–63. London: Routledge. Frank, Andre Gunder. 1998. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1955. Die Vernunft in der Geschichte. In Sämtliche Werke. Hamburg: Meiner. . 1970. “Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte.” In Theorie Werkausgabe. Vol. 12. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Huntington, Samuel. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Jay, Martin, 1984. Marxism and Totality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse. New York: Vintage. Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de. 1989 [1748]. The Spirit of Laws. Translated and edited by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Corlyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neuvillate, A. de. 1997. “Un ejemplo singular del mueble inglés: El gabinete Windsor.” Casas y gente 116: 8.

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Smith, Adam. 1976[1776]. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by Edwin Cannan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sombart, Werner. 1965 [1913]. Lujo y capitalismo. Madrid: Revista de Occidente. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). 1999. Human Development Report 1999. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System. Vol. 1. New York: Academic. . 1980. The Modern World-System: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750. Vol. 2. New York: Academic. . 1995. After Liberalism. New York: New Press. . 1999. “Frank Proves the European Miracle.” Review 22.3: 355–72. Weber, Max. 1920–21. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. Vols. 1–3. Tübingen: Mohr. . 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Georg Allen and Unwin. . 1951. The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. . 1958. The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

chapter ten

Eurocentrism, Modern Knowledges, and the “Natural” Order of Global Capital Edgardo Lander

I

n recent debates about hegemonic knowledge in the modern world, a number of basic assumptions have emerged that allow us to characterize the dominant conception of knowledge as Eurocentric (Lander 2000a). After providing a concise description of its main assumptions, I will explore here the pervasiveness of the Eurocentric perspective in the principles or fundamentals that guide current practices by which the global order of capital is planned, justified, and naturalized (i.e., made less artificial). Along these same lines, I will demonstrate the presence of the fundamentals of Eurocentrism in the international norms of protection of private investment in the failed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) and in the protection of intellectual property set out by World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements. The perspective of Eurocentric knowledge is the central axis of a discourse that not only naturalizes but renders inevitable the increasingly intense polarization between a privileged minority and the world’s excluded, oppressed majorities. Eurocentric knowledge also lies at the center of a predatory model of civilization that threatens to destroy the conditions that make life possible on Earth. For this reason, the critique of Eurocentrism and the development/recovery of alternate knowledge perspectives cannot be interpreted as merely an esoteric intellectual or academic preoccupation, or for that matter as a topic for interesting debates within a narrow community of scholars working on epistemological problems. In reality, these issues are closely related to vital political demands, both local and

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global, which are linked in turn to communities, organizations, and movements that (in a variety of ways) confront and resist the growing hegemony of transnational capital throughout the world. BASIC ASSUMPTIONS OF EUROCENTRIC KNOWLEDGE The main assumptions of the perspective of Eurocentric knowledge can be summarized in the following terms. 1. Eurocentric knowledge is based on the construction of multiple and repeated divisions or oppositions. The most characteristic and significant of these—but not the only ones, to be sure—include the basic, hierarchical dualisms of reason and body, subject and object, culture and nature, masculine and feminine (Berting 1993; Quijano 2000; Lander 2000b). 2. European regional or local history is understood as universal History. According to this perspective, Europe serves as the model or reference for every other history, representing the apex of humanity’s progress from the “primitive” to the “modern” (Dussel 2000; Quijano 2000). 3. Differences from others are converted into value differences (Mignolo 1995), time-space distances (Fabian 1983), and hierarchies that define all non-European humans as inferior (“savage,” “primitive,” “backward,” “underdeveloped”). The category of race as an instrument for classifying the different peoples of the world—on a scale from superior to inferior—plays a central role here (Quijano 2000). 4. Scientific knowledge and technological development advance in an upward linear direction toward ever higher levels of knowledge and greater ability to usefully transform the environment. The hegemony of these assumptions has had multiple consequences for the constitution of modern social knowledge. Here, I will simply highlight the following: First, one particular kind of knowledge—Western scientific knowledge—is understood to be true, universal, and objective—the form by which all other ways of knowing are simultaneously defined as ignorance or superstition. In Western knowledge, the separation of reason and body lies at the base of a “disembodied,” desubjectified knowledge; these divisions sustain its pretensions to objectivity and detachment from time and space as a universal knowledge. Second, through the oppositions of reason/body and culture/ nature, a relationship of exteriority to “nature” is established. This

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is a condition for the appropriation/exploitation that grounds the Western paradigm of unlimited growth. Third, by ignoring the colonial/imperial relationships between peoples and cultures—ones that made the modern world-system possible—Eurocentric knowledge understands modernity to be an internal product of European genius, owing nothing to the rest of the world (Coronil 1997, 2000). Similarly, the current condition of the other peoples of the planet is seen as having no connection to the colonial/imperial experience. Their present status of “backwardness” and “poverty” is the result, rather, of insufficient capitalist development. Instead of being seen as the products of modern experience, such conditions are interpreted as being symptoms of the absence of modernity. We are therefore dealing with a history that dehistoricizes and conceals the constitutive relationships of the modern colonial world-system (Coronil 1997, 2000; Migolo 2000a, 2000b; Quijano 2000). Fourth, proceeding from the basic assumptions of Eurocentrism, liberal society is assumed as the natural order of things. Once former “primitive” or “backward” historical phases are overcome, the particular historical experience of liberal capitalist society and the liberal worldview are ontologized as the “normal” state of society. In this way, possessive indvidualism (Macpherson 1970), the separation of the fields of collective life (political, social, cultural, economic), and a conception of wealth and the good life unilaterally associated with the accumulation of material goods characteristic of liberal society are transformed into a universal standard for judging the deficiencies, backwardness, or poverty of the rest of the peoples and cultures of the planet. It follows from the hegemony of this articulated body of assumptions that the main transformational practices of the contemporary world—including the globalization of markets and of financial movement, the politics of deregulation and opening, as well as structural adjustment and the dismantling of state social policies—are simply adaptations to “technological transformations,” or new conditions created for “globalization.” These conditions are understood to be a new stage of “modern” or “postmodern” society. Given the common sense established by the hegemony of liberal thought, these practices are inevitably assumed to represent the course of natural history. In the analyses and debates surrounding these practices, the players, along with their interests, strategies, contradictions, and oppositions, disappear. The most powerful

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effect of the naturalization of social practices is its effectiveness in clouding the power relationships underlying the hegemonic tendencies of globalization. THE “NATURAL” ORDER OF LIBERAL SOCIETY The view of liberal society as the natural, most advanced form of human experience has been an inseparable part of modern world history for the past three centuries. This view has been the legitimizing basis of the civilizing mission of the colonial/imperial system; in more recent times, since the end of the Second World War, it has acquired renewed vigor with the “colonization of reality by the discourse of development” (Escobar 1995, 22). Along with the development imaginary, the process of conquest of the rest of the planet intensified and accelerated, by way of a dense global institutional network that defined (using the diagnosis provided by the social sciences) the vast majority of the planet’s population as lacking, poor, and backward, justifying a massive intervention to rescue it from such a pitiful condition. A type of development was promoted which conformed to the ideas and expectations of the affluent West, to what the Western countries judged to be a normal course of evolution and progress . . . by conceptualizing progress in such terms, this development strategy became a powerful instrument for normalizing the world. (ibid., 26) Behind the humanitarian concern and the positive outlook of the new strategy, new forms of power and control, more subtle and refined, were put in operation. Poor people’s ability to define and take care of their own lives was eroded in a deeper manner than perhaps ever before. The poor became the target of more sophisticated practices, of a variety of programs that seemed inescapable. From the new institutions of power in the United States and Europe; the offices of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the United Nations; from North American and European campuses, research centers, and foundations; and from the new planning offices in the big capitals of the underdeveloped world, this was the type of development that was actively promoted and that in a few years was to extend its reach to all aspects of society. (85) The organizing premise was the belief in the role of modernization as the only force capable of destroying archaic superstitions and relations, at whatever social, cultural, and political cost. Industrialization and urbanization were seen as the inevitable and necessarily progressive routes to modernization. (86)

Far from referring us to the colonial/imperial past that informs the relationships between people and cultures of the modern world-

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system, these assumptions maintain an extraodrindary efficiency, both legitimizing and naturalizing the most significant practices of design, negotiation, and establishment of the new global institutional order of capital. These assumptions make up a theoretical and normative patrimony on the basis of which the global technocracy of commerce and international finance legitimizes its expertise. In this sense, the content of the (failed) negotiations of the MAI1 and the agreements of the WTO are particularly significant. THE MARKET (AND FREE TRADE) AS NATURAL ORDER (ANY OBSTACLE TO THIS ORDER REPRESENTS AN UNNATURAL DISTORTION) We are writing the constitution of a single global economy.

—Renato Ruggiero, first director general of the World Trade Organization

The significance of establishing a global system called “free trade”2 is illustrated by the importance attributed by the WTO to the prolonged negotiations known as the Uruguay Round, which culminated in the creation of this global organization. “It was quite simply the largest trade negotiation ever, and most probably the largest negotiation of any kind in history” (WTO 1999b, 12). The goal of this organization is to create “a system of undistorted commerce” (ibid., 7). The WTO “is a system of rules dedicated to open, fair, and undistorted competition.” “Essentially, trade is distorted if prices are higher or lower than normal, and if quantities produced, bought, and sold are also higher or lower than normal—i.e. than the levels that would usually exist in a competitive market” (17). This view of a normal, natural way of doing things, in contrast with distorted (or unnatural) approaches, can be seen quite clearly in the justifications for performance requirement bans envisaged by investment treaties—whether in the extensive range of bilateral agreements negotiated over the last few years on the promotion and protection of investment, or in the MAI negotiating text. In official U.S. government documents referring to this treaty, it is repeatedly affirmed that “‘performance requirements’ generally distort trade and investment decisions that an investor would otherwise make in a free market” (Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs 1998).

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“Performance requirements” is the term used to describe a wide range of public policies that could curb in some way the full freedom of the investor. The MAI negotiating text details the performance requirements that governments are explicitly banned from using. A Contracting Party shall not, in connection with the establishment, acquisition, expansion, management, operation, maintenance, use, enjoyment, sale or other disposition of an investment in its territory of an investor of a Contracting Party or of a non-Contracting Party, impose, enforce, or maintain any of the following requirements, or enforce any commitment or undertaking: a. to export a given level or percentage of goods or services; b. to achieve a given level or percentage of domestic content; c. to purchase, use or accord a preference to goods produced or services provided in its territory, or to purchase goods or services from persons in its territory; d. to relate in any way the volume or value of imports to the volume or value of exports or to the amount of foreign exchange inflows associated with such investment; e. to restrict sales of goods or services in its territory that such investment produces or provides by relating such sales to the volume or value of its exports or foreign exchange earnings; f. to transfer technology, a production process or other proprietary knowledge to a natural or legal person in its territory, except when the requirement: 1) is imposed or the commitment or undertaking is enforced by a court, administrative tribunal or competition authority to remedy an alleged violation of competition laws, or ii) concerns the transfer of intellectual property and is undertaken in a manner not inconsistent with the TRIPS Agreement;3 g. to locate its headquarters for a specific region or the world market in the territory of that Contracting Party; h. to supply one or more of the goods that it produces or the services that it provides to a specific region or the world market exclusively from the territory of that Contracting Party; i. to achieve a given level or value of research and development in its territory; j. to hire a given level of nationals; k. to establish a joint venture with domestic participation; or l. to achieve a minimum level of domestic equity participation other than nominal qualifying shares for directors or incorporators of corporations. (OECD 1998, 18–20)4

In accordance with this, the full freedom of the investor should always take precedence over any other social, cultural, political, or economic interest, goal, or value of the countries, regions, and

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communities toward which the investment is directed. Any effort to redirect, change, regulate, promote, limit, or ban any of the investor’s activities constitutes discrimination or distortion. It follows that what is natural remains the free decision of the investor in a market that is equally free. From this perspective, any conditions attached to this freedom—as a result of social, cultural, or ethical criteria—become an unacceptable distortion of the natural order of things. Performance requirements are considered as “distorting investment decisions to the benefit of the jurisdiction imposing the requirement” (Singer and Orbuch 1997). NATURAL ORDER AND LEGITIMATE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT In accordance with the stipulations just listed, no country, region, or local community could legitimately establish criteria to direct or shape investment carried out within its jurisdiction in terms of its own goals. This even holds true in cases where these terms were democratically established and represent a wide popular consensus. The various levels of government, in other words, must be content to be passive spectators, awaiting decisions made by national or foreign investors regarding the use of national or local resources, land, and human potential. The boundary determining what constitutes the very limited—and thus legitimate—core responsibilities of the states, in contrast with functions that are illegitimate (all the laws, standards, regulations, policies, or public investments that can in any way distort the functioning of the market and the free will of investors), represents one of the most significant normative concepts in the entire MAI text. According to the U.S. representative (the vice president of the negotiating group), in spite of the wide spectrum of limitations that the treaty imposes on public policy, a few exceptions are allowed. “These exceptions make sure that governments are assured they have the ability, subject to certain constraints, to do what they feel is necessary to carry out some of the core responsibilities of government” (Larson 1997). This restriction on state investment is similarly present in WTO treaties. In the case of farming, for instance, the following terms establish which public investments are allowed and which are banned: The Agriculture Agreement distinguishes between support programmes that stimulate production directly, and those that are considered to have no direct effect.

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Domestic policies that do have a direct effect on production and trade have to be cut back. (WTO 1999b, 18)5

From this naturalizing perspective, only public policies and government actions that move toward liberalization and deregulation are legitimate. Any policy aimed in the opposite direction is, by definition, the policy of “special interest groups interested only in protecting their own privileged positions at the expense of the rest of the population” (ibid., 58). For this reason a transnational judicial order is needed to safeguard governments from their societies’ democratic demands.6 This is the clear meaning of the following WTO text: Every nation rightly wants to safeguard its economic sovereignty. Most would rather introduce economic reforms of their own, without outside pressure. But the reforms can be delayed or blocked by domestic special interest groups which put their own economic welfare ahead of that of the country as a whole. In such cases, the need to fulfil multilateral obligations can assist a government to promote economic growth and development through economic reform. In similar ways, the opportunity to engage in reciprocal trade negotiations with WTO partners—a country succeeding in obtaining lower trade barriers for some of its exports in return for lowering its own barriers on imports, for example—can also help a government overcome domestic special interest groups interested only in protecting their own privileged positions at the expense of the rest of the population. (ibid.)

As Pierre Bourdieu (1998) has aptly demonstrated, beyond limiting the state’s ability to act, this new global legal order is designed to “call into question any and all collective structures that could serve as an obstacle to the logic of the pure market.” EXPERT KNOWLEDGE The naturalization of these processes of free circulation of investment and trade, as criteria that dictate the terms under which all societies on the planet necessarily must be organized, is explicitly supported by the expertise of those who speak in the name of specialized knowledges, in this case of economic science (a knowledge in the singular): It is widely recognized by economists and trade experts that the WTO system contributes to development. (WTO 1999b, 7) The economic case for an open trading system based upon multilaterally agreed rules is simple enough and rests largely on commercial common sense.

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But it is also supported by evidence: the experience of world trade and economic growth since the Second World War. (8) Economists agree that the greatest gains go to the country that slashes its own trade barriers. Readiness to open up to foreign suppliers of consumer goods and of inputs to production improves choices as well as competition in price and services offered. Protection that gives special favours to one sector or another of the economy distorts the way a country uses its productive resources. Removal or reduction of distortions allows resources to be used more efficiently. (WTO 1999a, 5)

Another manifestation of the “naturalization”/depoliticization of the issues at stake in international economic relations is the tendency to turn disagreements into technical issues that can be resolved in an “objective” and “impartial” manner by the relevant specialists. The Multilateral Agreement on Investment establishes that regulations (including environmental or health-related regulations) that can be considered polemical from the point of view of their scientific justification may be submitted to a body of scientific experts for consideration (OECD 1998, 66). Similar practices are established in WTO agreements. A separate agreement on food safety and animal and plant health standards (sanitary and phytosanitary measures) sets out the basic rules. It allows countries to set their own standards. (WTO 1999b, 19) Member countries are encouraged to use international standards, guidelines and recommendations where they exist. However, members may use measures which result in higher standards if there is scientific justification. (ibid.)

What in these texts appears to be the simple application of objective scientific criteria in reality relates to extremely complex and controversial matters. This is the type of situation that arises when, whether on the basis of scientific evidence (on which consensus may or may not exist) or based on specific preferences on the part of the population, standards are established that regulate, limit, or block the use of a certain product or technological process. This can be seen in the heated debate surrounding foods derived from genetically modified plants and animals. One well-known case illustrating the application of WTO standards is the U.S. lawsuit involving the European Union’s ban on the sale—in E.U. territory—of beef treated with growth hormones. The WTO ruled in favor of the United States, categorizing this ban as an unfair, protectionist practice that went against free trade, forcing the European Union to either allow the importation of these products or face severe sanctions, in spite of

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the opposition of a great majority of the continent’s population. The opinion of a few experts, chosen by the WTO authorities dealing with conflict resolution, thus overruled the democratically expressed wishes of the people of the European Union. In this case it was determined that the fear of consuming beef treated with growth hormones lacked scientific basis; inside the new world order defined by the WTO, this preference was not one for which people could legitimately opt. The majority of the ethical and political confrontations having to do with techno-scientific matters do not have a univocal scientific solution, and differences of opinion and interpretation can continue indefinitely (Nelkin 1977, 1984). Generally, the issues at stake cannot be resolved solely on the basis of experts’ opinions. People are being denied the sovereign right to found their decisions on ethical choices or on particular cultural contexts. This is an example of the growing authoritarianism of the global capitalist order, exposing the population to the potentially harmful effects of certain techno-scientific processes against its expressed will, merely because “specialists” consider that their opposition is based on nothing more than prejudice. These are not issues that depend on the existence or absence of consensus in the scientific community. In any case, as Hans Jonas (1984, 118) argues, human capacity to wield power over nature is always greater than the predictability of this power’s long-range effects, which, in case of doubt, calls for an ethics of responsibility.7 This ethical choice is denied when it is assumed that, to make this type of decision it suffices to take into account the opinions of experts and the rights of investors (Lander 1994). Beyond the internal controversies within Western, technoscientific communities lies the fact that in the thousands of conflicts occurring in the world today between the interests of transnational capital and those of rural or indigenous people concerning the use of the environment, there is generally also a conflict in the parties’ views of the cosmos, an antagonism between different knowledge systems and different ways of conceiving the relationships between culture and nature. Nevertheless—and this is a perfect expression of the continual functioning of colonial mechanisms—in the new global capital order only one form of knowledge is recognized: Western scientific knowledge. From this discourse of knowledge the criteria and procedures are established by which all controversies are decided.

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THE METAPHYSICS OF A LINEAR HISTORY LEADING TO GLOBAL LIBERAL SOCIETY In the metaphysics that sustains the current juridico-institutional design of the global order of capital, history can lead in only one direction, toward ultraliberal society. That is, toward the progressive deregulation of all economies, the reduction of state activity to “core” functions, and toward the full freedom of capital to circulate unrestricted in all economic activities, in any locality in any country on the planet. Through the legal system, the new global institutional framework attempts to impose a single possible direction on public policy. Only certain types of policies are acceptable—those implying more liberalization and less regulation. Political reforms that lean in a different direction are explicitly forbidden. In the MAI text this conditioning of public policy was established by way of two mechanisms proposed in the treaty. The first is called the rollback mechanism, and is expressed in the following terms: if, in connection to MAI standards, a country is granted any exemption that allows it to maintain an existing regulation, in most cases a schedule will be established for that exemption to be cut back, and finally eliminated. The second mechanism, that of standstill, establishes that once a liberalized measure has been agreed to, it can subsequently be neither reversed nor eliminated. In WTO texts, this historical philosophy of a world that defines happiness as a progressive, irreversible advance toward increasing levels of freely circulating capital is presented under the apparently innocuous term of “binding.” As history moves toward the liberalization of commerce, the only thing in question is the rapidity of this process, not its orientation. As a result, modifications that may later affect commercial agreements can only be made toward greater liberalization, and never in the opposite direction. In the WTO, when countries agree to open their markets for goods or services, they “bind” their commitments. For goods, these bindings amount to ceilings on customs tariff rates. (WTO 1999b, 6) The market access schedules are not simply announcements of tariff rates. They represent commitments not to increase tariffs above the listed rates—the rates are “bound.” (16) Countries can break a commitment (i.e. raise a tariff above the bound rate), but only with difficulty. To do so they have to negotiate with the countries most concerned and that could result in compensation for trading partners’ loss of trade. (ibid.)

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In order to assure that this course, once undertaken, will be as irreversible as possible and will not be reconsidered by new governments in any of the signatory states, commitments that are obtained must be long term. In the case of the MAI, once a country had signed the treaty, it could only withdraw from the agreement after a five-year waiting period following the treaty’s taking effect in its jurisidiction. In order for the country to withdraw, the treaty would have to remain active for another six months, beginning with presentation of the country’s notification of withdrawal. As for investments carried out while the treaty was in effect, conditions established by the MAI would remain in place for an additional fifteen years (OECD 1998, 105). INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS: THE COLONIZATION OF PEOPLE AND THE ENVIRONMENT CONTINUES Five hundred years ago, it was enough to be a non-Christian culture to lose all claims and rights. Five hundred years after Columbus, it is enough to be a non-Western culture with a distinctive worldview and diverse knowledge systems to lose all claims and rights. The humanity of others was blanked out then and their intellect is being blanked out now.

—Vandana Shiva

Intellectual property is the field of international negotiations where one sees most clearly how the assumptions (and values) of Eurocentric knowledges legitimize ongoing practices involving the colonization of people, culture, and the environment. According to the WTO (1999b, 26): Ideas and knowledge are an increasingly important part of trade. Most of the value of new medicines and other high technology products lies in the amount of invention, innovation, research, design and testing involved. Films, music recordings, books, computer software and on-line services are bought and sold because of the information and creativity they contain, not usually because of the plastic, metal or paper used to make them. . . . Creators can be given the right to prevent others from using their inventions, designs or other creations. These rights are known as “intellectual property rights.” . . . The extent of protection and enforcement of these rights varied widely around the world; and as intellectual property became more important in

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trade, these differences became a source of tension in international economic relations. New internationally-agreed trade rules for intellectual property rights were seen as a way to introduce more order and predictability, and for disputes to be settled more systematically. The 1986–94 Uruguay Round achieved that. The WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is an attempt to narrow the gaps in the way these rights are protected around the world, and to bring them under common international rules.

But what exactly is meant by intellectual property? Which rights are being defended? To whom do these rights belong? The WTO agreement begins by defining intellectual property rights as private rights. Classic liberal thought from John Locke to John Stuart Mill has justified European colonialism in the Americas and the rest of the world on the premise that, given the non-existence of legal provisions regarding individual private property—as liberal doctrine conceived them—non-European lands were unoccupied lands. In the words of Bar tolomé Clavero (1994, 21–22): The rejection of the rights of the colonized originates with the affirmation of the rights of the colonizer; a collective right gives way to that of an individual. In his second Treatise of Government, Locke conceives of this right more specifically as a property right, as private property, for a very precise reason. Property, for him, is above all a right that the individual has with respect to himself. It is a principle of personal stance, of radical freedom. And the right to property can also be extended to things, when it derives from the individual’s exercise of control not only of himself, but of nature, which he occupies and works. The subjective, individual right constitutes, must give form to, the objective, social right; the social order must respond to this individual faculty. No legitimate right exists outside of this structure. “Let him [the Man] plant in some in-land, vacant places of America,” thereby colonizing the uninhabited lands of America, a territory that can be considered legally empty because it is not populated with persons who fulfill the requirements of that view, who occupy and exploit the land in this way that produces, first and foremost, rights, and, above all, individual rights. . . . if there is no cultivation and harvest, not even effective occupation is enough to generate a right; other uses are not important. This part of the world, this continent of America, although populated, can still be considered unoccupied, at the disposal of the first colonizer who arrives and establishes himself. The native who does not conform to this concept, to this culture, has no rights.(22)

This is precisely how intellectual property is conceived in the most powerful instruments existing in the world today for the defense of

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that property, the agreements of the WTO (Correa 1999).8 The text referring to intellectual property begins with the categorical definition of “intellectual property rights” as “private rights.”9 In the support of these private rights, all the member countries of the WTO should establish a regime of national legislation that allows the granting of patents for “any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology, provided that they are new, involve an inventive step and are capable of industrial application” (WTO 1994, 12). Similarly, according to Article 27 of the agreement, member countries should establish patents for the protection of microorganisms and microbiological processes. They should also establish patents or other forms of sui generis protection for varieties of plants.10 Thus a universal regime is established, one that protects intellectual property and corresponds unilaterally to the liberal view of the cosmos and to the model of scientific and technological knowledge characteristic of Western society. Two crucial issues stand out here. First, this regime determines that, in order for a patent to be granted, the discovery in question must be “new,” “involve an inventive step” and, moreover, be “capable of industrial application.” This is based on a model of knowledge in which novelty and individualized authorship (or that of a team of coauthors or coinvestigators) are recorded concurrently with their publication or with the request for a patent. This knowledge system has little to do with the ways of knowing of the world’s rural or indigenous communities. On the contrary, the latter are collective, communal knowledges preserved through oral tradition and shared practices, knowledges whose authorship and moments of innovation are difficult to document. Second, and as an expression of the radicalization of the capitalist regime’s all-embracing process of commercialization, this unilateral vision of knowledge assumes that it is possible to create new forms of life. Hence, the right of (private) property is established over these creations. This agreement constitutes the principal mechanism for extending to the entire world the controversial legal doctrine that has developed in the United States, Japan, and the European Union in recent years allowing the granting of patents to life (Ho and Traavik n.d.).11 The logic of capital thus confronts not only the cosmovisions of the planet’s rural and indigenous populations (Mapuche Documentation Center 1993; “Indigenous People’s Seattle Declaration” 1999) but also the views of the West’s main religions (van Dillen and Leen 2000).

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Since the Eurocentric colonial assumption is that the only possible knowledge is Western university and industrial knowledge, it follows that only knowledges which correspond to this paradigm can be registered and protected as intellectual property. All other ways of knowing can be freely appropriated (Khor n.d.). In the case of biotechnology, all indigenous and rural knowledges and technologies involving the selection, combination, and preservation of diverse species are denied and devalued, since they are classified as part of nature. Thus, the selection and cultivation of vegetable species (plant breeding) is not considered to be either true production, knowledge, or technological application, for real breeding only begins when the “primitive germ plasm” is mixed or crossbred by scientists in international laboratories (Shiva 1997, 51–52). According to Vandana Shiva (1997, 9), one can identify three types of creativity: 1. The creativity inherent to living organisms that allows them to evolve, recreate, and regenerate themselves. 2. The creativity of indigenous communities that have developed knowledge systems to conserve and utilize the rich biological diversity of our planet. 3. The creativity of modern scientists in university or corporate laboratories who find ways to use living organisms to generate profits. Given the hierarchical dualities between culture and nature— and between scientific knowledge and empirical and/or traditional knowledge—that characterize Eurocentric knowledge, the only kind of creativity that can be recognized, and thus protected as intellectual property, is based on the third type of creativity. Beginning with the reductive principle of genetic engineering, according to which it is possible to create life, the intellectual property rights agreements oblige governments world-wide to recognize patents on life, or other forms of protection of the private ownership of life. Just as resources formerly considered to be commons, or of communal use, were privately appropriated through the enclosure and private appropriation of fields, rivers, lakes, and forests, leading to the expulsion of European peasants from their land and their forced conversion into factory workers during the Industrial Revolution, through biopiracy, legalized by the agreements protecting intellectual property, the ancestral collective knowledge of peoples in all parts of the world is being expropriated and converted into private property, for whose use its own creators must pay. This represents

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the dispossession or private appropriation of intellectual commons (Shiva 1997, 10). The potential—but also real—impact of these ways of defining and imposing the defense of so-called intellectual property are multiple, yet another expression of the tendency, in the current process of globalization, to concentrate power in Northern businesses and countries, to the detriment of the poor majorities in the South. At stake are matters as critical as the survival of life-forms and choices that do not completely fit within the universal logic of the market, as well as rural nutritional self-sufficiency and access to food and health services for the planet’s underprivileged majorities. As a consequence of the establishment of patents on varieties of life-forms, and the appropriation/expropriation of rural/communal knowledge, by transnational seed and agrochemical companies, the patterns of rural production are changing ever more quickly, on a global scale. Peasants become less and less autonomous, and they depend more and more on expensive consumables they must purchase from transnational companies (Gaia Foundation and GRAIN 1998). These companies have also developed a “terminator” technology deliberately designed so that harvested seeds cannot germinate, forcing peasants to buy new seeds for each planting cycle (Ho and Traavik n.d.; Raghavan n.d.). All of this has had a profound impact, as much on the living conditions of millions of people as on genetic diversity on the planet Earth. The “freedom of commerce” that the interests of these transnational companies increasingly impose on peasants throughout the world is leading to a reduction in the genetic variety of many staple food crops. This reduction in genetic diversity, associated with an engineering view of agriculture and based on an extreme, industrial type of control over each phase of the productive process—with genetically modified seeds and the intensive use of agrochemicals—drastically reduces the auto-adaptive and regenerative ability of ecological systems. And nevertheless, the conservation of biodiversity requires the existence of diverse communities with diverse agricultural and medical systems that utilize diverse species in situ. Economic decentralization and diversification are necessary conditions for biodiversity conservation. (Shiva 1997, 88) Agricultural biodiversity has been conserved only when farmers have total control over their seeds. Monopoly rights regimens for seeds, either in the form of breeders’ rights or patents, will have the same impact on in

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situ conservation of plant genetic resources as the alienation of rights of local communities has had on the erosion of tree cover and grasslands in Ethiopia, India and other biodiversity-rich regions. (99)12

As much as for preserving genetic diversity—an indispensable condition of life—as for the survival of rural and indigenous peoples and cultures all over the planet—a plurality of ways of knowing must coexist, democratically. Current colonial trends toward an intensified, totalitarian monoculture of Eurocentric knowledge only lead to destruction and death. NOTES 1. The Multilateral Agreement on Investment was a treaty protecting investors’ rights that was secretly negotiated among governments of the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) between 1995 and 1997. As a result of widespread global resistance that occurred when an excerpt of the text was published on the Internet in early 1997, negotiations on the treaty ended in December 1998 without it having been signed. In spite of the fact that these negotiations did not culminate in the adoption of the agreement, the negotiating text continues to be very significant for two basic reasons. First, more than any other text pertaining to the intense drama of international accords and trade agreements in the current globalization process, the MAI explicitly and clearly expresses the core aspects of what can be properly considered to be the global agenda of transnational capital. Second, the main aspects of this agenda, which are mainly promoted by large, transnational corporations and by the U.S. government, continue to appear (sometimes echoing the MAI text word-for-word) in multiple other bilateral, regional, and multilateral forums and negotiations (bilateral agreements on the promotion and protection of investment, the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, the Forum on Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, as well as in negotiations carried out within the WTO and the International Monetary Fund). For a detailed explanation of the content and political implications of this treaty, see Lander 1998. For the complete text of the treaty, see OECD 1998. 2. In reality, it would be more correct to speak of a commercial regime that is “corporately administered” by large, transnational companies (Working Group on the WTO/MAI 1999). 3. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The text of this accord is Annex 1C of the agreements of the WTO (1994).

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4. “The reason that these categories are disciplined in this article is that requirements imposed by governments in these areas are major burdens on investors and impair the competitiveness of their investments” (Brooks 1997). 5. A wide variety of policies are considered “distorting” because governments promote them on the basis of criteria or priorities other than the absolute primacy of free trade. This despite the possible importance of the objectives orienting these policies. Governments usually give three reasons for supporting and protecting their farmers, even if this distorts agricultural trade: • to make sure that enough food is produced to meet the country’s needs • to shield farmers from the effects of the weather and swings in world prices • to preserve rural society. (WTO 1999b, 18) 6. This corresponds to an old desire to limit the “excesses of democracy,” present in rightist thought for decades. In this sense, Joseph Schumpeter’s (1983 [1942]) interventions and the report to the Trilateral Commission, The Crisis of Democracy (Crozier, Huntington, and Joji 1975), can be considered the classical statements of this position. 7. According to Jonas (1984, 30), given that what is at stake in some contemporary technological decisions could be the survival of life on planet Earth—and thus the central point of ethics—and given the insufficiencies of our predictive knowledge, it follows that when doubts arise concerning the impact of our technological action, we should prioritize the “prophecy of doom” over the “prophecy of bliss”: It must be admitted now that this same uncertainty of all long-term projections becomes a grievous weakness when they have to serve as prognoses by which to mold behavior . . . the envisaged distant outcome should lead its beholder back to a decision on what to do or abstain from now: and one demands, not unreasonably, a considerable certainty of prediction when asked to renounce a desired and certain near-effect because of an alleged distant effect, which anyway will no longer touch ourselves. To be sure, in the truly capital issues of ultimate destiny, the order of magnitude of the unwilled long-term effects so far exceeds that of the intended short-term effect that it ought to outweigh quite some disparity in certainty.

This approach by Jonas corresponds to what is usually called the principle of precaution. 8. The main international body responsible for the defense of intellectual property is the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialized agency of the United Nations based in Geneva. The purpose of this organization is “to promote the protection of intellectual property throughout the world through cooperation among States and, where

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10.

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appropriate, in collaboration with any other international organization” (WIPO 1993, 2). Nevertheless, this agency—based on “cooperation between states”—has lacked the power necessary to guarantee compliance with agreements or to impose sanctions. For this reason, transnational corporations and governments of the richest countries, using as justification “trade-related” issues relating to intellectual property, have imposed the much more powerful WTO as the new means for guaranteeing the effective protection of their intellectual property. Among the basic premises explicitly established in the agreement on the regime of intellectual property, it is “recognize[d] that intellectual property rights are private rights” (WTO 1994, 12). The agreement states: “Members may also exclude from patentability . . . plants and animals other than micro-organisms, and essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals other than non-biological and microbiological processes. However, Members shall provide for the protection of plant varieties either by patents or by an effective sui generis system or by any combination thereof” (WTO 1994, 12). Article 27 is drawn up in a deliberately ambiguous manner, probably with the objective of getting it signed before extending its coverage by successive interpretations of its meaning. None of the main concepts used in the text, such as microorganisms, essentially biological processes, or sui generis, are defined. Neither is a distinction drawn—which in this case would be fundamental—between invention and discovery; thus the authors of Article 27 attempt to subsume under the notion of invention what juridical regimes in many countries have understood as discovery, and therefore as unpatentable. For an example of patents on life or manipulations of life that have been granted on the basis of Western intellectual property formulas, see RAFI 1998. For an excellent summary of recent research on the close ties between biological and cultural diversity in farming communities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, see Prain, Fuyjisca, and Warren 1999.

REFERENCES Berting, Jan. 1993. “Technological Impacts on Human Rights: Models of Development, Science and Technology, and Human Rights.” In The Impact of Technology on Human Rights: Global Case Studies, edited by C. G. Weeramantry. Tokyo: United Nations University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. “The Essence of Neoliberalism.” Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro. Le monde diplomatique, December. Accessed on-line at www. en.monde-diplomatique.fr/1998/12/08bourdieu, 24 January 2002. Brooks, Jo. 1997. United States Department of State. MAI Briefing for NonOECD Countries: Performance Requirements. Paris, 17 September. OECD,

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MAI home page. Accessed on-line at www.oecd.org/daf/cmis/mai/ maindex.htm, May 1998. Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs. 1998. “Mutlilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI): The Facts.” Washington, DC, March 23. Accessed on-line at www.state.gov/www/issues/economics/fs_980323_multilat.html, 24 January 2002. Clavero, Bartolomé. 1994. Derecho indígena y cultura constitucional en América. Mexico City: Siglo XXI. Cornoil, Fernando. 1997. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 2000. “Naturaleza del postcolonialismo: Del eurocentrismo al globocentrismo.” In Lander 2000a. Correa, Carlos. 1999. “Developing Countries and the TRIPS Agreement.” Third World Network. Accessed on-line at www.twnside.org.sg/title/ correa-cn.htm, 24 January 2002. Crozier, Michel J., Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki. 1975. The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission. New York: New York University Press. Dussel, Enrique, 2000. “Europa, modernidad y eurocentrismo.” In Lander 2000a. Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Gaia Foundation and Genetic Resources Action International (GRAIN). 1998. “Intellectual Property Rights and Biodiversity: The Economic Myths.” Global Trade and Biodiversity in Conflict, no. 3. Accessed on-line at www. grain.org/publications/issue3-en-p.htm, 24 January 2002. Ho, Mae-Wan, and Terje Traavik. n.d. “Why We Should Reject Biotech Patents from TRIPS: Scientific briefing on TRIPS Article 27.3(b).” Third World Network. Accessed on-line at www.twnside.org.sg/title/reject-cn.htm, 24 January 2002. “Indigenous Peoples’ Seattle Declaration on the Occasion of the Third Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization.” 1999. In Indigenous and Tribal Peoples: Legal Framework and Indigenous Rights. 30 November-3 December. Accessed on-line at www.ecouncil.ac.cr/indig/leg_index.htm, 25 January 2002. Jonas, Hans. 1984. The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Khor, Martin. n.d. “A Worldwide Fight against Biopiracy and Patents on Life.” Third World Network. Accessed on-line at www.twnside.org.sg/ title/pat-ch.htm, 24 January 2002. Lander, Edgardo. 1994. La ciencia y la tecnología como asuntos políticos: Límites de la democracia en la sociedad tecnológica. Caracas: Fondo

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Editorial de la Asociación de Profesores de la Universidad Central de Venezuela, Publicaciones de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Sociales de la Universidad Central de Venezuela and Editorial Nueva Sociedad. . 1998. “El Acuerdo Multilateral de Inversiones (MAI): El capital diseña una constitución universal.” Revista venezolana de economía y ciencias sociales, no. 2–3. , comp. 2000a. La colonialidad del saber: Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales— Perspectivas latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)/Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO). . 2000b. “Ciencias sociales: Saberes coloniales y eurocéntricos.” In Lander 2000a. Larson, Alan P. 1997. “State of Play of MAI Negotiations.” MAI Briefing for non-OECD Countries. May 17. Paris. Accessed on-line at www.oecd.org/ daf/cmis/mai/maindex.htm, May 1998. Macpherson, C. P. 1970. La teoría política del individualismo posesivo: De Hobbes a Locke. Barcelona: Fontanella. Mapuche Documentation Center. 1993. “The Mataatua Declaration on Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” June. Accessed on-line at www.soc.uu.se/mapuche/indgen/Mataatua.html, 24 January 2002. Mignolo, Walter. 1995. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. . 2000a. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. . 2000b. “La colonialidad a lo largo y lo ancho: El hemisferio occidental en el horizonte colonial de la modernidad.” In Lander 2000a. Nelkin, Dorothy. 1977. Technological Decisions and Democracy: European Experiments in Public Participation. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. , ed. 1984. Controversy: Politics and Technological Decisions. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 1998. Multilateral Agreement on Investment. The MAI Negotiating Text (As of 24 April 1998). Accessed on-line at www.oecd.orgdaf/investment/fdi/ mai/maitext.pdf, 24 January 2002. Prain, Gordon, Sam Fuyjisca, and Michael D. Warren, eds. 1999. Biological and Cultural Diversity: The Role of Indigenous Agricultural Experimentation in Development. London: Intermediate Technology. Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales.” In Lander 2000a. Raghavan, Chakravarthi. n.d. “New Patent Aims to Prevent Farmers from Saving Seed.” Third World Network. Accessed on-line at www.twnside.org. sg/title/newpa-cn.htm, 24 January 2002.

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Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI). 1998. “Out of Control: Northern Patent Systems Threaten Food Security, Human Dignity, and are Predatory on the South’s Resources and Knowledge” (Occasional Paper). Accessed on-line at www.rafi.org/documents/occ_out.pdf, 24 January 2002. Schumpeter, Joseph. 1983 [1942]. Capitalismo, socialismo y democracia. 2 vols. Barcelona: Orbis. Shiva, Vandana. 1997. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Boston: South End. Singer, Thomas, and Paul Orbuch. 1997. “Multilateral Agreement on Investment: Potential Effects on State and Local Government.” Denver: Western Governors’ Association. Accessed on-line at www.westgov.org/ wga/publicat/maiweb.htm, 24 January 2002. van Dillen, Bob, and Maura Leen, eds. 2000. Biopatenting and the Threat to Food Security: A Christian and Development Perspective. International Cooperation for Development and Solidarity/Coopération Internationale pour le Dévelopment et la Solidarité (CIDSE). Accessed on-line at www. cidse.org/pubs/tgippcon.htm, 24 January 2002. Working Group on the WTO/MAI. 1999. A Citizen’s Guide to the World Trade Organization: Everything You Need to Know to Fight for Fair Trade. July. Washington, DC: Working Group on the WTO/MAI. World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). 1993. “Objectives of the Organization.” Article 3 of Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization: Signed at Stockholm on July 14, 1967 and as Amended on September 28, 1979. Geneva: World Intellectual Property Organization. WIPO Database of Intellectual Property Legislative Texts. Accessed online at www.wipo.org/members/convention/pdf/conv-en.pdf, 24 January 2002. World Trade Organization (WTO). 1994. Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. Accessed on-line at www.wto.org/english/ docs_e/legal_e/final_e.htm, 24 January 2002. . 1999a. Seattle: What’s at Stake. (Resource Booklet for the Seattle Ministerial Meeting). Switzerland, Accessed on-line at www.wto.org/ english/ thewto_e/minist_e/min99_e/english/book_e/stak_e_1.htm, 24 January 2002. . 1999b. Trading into the Futue: WTO, the World Trade Organization. 2d ed. Geneva: WTO, Information and Media Relations Division. Accessed on-line at www.wto.org/english/res_e/doload_e/tif.pdf, 24 January 2002.

chapter eleven

The Social Sciences, Epistemic Violence, and the Problem of the “Invention of the Other” Santiago Castro-Gómez

D

uring the last two decades of the twentieth century, postmodern philosophy and cultural studies developed into important theoretical currents that impelled a strong critique, inside and outside the academy, of the pathologies of Westernization. Their many differences notwithstanding, both currents attribute these pathologies to the exclusive, dualist character that modern power relations assume. Modernity is an alterity-generating machine that, in the name of reason and humanism, excludes from its imaginary the hybridity, multiplicity, ambiguity, and contingency of different forms of life. The current crisis of modernity is seen by postmodern philosophy and cultural studies as a historic opportunity for these long-repressed differences to emerge. I hope to show here that the proclaimed “end” of modernity clearly implies the crisis of a power mechanism that constructs the “other” by means of a binary logic that represses difference. I also argue that this crisis does not imply the weakening of the global structure within which this mechanism operates. What I will refer to here as the “end of modernity” is merely the crisis of a historical configuration of power in the framework of the capitalist worldsystem, which nevertheless has taken on other forms in times of globalization, without this implying the disappearance of that worldsystem. I argue that the present global reorganization of the capitalist economy depends on the production of differences. As a result, the celebratory affirmation of these differences, far from subverting the system, could be contributing to its consolidation. I defend the claim

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that the challenge now facing a critical theory of society is precisely to reveal what the crisis of the modern project consists of and to indicate the new configurations of global power in what Jean-François Lyotard has called the “postmodern condition.” My strategy is first to interrogate the significance of what Jürgen Habermas has called the “project of modernity,” seeking to demonstrate the origins of two closely linked social phenomena: the formation of nation-states and the consolidation of colonialism. Here I emphasize the role played by techno-scientific knowledge, particularly knowledge that emerges from the social sciences, in the consolidation of these phenomena. Later I show that the “end of modernity” cannot be understood as the result of an explosion of normative frameworks in which this project taxonomically operated, but, rather, as a new configuration of global power relations that is based on the production of differences instead of on their repression. I conclude with a brief reflection on the role of a critical theory of society in times of globalization. THE PROJECT OF GOVERNMENTABILITY What do we mean when we speak of the “project of modernity”? Primarily and generally, we refer to the Faustian drive to submit the entire world to the absolute control of man under the steady guide of knowledge. The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1973, pt. 2) has shown that, at a conceptual level, this project required humanity’s elevation to the rank of principal organizer of all things. To attain this power, mankind must fight a war, one it will win only by knowing the enemy profoundly, deciphering its most intimate secrets, so that its own tools may be used to make it submit to human will. This is precisely the role of techno-scientific reason with respect to nature. Ontological insecurity can only be eliminated insofar as we increase our mechanisms of control over the magical or mysterious forces of nature, especially over those aspects of it that cannot be reduced to calculability. In this sense, Max Weber speaks of the rationalization of the West as the process of “disenchanting” the world. When we speak of modernity as a “project,” we are also principally referring to the existence of a central instance from which the mechanisms of control over the natural and social world are distributed and coordinated. This primary instance is the state, guarantor of the rational organization of human life. In this context, “rational organization” means that the processes of disenchantment and demagicalization

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of the world to which Weber and Blumenberg refer have begun to be regulated by the state’s guiding hand. The state is understood as the sphere in which all societal interests reach a point of “synthesis,” that is, the locus which formulates collective goals valid for everyone. This requires the application of “rational criteria” that permit the state to channel the desires, interests, and emotions of citizens toward its own goals. The modern state thus not only acquires a monopoly on violence, but also uses it to rationally “direct” the activities of its citizens in accordance with previously established scientific criteria. The U.S. sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein (1991) has shown how the social sciences became a fundamental part of this project of organization and control over human life. The birth of the social sciences was not an additive phenomenon to the framework of political organization defined by the nation-state, it was constitutive of that framework. In order to govern the social world, one first had to generate a platform from which it could be scientifically observed.1 Without the aid of the social sciences, the modern state would not be in a position to exercise control over people’s lives, define long- and short-term collective goals, or construct and assign to its citizens a cultural “identity.”2 The restructuring of the economy according to the new demands of international capitalism, the redefinition of political legitimacy, and even the identification of the specific character and values of each nation all required a scientifically endorsed representation of how social reality “functioned.” Governmental programs could only be realized and executed on the basis of this information. The taxonomies elaborated by the social sciences were thus not limited to the development of an abstract system of rules called “science”—as the founding fathers of sociology ideologically believed. Instead, these taxonomies had practical consequences, for they legitimized the regulative politics of the state. The practical matrix that led to the rise of the social sciences was the need to “adjust” human life to the apparatus of production. The social sciences teach us which “laws” govern economy, society, politics, and history. For its own part, the state defines its governmental politics on the basis of this scientifically legitimized normativity. Now, this attempt to establish profiles of subjectivity coordinated by the state entails a phenomenon that I call here the “invention of the other.” By “invention,” I do not mean simply the way in which a certain group of people abstractly represents itself to others; rather, I refer to the mechanisms of power/knowledge from which those representations are constructed. The problem of the “other” must

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be approached theoretically not so much as the “concealment” of a preexisting cultural identity as from a perspective that takes into account the process of material and symbolic production that modern societies have been involved in since the beginning of the sixteenth century.3 I would like to illustrate this point by turning to the work of the Venezuelan thinker Beatriz González Stephan, who has studied the disciplinary mechanisms of power in the context of nineteenth century Latin America and the ways in which these constructions made possible the “invention of the other.” González Stephan identifies three disciplinary practices that helped shape Latin American citizenship in the nineteenth century: constitutions, manuals of etiquette [urbanidad], and grammar manuals. Following the Uruguayan theorist Angel Rama, González Stephan observes that these technologies of subjectification had a common denominator: their legitimacy lay in writing. In the nineteenth century, writing was an exercise that met the need to organize and institute the logic of “civilization.” It anticipated the modernizing dream of the Creole elites. The written word constructed laws and national identities, designed modernizing programs, and organized the understanding of the world in terms of inclusion and exclusion. For this reason, nations’ foundational projects were carried out by creating institutions legitimized by writing (schools, hospices, workshops, prisons) and hegemonic discourses (maps, grammars, constitutions, manuals, treatises on hygiene) that regulated public conduct. These institutions and texts established boundaries between people and assured them that they existed either inside or outside of the limits defined by written legality (González Stephan 1996). The formation of the citizen as a “subject of law” is only possible within the limits of the disciplinary structure and, in this case, within the space of legality defined by the constitution. The juridicopolitical function of constitutions is precisely to invent citizenship, in other words, to create a field of homogenous identities that make the modern project of governmentability viable. For example, the Venezuelan constitution of 1839 declares that the only people eligible for citizenship are married males who are older than twenty-five, literate, own property, and practice a profession earning them no less than four hundred pesos a year (ibid., 32). The acquisition of citizenship is thus a sieve through which only those subjects who fit the profile required for the project of modernity may pass: ones who are male, white, head of household, Catholic, landowner, literate, and hetero-sexual. Those who do not meet these requirements (women,

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servants, the insane, the illiterate, blacks, heretics, slaves, Indians, homosexuals, dissidents) are excluded from the “lettered city,” sealed off in a field of illegality, and subject to punishment and therapy by the same laws that exclude them. But if the constitution formally defines a desirable type of modern subjectivity, pedagogy is the great artisan of its materialization. Schools become a space of enclosure that forms the type of subject called for by the constitution’s “regulative ideals.” The purpose is to impose a discipline on the mind and body that enables people to be “useful to the fatherland.” Children’s behaviour must be regulated and monitored, compelling them to acquire knowledge, abilities, habits, values, cultural models, and lifestyles that will allow them to assume a “productive” role in society. González Stephan does not direct her attention to the school as an “institution of seclusion,” but rather toward the disciplinary function of certain pedagogical technologies such as manuals of etiquette, especially the famous one published by Manuel Antonio Carreño (1854). The manual operates within the field of authority laid out by the book, with the purpose of ordering the subordination of human instinct, the control over the body, and the domestication of any kind of sensibility considered “barbaric” (González Stephan 1995). No manuals were written on how to be a good peasant, a good Indian, a good black person, or a good gaucho, since all of these human types were seen as barbaric. Instead, manuals were written on how to be a “good citizen” so as to become part of the civitas, the legal space inhabited by the epistemological, moral, and aesthetic subjects that modernity requires. For this reason, the Carreño manual warns that “without the observation of these rules, more or less perfect according to the degree of civilization in each country[,] . . . there will be no way to cultivate sociability, which is the principle of communities’ conservation and progress and of all well-ordered societies’ existence” (quoted in ibid., 436; González Stephan’s emphasis). The manuals of etiquette became a new bible that would teach citizens proper behavior in the most diverse situations of life, for each person’s degree of success in the civitas terrena, or the material reign of civilization, depended on his or her faithful obedience of norms. “Entrance” into the banquet of modernity required compliance with the normative prescription that distinguished members of the new Latin American urban class that began to emerge during the second half of the nineteenth century. The “we” that the etiquette manuals refer to, then, is the same class of bourgeois citizens whom

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the republican constitutions address: citizens who know how to speak, eat, use silverware, blow their nose, deal with servants, and behave themselves in society. These subjects are perfectly familiar with “the theater of etiquette, the rigidity of appearance, the mask of contention” (González Stephan 1995, 439). In this sense, González Stephan’s observations agree with those of Max Weber and Norbert Elias, for whom the formation of the modern subject went hand in hand with the requirement of self-control and the repression of instincts, the goal being to make social difference more visible. The “process of civilization” implies an increase of the threshold of shame, for it was necessary to clearly distinguish oneself from all of the social classes that did not pertain to the arena of civitas which Latin American intellectuals like Domingo Faustino Sarmiento identified as the paradigm of modernity. “Civility” and “civic education” thus operated as pedagogical taxonomies that separated dress coats from ponchos, neatness from filth, the capital from the provinces, the republic from the colony, civilization from barbarism. Within this taxonomic process, grammar manuals also played a foundational role. In particular, González Stephan mentions Andrés Bello’s Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos [Grammar of the Castilian language destined for American use] published in 1847. The project of the construction of the nation required the stabilization of language so that laws could be properly implemented and commercial transactions facilitated. A direct relationship exists, therefore, between language and citizenship, between grammar manuals and manuals of etiquette: the purpose in all of these cases is to create the Homo economicus, or the patriarchal subject charged with promoting and carrying out the modernization of the republic. From the normativity of the written word, the Latin American grammar manuals sought to establish a culture of “buen decir” (formal speech) so as to avoid “the vices of popular speech” and the coarse barbarisms of the masses (González Stephan 1996, 29). We are thus faced with a disciplinary practice that reflects the contradictions that would eventually tear apart the project of modernity: establishing the conditions for “liberty” and “order” implies the subjection of instincts, the suppression of spontaneity, and the control over differences. To be civilized, to enter into modernity, to become Colombian, Brazilian, or Venezuelan citizens, individuals not only had to behave properly and know how to read and write, but they also had to make their language fit a series of norms. The submission to order and the norm leads the individual to substitute

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the heterogeneous, spontaneous vital flow for a continuum that is arbitrarily constituted from the written word. It is thus clear that the two processes indicated by González Stephan, the invention of citizenship and the invention of the other, are genetically related. The creation of the modern citizen in Latin America entailed the generation of a reverse image from which this identity could assess and affirm itself as such. The construction of the imaginary of “civilization” required the production of its counterpart: the imaginary of “barbarism.” In both cases, more is at stake than just abstract representation. These imaginaries have a concrete materiality, in the sense that they are bound to abstract systems of disciplinary nature such as schools, law, the state, prisons, hospitals, and the social sciences. It is precisely this link between knowledge and discipline that permits us to speak, following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, of the project of modernity as an exercise in “epistemic violence.” Although González Stephan indicates that all of these disciplinary mechanisms strove to create the profile of Homo economicus in Latin America, her genealogical analysis, inspired by the mircophysics of power analyzed by Michel Foucault, does not permit an understanding of how these processes are linked to the dynamic of capitalism’s constitution as world-system. In order to conceptualize this problem, a methodological turn is necessary: the genealogy of power-knowledge, as developed by Foucault, must be broadened into the sphere of longue durée macrostructures (as analyzed by Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein) so that we can visualize the problem of the “invention of the other” from a geopolitical perspective. To this end, it would be useful to examine how postcolonial theories have approached this problem. THE COLONIALITY OF POWER, OR, THE “OTHER FACE” OF MODERNITY One of the most important contributions of postcolonial theories to the current restructuring of the social sciences is their demonstration that the rise of nation-states in Europe and the Americas from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries was not an autonomous process, but rather one with a structural counterpart: the consolidation of European colonialism abroad. The social sciences’ persistent negation of this link between modernity and colonialism has been one of the clearest signs of their conceptual limitations. Permeated from the beginning with a European imaginary, the social

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sciences projected the idea of an aseptic and self-generating Europe, historically formed without any contact with other cultures (see Blaut 1993). Rationalization—in a Weberian sense—would thus have resulted from the attribution of qualities inherent to Western societies (the “passage” from tradition to modernity) and not from Europe’s colonial interaction with America, Asia, and Africa since 1492.4 From this perspective, the experience of colonialism seems to be completely irrelevant to an understanding of the phenomenon of modernity and the rise of the social sciences. For Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans, this means that colonialism did not primarily represent destruction and plunder but, above all, the start of the tortuous, inevitable road to development and modernization. This is the colonial imaginary that traditionally has been reproduced by the social sciences and by philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic. Nevertheless, postcolonial theories have shown that any inventory of modernity which does not take into account the impact of the colonial experience on the formation of properly modern power relations is not only incomplete, but also ideological. For this type of disciplinary power, which, according to Foucault, characterizes societies and modern institutions, was generated precisely at the center of a web of power/knowledge marked by coloniality. Coloniality should not be confused with colonialism. While colonialism refers to a historical period (which, in the case of Latin America, ended in 1824), coloniality references a technology of power that persists today, founded on the “knowledge of the other.” Coloniality is not modernity’s “past” but its “other face.” The category of “coloniality of power,” suggested by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (1999), refers precisely to this situation. In Quijano’s opinion, colonial depredation is legitimized by an imaginary that establishes incommensurable differences between the colonizer and the colonized. Here, notions of “race” and “culture” operate as a taxonomic construction that generates opposing identities. The colonized thus appears as the “other of reason,” which justifies the use of disciplinary power by the colonizer. Wickedness, barbarism, and incontinence are “identitarian” markers of the colonized, while goodness, civilization, and rationality pertain to the colonizer. Both identities are related through exteriority and are mutually exclusive. Any communication between them cannot take place in the sphere of culture—since their codes are incommensurable—but only in the sphere of the Realpolitik dictated by colonial power. A “just” politics would be one that, through the implementation of juridical

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and disciplinary mechanisms, attempts to “normalize” the other by completely Westernizing him or her. The concept of the “coloniality of power” broadens and corrects the Foucauldian concept of “disciplinary power” by demonstrating that the panoptic constructions erected by the modern state are inscribed in a wider structure of power/knowledge. This global structure is configured by the colonial relation between center and periphery that is at the root of European expansion. As Enrique Dussel has shown, this structure is created during the “first modernity,” which corresponds to the hegemony of Spain over the Atlantic circuit (see Dussel’s contribution to this volume). The concept of disciplinary power Foucault works with refers to the “second modernity,” or the period of state biopolitics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and can be understood as a “modality” of the coloniality of power. We can thus state that modernity is a project of governing the social world which emerged in the sixteenth century. Its constructions of power/knowledge are anchored in a double coloniality: one directed inward by European and American nation-states in their effort to establish homogenous identities through politics of subjectification, the other directed outward by the hegemonic powers of the modern/ colonial world-system in their attempt to ensure the flow of primary materials from the periphery to the center. Both processes are part of the same structural dynamic. My thesis is that the social sciences developed in this space of modern/colonial power and in the ideological knowledges it generated. From this perspective, the social sciences did not produce an “epistemological rupture” (in an Althusserian sense) with respect to ideology. Instead, the colonial imaginary permeated the entire conceptual system of the social sciences from their inception.5 In this sense, the majority of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century social theorists (Hobbes, Bossuet, Turgot, Condorcet) agreed that the “human species” slowly emerged from ignorance and crossed different “stages“ of perfection until finally reaching the “coming of age” that modern European societies had achieved (see Meek 1981). The empirical referent employed by this heuristic model to define the first “stage,” the lowest on the scale of human development, is that of American indigenous societies as described by European travelers, chroniclers, and navigators since the sixteenth century. The characteristics of this first stage are savagery, barbarism, and the total absence of art, science, and writing. “In the beginning all was America,” that is, all was superstition, primitivism, the struggle of all against all, the

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“state of nature.” The final stage of human progress, already achieved by European societies, is constructed instead as the absolute “other” of the first and as its reverse image. In this stage reign civility, the state of law, the cultivation of science, and the arts. Here, man has reached a state of “enlightenment” in which, according to Kant, he is capable of self-government and the autonomous use of reason. Europe has blazed the path to civilization that all nations of the planet must take. It is not difficult to see how the conceptual apparatus that emerged with the social sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is sustained by a colonial imaginary of ideological character. Binary concepts like barbarism and civilization, tradition and modernity, community and society, science and myth, infancy and maturity, organic solidarity and mechanical solidarity, and poverty and development, among many others, have fully permeated the analytic models of the social sciences. The imaginary of progress, according to which all societies evolve in time following universal laws inherent to nature or the human spirit, appears as an ideological product constructed from the mechanism of modern/colonial power. The social sciences function structurally as an “ideological apparatus” that internally sanctioned the exclusion and disciplining of those who did not conform to the profiles of subjectivity that the state needed to implement its politics of modernization. Externally, the social sciences legitimized the international divisions of labor and the inequality of the terms of interchange and commerce between the center and the periphery, that is, the enormous social and economic benefits that European powers obtained through domination of their colonies. The production of alterity within and the production of alterity without were part of the same construct of power. Coloniality of power and coloniality of knowledge were situated in the same genetic matrix. FROM DISCIPLINARY POWER TO LIBIDINAL POWER I would like to conclude this essay by analyzing the transformations capitalism undergoes once the end of the project of modernity is consolidated, and the consequences these transformations may have on the social sciences and a critical theory of society. I have conceptualized modernity as a series of practices oriented toward the rational control of human life. Among these practices are the institutionalization of the social sciences, the capitalist organization of the economy, the colonial expansion of Europe, and, above all,

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the juridicoterritorial configuration of nation-states. We have also seen that modernity is a “project” because the rational control over human life is exercised from within and without through a primary instance, which is the nation-state. But what do we refer to when we speak of the end of the project of modernity? We can begin by responding in the following manner: Modernity no longer operates as a “project” insofar as the social is configured by instances that escape the control of the nation-state. Or, in other words, the project of modernity reaches its “end” when the nation-state loses the capacity to organize people’s social and material lives. It is then that we may properly speak of globalization. Although the project of modernity always had a tendency toward the “worldness” (Mignolo 2000) of human action, I believe that what today is called “globalization” is a sui generis phenomenon, since it brings with it a qualitative change in the global mechanisms of power. I would like to illustrate the difference between modernity and globalization using the concepts of embedding and disembedding developed by Anthony Giddens: while modernity disembeds social relations from their traditional contexts and reembeds them in posttraditional spheres of action coordinated by the state, globalization disembeds social relations from their national contexts and reembeds them in postmodern spheres of action that are no longer coordinated by any particular instance. From this perspective, I maintain that globalization is not a “project,” because governmentability no longer needs an “Archimedian point,” that is, a central instance that regulates the mechanisms of social control.6 We can even speak of a “governmentability without government” to indicate the spectral, nebulous character, at times imperceptible but effective for this very reason, that power assumes in times of globalization. Subjection to the world-system is no longer assured through the control over time and body exercised by institutions like factories or schools but, rather, by the production of symbolic property and its irresistible seduction of the consumer’s imaginary. The libidinal power of postmodernity attempts to shape individuals’ total psychology in such a way that each may reflexively construct his or her own subjectivity without having to oppose the system. On the contrary, the system itself offers the resources that permit the differential construction of the Selbst. Whatever lifestyle one chooses, whatever project of self-invention or act of autobiographical writing, there is always an offer on the market and an “expert system” that guarantees its trustworthiness.7 Far from repressing differences,

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as did the disciplinary power of modernity, the libidinal power of postmodernity stimulates and produces them. We have also noted that within the framework of the modern project, the social sciences basically functioned as alterity-producing mechanisms. This was due to the fact that the accumulation of capital required the creation of a “subject” profile that would easily adapt to the demands of production: white, male, married, heterosexual, disciplined, hardworking, self-controlled. As Foucault has shown, human sciences contributed to the creation of this profile insofar as their object of knowledge was constructed through institutional practices of confinement and sequestration. Prisons, hospitals, asylums, schools, factories, and colonial societies were laboratories from which the social sciences recovered, through its reverse image, the ideal of “man” that would impel and sustain the processes of capital’s accumulation. This image of “rational man” was obtained counterfactually, by studying the “others of reason”: the insane, Indians, blacks, social misfits, prisoners, homosexuals, the poor. To construct the profile of subjectivity required by the modern project, therefore all these differences had to be suppressed. Nevertheless, if my argument up to this point is plausible, in the moment at which the accumulation of capital no longer demands the suppression but rather the production of differences, the structural link between the social sciences and the new mechanisms of power should also change. The social sciences and humanities must undergo a “paradigm shift” allowing them to adjust to the systemic requirements of global capital. The case of Lyotard seems to me symptomatic. He lucidly affirms that the metanarrative of the humanization of humanity has entered into crisis, but he simultaneously proclaims the birth of a new legitimizing narrative: the coexistence of different “language games.” Each language game defines its own rules, which no longer need to be sanctioned by a higher court of reason. Neither Descartes’s epistemological hero nor Kant’s moral hero continues to function as a transcendental instance that defines the universal rules by which all players should play, irrespective of the diversity of the games in which they participate. For Lyotard, in the “postmodern condition” it is the players themselves who construct the rules of the game they wish to play in. There are no previously defined rules (Lyotard 1990[1979]). The problem with Lyotard is not that he has announced the end of a project that, in Habermas’s (1990, 32–54) opinion, is still “inconclusive.” Instead, the problem stems from the new narrative that Lyotard proposes. To affirm that previously defined rules no

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longer exist is to render invisible—that is, to mask—the world-system that produces differences based on rules defined for all of the globe’s players. Let me be clear: the death of the world-system’s metanarratives of legitimation does not mean the death of the world-system itself! Rather, it entails a change in the power relations within the worldsystem, which generates new narratives of legitimation such as the one proposed by Lyotard. The strategy of legitimation is different, however: no longer a set of metanarratives that reveal the system, ideologically projecting it onto an epistemological, historical, and moral macrosubject, it consists, rather, of micronarratives that leave the system outside of representation; that is, they make it invisible. Something similar occurs with so-called cultural studies, one of the most innovative paradigms in the humanities and social sciences toward the close of the twentieth century.8 Of course, cultural studies have contributed to the loosening of disciplinary boundaries whose rigidity was converting our departments of social sciences and humanities into a handful of incommensurable “epistemological fiefdoms.” The transdisciplinary vocation of cultural studies has been extremely healthy for some academic institutions that, in Latin America at least, had become accustomed to “guarding and administering” the canon of every discipline.9 It is in this context that the Gulbenkian Commission report shows how cultural studies have begun to build bridges between the three great islands among which modernity distributed scientific knowledge (Wallerstein et al. 1996, 64–66). Nevertheless, the problem lies not so much in the inscription of cultural studies into the university sphere, nor even in the type of theoretical questions cultural studies provoke or the methodologies they utilize, as in their use of these methodologies and in their responses to these questions. It is evident, for example, that the spread of the culture industry throughout the world has called into question the separation between high and low culture, which thinkers from the “critical” tradition like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno were still bound to, as were our great Latin American “men of letters,” with their conservative, elitist tradition. But within this interchange between high culture and popular culture enabled by the mass media, within the planetary negotiation of symbolic property, cultural studies have seemed to see only a liberating explosion of differences. Urban mass culture and the new forms of social perception generated by information technologies are viewed as spaces of democratic emancipation, and even as a locus of hybridization and resistance

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before the imperatives of the market. Faced with this diagnostic, one begins to wonder if cultural studies have mortgaged their critical potential to the commodity fetishism of symbolic property. As in Lyotard’s case, the world-system remains the great absent object in the representation offered us by cultural studies. It is as if merely naming “totality” had become taboo for contemporary social sciences and philosophy, just as in Judaism it was a sin to name or represent God. The “permitted” topics—which today enjoy academic prestige—are the fragmentation of the subject, the hybridization of life-forms, the articulation of differences, and the disenchantment with metanarratives. The use of categories like “class,” “periphery,” or “worldsystem,” which propose to encompass heuristically a multiplicity of specific situations of gender, ethnicity, race, background, or sexual orientation, marks one as “essentialist,” as behaving in a “politically incorrect” manner, or at least as having fallen under the spell of metanarratives. These reproaches are sometimes justified, but perhaps there is an alternative. I consider that the great challenge for the social sciences consists in learning how to name totality (with its persistent colonial face) without falling into the essentialism and universalism of metanarratives. The task of a critical theory of society is, then, to make visible the new mechanisms of colonial production of differences in times of globalization. In the Latin American case, the major challenge is to “decolonize” the social sciences and philosophy. Although this is not a new agenda for us, our goal today is to disengage ourselves from a whole series of binary categories (colonizer versus colonized, center versus periphery, Europe versus Latin America, development versus underdevelopment, oppressor versus oppressed, etc.) that dependency theories and liberation philosophies worked with in the past. We must understand that it is no longer possible to conceptualize new configurations of power using this theoretical tool.10 From this perspective, the new agendas of postcolonial studies could revitalize the tradition of critical theory in our field (CastroGómez, Guardiola-Rivera, and Millán de Benavides 1999). NOTES 1. As Anthony Giddens demonstrates clearly, the social sciences are “reflexive systems,” since their function is to observe the social world within which they themselves are produced. See Giddens 1999 [1991), 23.

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2. I have addressed the problem of cultural identity as a construct of the state in Castro-Gómez 1999. 3. For this reason, I prefer to use the category “invention” instead of Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel (1992)’s “encubrimiento” (covering over or concealing). 4. Recall that Max Weber wonders, at the beginning of The Protestant Ethic (1992 [1994], 13), by “what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value.” This question guides his entire theory of rationalization. 5. A genealogy of the social sciences should show that the ideological imaginary that penetrated the social sciences originated in the first phase of consolidation of the modern/colonial world-system, that is, in the period of Spanish hegemony. 6. The materiality of globalization is no longer constituted by the disciplinary institutions of the nation-state, but rather by corporations that recognize neither territories nor borders. This implies the configuration of a new framework of legality, that is, a new form of the exercise of power and authority, such as the production of new punitive mechanisms (a global police) that would guarantee the accumulation of capital and the resolution of conflicts. The wars in the Persian Gulf and Kosovo are good examples of the “new world order” emerging after the Cold War and as a consequence of the “end” of the project of modernity. See Hardt and Negri 2000; and Castro-Gómez and Mendieta 1998. 7. I take the concept of “trust” deposited in expert systems from Giddens (1999 [1991], 84). 8. For an introduction to Anglo-Saxon cultural studies, see Agger 1992. For the case of cultural studies in Latin America, the best introduction is still Rowe and Schelling 1993 [1991]. 9. Here we need to understand the different political significance that cultural studies have had in North American and Latin American universities. While cultural studies in the United States have become a convenient vehicle for rapid academic “careerism” in a structurally flexible atmosphere, in Latin America they have served to combat the frustrating ossification and parochialism of university structures. 10. For a critique of the binary categories that Latin American thinking engaged with during the twentieth century, see Castro-Gómez 1996.

REFERENCES Agger, Ben. 1992. Cultural Studies as Critical Theory. London: Falmer. Bacon, Francis. 1984 [1620]. Novum organum. Madrid: Sarpe.

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Blaut, James M. 1993. The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: Guilford. Blumenberg, Hans. 1973. Die Legitimität der Neuzeit. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Carreño, Miguel Antonio. 1854. Manual de urbanidad y buenas maneras para uso de la juventud de ambos sexos . . . precedidio de un breve tratado sobre los deberes morales del hombre. New York: Appleton. Castro-Gómez, Santiago. 1996. Critica de la razón latinoamericana. Barcelona: Puvill. . 1999. “Fin de la modernidad nacional y transformaciones de la cultura en tiempos de globalización”. In Cultura y globalización, edited by Jesús Martín-Barbero, Fabio López de la Roche, Jamio E. Jaramillo, and Renato Ortiz. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Centro de Estudios Sociales. Castro-Gómez, Santiago, and Eduardo Mendieta. 1998. “La translocalización discursiva de Latinoamérica en tiempos de la globalización. In Teorías sin disciplina: Latinoamericanismo, poscolonialidad y globalización en debate, edited by Santiago Castro-Gómez and Eduardo Mendieta. Mexico City: Porrúa. Castro-Gómez, Santiago, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, and Carmen Millán de Benavides. 1999. Introduction to Pensar (en) los intersticios: Teoría práctica de la crítica poscolonial, edited by Santiago Castro-Gómez, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, and Carmen Millán de Benavides. Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Dussel, Enrique. 1992. El encubrimiento del otro: El orígen del mito de la modernidad. Bogotá: Antropos. Giddens, Anthony. 1999 [1991]. Consecuencias de la modernidad. Translated by Ana Lizón Ramón. Madrid: Alianza. González Stephan, Beatriz. 1995. “Modernización y disciplinamiento: La formación del ciudadano—del espacio público y privado.” In Esplendores y miserias del siglo XIX: Cultura y sociedad en América Latina, compiled by Beatriz González Stephan et al. Caracas: Monte Avila. . 1996. “Economías fundacionales: Diseño del cuerpo ciudadano.” In Cultura y tercer mundo: Nuevas identidades y ciudadanías, compiled by Beatriz González Stephan. Caracas: Nueva Sociedad. Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. Die Moderne: Ein unvollendetes Projekt. Leipzig: Reclam. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1990 [1979]. La condición postmoderna: Informe sobre el saber. Translated by Mariano Antolín Rato. Mexico City: Rei. Meek, Ronald. 1981. Los orígenes de la ciencia social: El desarrollo de la teoría de los cuatro estadios. Translated by Eulalia Pérez Sedeño. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Quijano, Aníbal. 1999. “Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina.” In Pensar (en) los intersticios: Teoría y práctica de la crítica poscolonial, edited by Santiago Castro-Gómez, Oscar GuardiolaRivera, and Carmen Millán de Benavides. Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Rowe, William, and Vivian Schelling. 1993 [1991]. Memoria y modernidad: Cultura popular en América Latina. Mexico City: Grijalbo. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1991. Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms. London: Polity. Wallerstein, Immanuel, et al. 1996. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Standford, CA: Standford University Press. Weber, Max 1992 [1994]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. Introduction by Anthony Giddens. London: Routledge.

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chapter twelve

The Enduring Enchantment (Or the Epistemic Privilege of Modernity and Where To Go from Here) Walter D. Mignolo

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aurabh Dube’s invitation to participate in another, distinct volume on modernity entitled Enduring Enchantments called my attention to a critical dimension of the enchantments of modernity. Simply put, enduring enchantments that, created by the self-defining discourse of modernity, acquire an ontological dimension beyond the discourse itself. Modernity has, in these enduring enchantments, a double role. On the one hand, it is part of a series of oppositions (modernity/tradition, colony/modernity) and, on the other, modernity names the paradigm in which the enchantment of enduring oppositions is reproduced and maintained. Dube had stated that Enduring Enchantments:

does not propose a general solution to questions of the oppositions between tradition and modernity, ritual and rationality, myth and history, community and state, emotion and reason, and East and West. Indeed, it eschews immanent readings that relentlessly seek the “foundations” and “origins” of these binaries in Enlightenment principles and post-Enlightenment traditions only to cast out from imagination and understanding diverse human energies and enormous historical passions—from the first world through to the fourth world—that have laid claim upon these oppositions and animated these antinomies. Rather, Enduring Enchantments will work toward critical readings and substantive discussions of the key categories of tradition, community, colony, and modernity —and, when they bear upon this dialogue, the crucial constructs of the subaltern and nation—in view of the place and the persistence of overwrought oppositions that have ordered cultures and pasts in academic analyses and everyday understanding [emphasis added; see also Saurabh

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Dube, “Introduction: Enchantments of Modernity” in Dube (ed.) Enduring Enchantments, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4, 2002, published by Duke University Press].

My thesis is that the self-conception of the European Renaissance was, basically, expressed in a temporal and spatial matrix that corresponded to a religious and alphabetic/historiographic imaginary supported by the invention of the printing press. This matrix was transformed in the late eighteenth century as the alphabetic-historiographic imaginary was replaced by the emergence of a new type of discourse, political economy.1 Political economy came into the picture with a geopolitical concept of time that displaced, in the West, the hegemony of the Christian idea of time and of space. Christianity told the story of humankind from its origins in God’s creation and distributed space in three continents, each of them attributed to one of Noah’s sons (Asia to Sem; Africa to Ham; and Europe to Japheth).2 The secularization of time was, interestingly enough, parallel to the emergence of political economy. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Adam Smith had no doubt about the “advancement” of colonized sites (places) with the help of the colonial countries. If today, the rhetoric is that “technology will lift poverty,” at the end of the eighteenth century the rhetoric was the following: The colony of a civilized nation which takes possession either of a waste country, or of one so thinly inhabited, that the natives easily give place to the new settlers, advances more rapidly to wealth and greatness than any other human society. The colonists carry out with them a knowledge of agriculture and other useful arts, superior to what can grow up of its own accord in the course of many centuries among savage and barbarous nations. They carry out with them too the habit of subordination, some notion of the regular government which takes place in their own country, of the system of laws which supports it, and of regular administration of justice, and naturally establish something of the same kind of the new settlement.3

Thus, the colonists not only “carried with them” all those aspects that Adam Smith enumerated but, most importantly, they carried with them the conceptualization of what they carried with them, that is, the conceptualization that Smith puts forward here but that became naturalized. It was then natural for Karl Marx, a little more than half a century after Adam Smith, to understand the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries as a period of primitive accumulation. By doing so, he reinforced both the temporal direction of the history of capitalism to its point of arrival in the “mother country” (Marx’s expression),

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and rearticulated the temporal relations within the colonies. Marx observed that: In Western Europe, the homeland of political economy, the process of primitive accumulation has been more or less been accomplished. Here the capitalist regime has either directly subordinated to itself the whole of the nation’s production, or, where economic relations are less developed, it has at least indirect control of those social layers which, although they belong to the antiquated mode of production, still continue to exist side by side with it in a state of decay. To this ready-made world of capital, the political economist applies the notions of law and of property inherited from a precapitalist world, with all the more anxious zeal and all the greater unction, the more loudly the facts cry out in the face of his ideology.4

And Marx adds: “It is otherwise in the colonies.” In the colonies the capitalist regime “constantly comes up against the obstacle presented by the producer, who, as owner of his own conditions of labour, employs that labour to enrich himself instead of the capitalist.”5 Most likely Marx was thinking about Indians in South Asia under British rule. However, the conceptualizaiton of economics based on the laws that Smith and Marx expanded had its foundation in religious discourse, also based on the law, established three centuries before Marx but under different economic and colonial conditions. In other words, the transformation of mercantile capitalism in the sixteenth century due to the “discovery of America” resulted in what Marx called “primitive accumulation.” What apparently Marx was referring to but not naming as such was “colonial (primitive) accumulation.” However, Marx was very much imbued with the already entrenched (in the nineteenth century) belief in the linear march of time and progress of universal history. The accumulation of capital that resulted from the exploitation of the silver and gold mines in Potosi, Zacatecas, and Ouro Preto (by Spaniards and the Portuguese), as well as the exploitation of the Caribbean lands and of African Slaves (in the French, British, and Dutch plantations), was not the same as the “modern (primitive) accumulation” in Europe itself. That is, that kind of accumulation which, since Europe was the “homeland of political economy,” had been already accomplished. For one, race was not a significant element in modern accumulation—that is, in Europe—while it was the essence of colonial accumulation. Indeed, it was race that became a foundational category in the organization and the exploitation of labour in colonial accumulation, while it was class that became

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the foundational category in modern accumulation.6 Lewis Gordon pointed out the same phenomenon from a different perspective: In Europe, class is so indigenous to its environment that it emerges even in European efforts to socialism. One can “feel” class in Europe as one can feel the air that one breathes. In the U.S. [and I will say in the Americas including the Caribbean, W. M.], however, the effort to escape (yet retain) Europe took the form of homogenizing European identities into a whiteness framed on the premise of racial being. Race, then, became an endemic motive of New World [and of course the New World is larger than the United States, although the United States is included in the New World, W. M.], and that is why one can “feel” race here as one can the air that one breathes . . . 7

Now, both Smith and Marx underlined the extreme relevance of the “discovery” of the Cape of Good Hope (1488) and the Americas to the history of capital (commercial and then industrial). The first allowed Christian Europe to establish commercial relations with the economic centres of China and India, while the “discovery” of America brought gold, silver, and goods from the Caribbean plantations to Europe and, later, to “Western Europe” (Holland, England, France, Germany). Certainly, Smith and Marx made their remarks in a secular prose that contrasted with the triumphal enunciation by which Francisco de Gómara, historian of Hernan Cortes’s conquest of Mexico, framed the discovery of America in the history of the Christian Western World. For Gómara, the discovery of America (he does not pay attention to the Cape of Good Hope) was, without a doubt, the most extraordinary event in the history of the world since its very creation was by the will of God. In the dedication of his Hispania Vitrix to Charles V, Gómara states, La mayor cosa despues de la creación del mundo sacando la encarnación y muerte del que lo crió, es el descubrimiento de Indias . . . Quiso Dios descubrir las Indias en vuestro tiempo y a vuestros vasallos, para que las convirtiesedes a su santa ley . . . Comenzaron las conquistas de Indios acabada la de los moros, porque siempre guerreasen espanioles contra infieles.8 The most important event after the creation of the World, beyond the incarnation and death of its Creator, was the discovery of the Indies . . . . It was God’s will to discover the Indies during your time and the time of your vassals so the Indies can be converted into his Sacred Law . . . The conquest of the Indies began once the conquest of the Moors ended, and that is because it was God’s will that Spaniards be always at war with the infidels.

Bringing a Spanish and Christian historian to this picture may seem far-fetched. I hope to show that it is not. Smith and Marx

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transformed the “foundational” discourse of enduring enchantment from the language of Christian historiography, law, and rhetoric to the language of political economy. Furthermore, Smith and Marx were not looking at the discovery of America from the perspective of the Spanish empire, be it triumphal like Gómara’s or critical like Bartolomé de las Casas’s. The discourse of Smith and Ricardo, however, carried over the enchantments of the discovery of America, colonial commerce (Smith) and colonial (primitive) accumulation (Marx). The excesses committed by Spanish “conquistadors,” so well exploited later on by England and France to take over the colonial power enjoyed by Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had its own criticism among Spanish missionaries as well. It is well known that Las Casas was used by the promoters of the “Black Legend” to show how bad things were in the Spanish colonies so that even Spaniards like Las Casas were horrified.9 We are no longer persuaded, today, by the rhetoric used by an imperial power against another imperial power. If Las Casas was the activist who denounced the abuses of the “conquistadors,” Francisco de Vitoria and the Salamanca school established, started around 1539, a system of international law based on the universal perspective of Christianity. Vitoria and the Salamanca school did not invent the law, of course. They worked seriously to put in place a system of international law that would acknowledge the “rights” of the Indians as well as of the Spanish. For instance, the Indians’ right to keep their property was one of the fundamental issues explored and defended by Vitoria. The rights of the Spaniards to be in Indian territory and preach Christianity were also defended. While Spaniards, according to Vitoria, did not have the right to expropriate Indians’ property, Indians had no right to exclude Spaniards from their territory and even less to stop them from spreading Christianity.10 Political economy was not in place, and economic issues were subsumed under historical, religious, and legal discourses. The situation was quite different from what Smith and Marx were looking at in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And yet, in different ways, Vitoria, Smith, and Marx embodied the existing power relations of which they, from different perspectives, pretended to be thoroughly critical. In the case of Vitoria, the Indians whose rights were being defended had no opportunity to voice their opinions about the rights they were supposed to have. In the case of Smith, the critique was directed toward the areas of the world that needed colonialism for their own advancement toward modernity, a word not used by Smith although its spirit was implied. And Marx

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condemned the exploitation of the capitalist mode of production. Everything was decided in the discourse of theological law and political economy, without any say from the rest of the world. In that sense, the three of them embodied the power relations of which they pretended to be critical. Due to the worldwide expansion of Christian, liberal, and Marxist discourses, we are still in a similar position today. There is no longer even the possibility of attaining and pretending to be a metacritcal voice, from the left, that condemns all the failures of leftist-like discourses, pretending to find a place uncontaminated from the embodiment of existing power relations. To find a place, finally, in which, like God, everybody else could be criticized by the embodiment of the existing power relations. I argue, instead, for border thinking as one possible way of breaking the enchantments and the (vicious) circle of capitalism and its internal critiques. Thus, imperial rhetoric disqualifying other imperial powers as well as the critique of imperial rhetoric became part of the expansion of Western religions, law, and economy. That is why there is no possibility of occupying a God-like position, from the left, that is not embodied in existing power relations and that would break away from enduring enchantments. This, once again, is another reason for the endurance of the dichotomies upon which the very conceptualization of the modern/colonial world was based from Vitoria to Smith to Marx, in reference to the example discussed earlier in this essay.11 During the European Renaissance people around the world were mainly located in space, not in time. Christianity did not link “the infidels” with beings less developed or behind in time. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries “the denial of coevalness,” as Johannes Fabian so lucidly analyzed, emerging from the European Enlightenment and particularly in G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy of history was nonsensical. During the Renaissance, the infidels were not primitive or distant in time. They were either in distant geographical places, like the Indians, or in different spheres of beliefs, like the Moors or the Jews. Christians did not classify the world in terms of a point of arrival in time, the point of arrival in History, but in space. The point of arrival was the Final Judgment, not the present as in secular history. The Christian map was drawn in consonance with Christian narratives of origin. In this case, the three sons of Noah served to locate continents, therefore people, and to rank the continents in relation to Japheth, Noah’s preferred son, Japheth was located in the West, in the lands of Western Christians, while Sem and Ham were located in Asia and Africa, respectively.

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It was during the eighteenth century and the European Enlightenment that people outside of Europe began to be located in time. The secular idea of “primitives” replaced that of the “infidels.” By the time Hegel wrote his lessons in the philosophy of history, the east of the world with respect to Europe was situated in the past, where history began but where it was no longer dwelling. China and India and Japan no longer coexisted with Europe. They belonged to a different “time.” The “present” of History was located in Europe. The “denial of coevalness” established the dividing line between “modernity and tradition,” but the distinction between both was created by the discourse of modernity, not by the discourse of tradition. Tradition did not have its own discourse. It was created by the discourse that defined modernity. To be modern became an ideal and the standards of these ideas were established by the discourse that defined modernity as the location in time of the ideals to be attained. In fact, tradition was an invention very much like modernity, a necessary invention in order to define modernity and to locate it in Europe, in Western Europe, England, France, and Germany. But of course what really counts is not that it was an invention but rather the geopolitical order and the historical consequences of such an invention. During the Renaissance the distinction between “les ancients et less moderns” was established in European history itself. “Les ancients” referred to Europe’s own past, while the “primitives” belonged to history outside of Europe, conceived either as the “past” (China, India), “the future of History” (America), or people without history (Africa). Hegel’s lessons in the philosophy of history were the canonical narrative of both the space-time matrix established in the European Renaissance and the transformed matrix of the European Enlightenment. Thus, Hegel (with the help of Kant) set the stage for the enduring enchantments being discussed here. Secular thinkers criticized religion that became the “opium of the people,” although Christianity remained complicit with secular discourse, since Christianity could have not been placed at the same level of “opium of the people” with Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or even Judaism! The complicity between secularism and Christianity is clear today in the enactment of international relations and global politics. Some religion had to be superior to others even if “faith” cannot be maintained at the same level as “reason.” The conflict between Palestine and Israel is not of course unrelated to the imaginary, the tensions, the complicity, and the hatred generated by the imaginary of the modern/colonial world and the articulation of differences and hierarchies. And all the talk of the “clash of civi-

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lizations” is very much the natural consequence of the invention of modernity and tradition. It is then necessary to replace tradition with coloniality and to make of coloniality a place of enunciation from where the invention of modernity can be disclosed and its “natural” underpinning revealed. The modern/colonial world was founded and sustained through a geopolitical organization of the world that, in the last analysis, consisted of an ethnoracial foundation.12 In the sixteenth century race did not yet have the meaning it acquired in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, the racial classifications from the eighteenth century based on skin color rather than on blood purity cannot be understood without the former.13 The transformation from blood purity to skin color runs parallel to the transformation from the hegemony of religious discourses grounded in faith to the hegemony of secular discourses grounded in reason. The persistence of bodies of knowledge distributed between “enchanted spaces” and “modern places,” of traditional and modern knowledge, of African philosophy and philosophy tout court, has been the flexibility of modernity in implementing coloniality of power and, therefore, of Western “racism.” In “modern spaces,” epistemology was first Christian and then White. In “enchanted places,” wisdom, and not epistemology, was first non-Christian (and this was one of the reasons why Christianity remained complicit with its critics, the secular philosophers) and later with color. Islam, for instance, became a colored religion while Christianity, and particularly Protestant Christianity, became whiter after the Reformation.14 One can surmise that the persistence of binary classifications then is due to two interrelated factors. On the one hand, and as I already mentioned, Christianity is a member of the set of World Religions and a particular moment of World History. Simultaneously, Christianity is the epistemic location that created and implanted such classification. None of the other members in the set of World Religions or World History have provided an equally powerful and enduring classification. In this regard, both Christianity and modernity share the privilege of a double location. First, being one among many of a set of religions and historical epochs and, second, being the only religion and historical epoch from which all other religions and historical epochs are established with the epistemic privilege of Christianity and modernity (and also postmodernity). The enchantments will endure, in spite of the work by the critics of the Empire whom, in spite of ourselves/ themselves, would remain embodied in the imperial relations of

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power. Christianity and its aftermath, secular epistemology, had the privilege of being at the same time part of the totality enunciated and the universal place of enunciation while being able to make believe that the place of enunciation was a nonplace. Consequently, the order of the enunciated was the natural order of the world and the world, alas, was organized in dichotomous hierarchies. The “Other” in space, time, belief, skin color, or place of birth was of a particular kind, a part of humanity in the world that was unknown, until then to the Christian Europeans who were debating the question of the just war against them or the rights of the people to property and autonomy. Modernity and tradition did not yet define a binary opposition. Nor did myth and history, although the “lack of history” Spaniards attributed to the Indians would become, later on, filled with the category of myth. State and community were not in opposition since the concept of the state, in the sixteenth century, was of a religion-state and not a nation-state as it would become conceptualized in the secular eighteenth century. The opposition between emotion and reason was not yet in place for several reasons, one of which is that while “emotion” became a necessary component of the secular conceptualization of the subjectego, endowed with reason, it was not a distinctive feature of the individual-believer endowed with faith and injected with fear toward God. The distinction between the former and the latter is related and runs parallel to the difference between the religion-state and the nation-state, between communities of believers and communities of citizens. The secular concept of reason was conceptualized, in part, through the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, by the detachment of the body from the mind and the erasure of secondary qualities from the pure work of reason that Immanuel Kant theorized with such intensity.15 Now, while the existing dichotomies are the result of the mobilization of a discourse that under the name and the positive value of modernity produces colonial differences and disqualifies the opposing binary that it creates, the devalued set in the paradigm gives rise to several possible outcomes. The first would be to accept that one is traditional, that one does not belong to the standard of “rationality,” that one has mythic narrative but not history, that one is black and not white, and so on. This outcome is a passive acceptance of an inferior condition. A second option would be to affirm the values that the discourse of modernity has devalued and negated. This outcome is clearly antimodern and may end up

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in a fundamental defence of what modernity has devalued. The third option is the one that accepts that double consciousness is a condition of the colonial paradigm and that the colonial paradigm consists of a set of binary oppositions resulting from the implementation of coloniality of power. Double consciousness is a necessary condition for the mobilization of border thinking, which is by definition beyond the national discourses of bounding territorial states (that is, what is often called the nation-state), and this may lead us to critical cosmopolitanism as an intellectual, political, and ethical project.16 If we agree that modernity and the paradigm of binary oppositions such as modernity/tradition is a business of the second and secular modernity—that is, Western Europe (mainly England, France, and Germany after the Reformation)—then the stories I was telling about the European Renaissance become situated in premodernity or the early-modern period, as the French historians from the Annales School would say. Thus, the way is paved for a modern period in the same narrow geopolitical line of the Eurocentric concept of historical time. Such a concept of modern historical time silenced the rest of the world, assuming the superiority of the “present” and of a type of “human being ” that was based in the ideal of the Renaissance, that is an ideal of being based on the paradigmatic example of the white male subject.17 Once we are aware of the narrow frame of mind implanted by intellectuals of the second modernity, it is not surprising that Michel Foucault locates the “beginning” of the discourse on war and race in 1630. Such biopolitics are the biopolitics of the Europe of nations, not of the constitution of Europe itself through international relations and the making of the colonial difference, as was discussed in the sixteenth century mainly by the Salamanca school and the work of Francisco de Vitoria. The debate on the just war against the Indians occupied the entire sixteenth century is Spain and Europe. But that Europe, the Europe of the sixteenth century, apparently is the traditional one and not the modern Europe Foucault is talking about. In other words, the thirty years war in Europe (in the middle of which Foucault locates the beginning of the discourse of biopolitics) presupposes the consolidation of Europe through colonial Christian missions and the Reformation.18 This presupposes, also, the wealth provided by the gold and silver of Potosi and Zatcatecas and the Caribbean plantations. And also the consolidation of the French and English economies through their exploitation of the Caribbean plantations, the massive transportation of slaves, and the foundation of European nations that will emerge between the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and the post-Napoleon

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colonial expansion. This racial war, the war of England and France against Spain, was certainly a war of imperial conflicts and of racial categorization among and between European emerging nations, as Kant made clear from a pragmatic point of view of anthropology.19 There is common knowledge that seldom appears articulated in a clear and concise prose, as it does in the editorial of the International Society of the Study of European Ideas: In the seventeenth century what had been known as Christendom became Europe and a new civilization came into being: European civilization. From then onwards Europe mirrored itself not only in its Greco-Roman legacy and its Judeo-Christian religion but also in the world’s other civilizations discovered by European travelers.20

This image takes Western Europe as the heart of Europe, as Hegel says. For someone who does not identify herself with European civilization, History can begin some place else. For example, Toward the end of the fifteenth century what had been known as Tawantinsuyu, Anahuac and Abya-Yala by the inhabitants of what it is today the Andean Region, Mexico and Panama, respectively, but also what is today the Insular Caribbean, became Indias Occidentales, and then America and then Latin America. A new civilization was born of the Christian and Castilian colonizaiton, a civilization that was reproduced later on in Africa and in Asia by the European civilizaiton that was born in the seventeenth century. A civilization of diversity, the “colonial/postcolonial civilization” characterizes itself by the diversity of local histories emerging form the encounter between Christian Spain and European civilization with America, Africa and Asia. The European civilization, as described above, did not leave its marks in the Caribbean until after the French revolution. Form early seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century French and British presence in the Caribbean was fully devoted to plantation economy rather than to the civilizing mission. The colonial/ postcolonial civilization has received several names: transmodernity, subaltern modernities, or alternative modernities.21

The enduring enchantment of binary oppositions seems to be related to the enduring image of a European civilization and of European history told from the perspective of Europe itself. Europe is not only the center (that is, the center of space and the point of arrival in time) but also has the epistemic privilege of being the center of enunciation. And in order to maintain the epistemic privilege it is necessary, today, to assimilate to the epistemic perspective of modernity and accuse emerging epistemology of claiming epistemic privileges! The logic

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of ethnic food seems to be at work in epistemology as well. The only nonethnic food in any European or U.S. fair would be precisely the food that is identified with European (and I do not mean “eastern Europe”) or U.S. cuisine. All other food has the privilege of being ethnic (and probably related to tradition, folklore, popular culture, and the like). While capitalism moved from Europe to the United States, then to Japan, and now to China, epistemology apparently remains located in Europe, which is taken, simultaneously, as the nonplace (or transparently universal) locus of enunciation. The complementary relations between the accumulation of capital and knowledge created the conditions for a self-definition of modernity. To be modern is either to assimilate to the self-fashioning of modernity or to oppose it from the perspective of modernity itself, such as from the opposition opened up by Marxism. Therefore, dichotimies of modern spaces and enchanted places reproduce themeselves under different masks. Let us review some of their foundations. The temporal matrix pronounced the Middle Ages as the necessary “before” to justify the need of a “Renaissance.”22 The spatial matrix organized the difference between Christianity, on the one hand, and the pagans and infidels on the other. The argument that I have developed addresses two interrelated issues embedded in the enduring oppositions that can be traced back to the European Renaissance and to the invention of America.23 One, as I already mentioned, is the legitimization of a selfendowed double role enjoyed by the first set of terms of the binary oppostions being discussed in the issue of The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies devoted to the (temporal) decolonization of the Middle Ages. This indirectly, made me think of the need “to decolonize traditions colonized by modernity.”24 Each term implies the other. Modernity, for example, implies West, reason, history, state, and rationality. Rationality implies modernity, West, and so on. Each term is part of the enunciated, but all of them are, at the same time, pervasively and invisibly the foundation of the classification itself— that is, of the enunciation. What we have here is a different version of the coloniality of power, since the second set of terms are part of the colonization of time within Europe itself and the colonization of space and time in the colonial world outside Europe. The terms in the complementary side of the paradigm (tradition, ritual, myth, community, and emotion) also are implied in each other. Colony, East, and tradition imply ritual, myth, community, and emotion. Colony implies tradition, myth, and so on. But, contrary to the first set of terms in the

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paradigm, none of them are part of the enunciation. They all have been relegated to the enunciated only. What is invisible in this paradigm is perhaps the reason for its enduring enchantment, the “coloniality of power” and, therefore, the fact that the discourse of modernity (the enunciation) that defined modernity (the enunciated) was successful in hiding the fact that there cannot be modernity without coloniality. Thus, if coloniality becomes the place of the enunciation, then the second set of terms in the paradigm (colony, ritual, traditional, and so on) loses its passive role of being the supporting actor of a triumphant self-defined modernity. The European Renaissance provided the logic on which the philosophers of the European Enlightenment could build and modify the logic related to the content of modernity and of tradition. The binary oppositions that we are exploring were articulated during and after the European Enlightenment and consisted of “filling in the blanks” of a “before” in European history in relation to which the Renaissance was precisely self-conceived as Renaissance. The notion of newness began to be associated with modernity. The before was the period to which the pagans and infidels were assigned, and pagans and infidels were defined as such by the rhetoric of Christianity. In other words, there was not such a thing as infidels without the rhetoric of Christianity appointing itself as the measuring stick for the classification of people according to their beliefs. When the Indians of the New World (and here we have “newness” in space) came into the picture, a new dimension of the difference emerged, and it was this difference that became one of the pillars of modernity/coloniality, of the modern/colonial world. Pagans and infidels in time, and in a shared territory, had to be dealt with as infidels in space and in an alien territory. West and East, Occident and Orient came into the picture. The Spanish possessions were divided between Indias Occidentales (the Americas) and Indias Orientales (the Philippines, Molucas), as I have already mentioned.25 Occidentalism in the sixteenth century became the necessary ground to conceiving Orientalism in the eighteenth century.26 And, on the other hand, the geographical paradigms for the establishment of a series of “lacks” and “wrongs” were established according to the Christian religious and secular epistemic frames. Briefly, the European Renaissance established the matrix for a double colonization, of time and of space. The colonization of time resulted in the invention of the Middle Ages in European history. The colonizaiton of space meant the expulsion of the Moors and the Jews

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from Christian Spain and the conquest of the Indias Occidentales as a “discovery” of a New World. The spatial colonial difference emerged toward the end of the fifteenth through the sixteenth centuries. It was the triumph of Christianity over the Moors and the the Jews in late-fifteenth-century Spain that laid out the foundations of the enduring paradigm of binary oppositions and the epistemic privilege of modern epistemology from the Renaissance to today. Jews and Moors embraced the wrong God and wrong beliefs. The American Indians were not in the intellectual horizon of Christianity and, therefore, were distinguished by their “lacks” rather than their “wrongs.” They lack alphabetical writing and therefore do not have history. They worship plants and nature and therefore do not have religion. They lack the logical way of reasoning that was put in place by the Christian thinkers of medieval Europe, Although the Aztecs’ and Incas’ social organization impressed the Spaniards very much, they did not have a conception of their lack of logical explicitness compared to Roman law, or at least the Spaniards were unable to see the logic of the Incas and Aztecs underlying their social organization. In the Caribbean the scenario is more complex due to, in the first place, the extermination of the native population and, in the second, the arrival of massive contingents of African slaves. Paget Henry, a philosopher from Antigua reflecting on these issues, has recently mapped the imperial/colonial conditions under which an Afro-Caribbean philosophy emerged. Thus, within the imperial frameworks of the modern/colonial world, “the original content of Caribbean philosophy emerged as a series of extended debates over projects of colonial dominaiton between four major social groups: Euro-Caribbeans, Amerindians, Indo-Caribbeans and Afro-Caribbeans.”27 In any case, the colonial difference in the Andes, Mesoamerica, and the Caribbean is the foundation of both the colonial differences created by colonial discourses, and the differential colonial accumulation that ensued from that historical foundational moment. The binary oppositions, which are indeed the colonial difference created from the epistemic privilege of colonial modernities, are the conditons under which subjectivities have been formed in the process of differential colonial accumulation. To imagine possible futures beyond the enduring enchantments of the differential colonial accumulation of binary oppositions would imply a redressing in the direction in which the coloniality of power has been implemented over the past five hundred years. And that process is already taking place. It is not, however, a project consisting of a mere reversal of the

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epistemic privilege of modernity, that is, of displacing the privileges from the first set of the paradigm to the second set. It consists instead of taking advantage of the double consciousness that emerges, out of necessity, in all those subjectivities that have been formed under the second set of terms. For instance, belonging to a world that has been classified as traditional and irrational means that any attempt to mobilize from that position will have to assume that the conditions of being irrational and traditional have been allocated from the epistemic privilege of a mythical space/time called “modernity.” However, since the epistemic privilege goes hand in hand with its hegemony, its displacement implies subsuming the first set of terms in the paradigm into the second by making of it a locus of enunciation as legitimate as the first. This is the epistemic operation I have conceptualized as border thinking, border gnosis, or border epistemology.28 Thus, there are three important moments before the European Enlightenment in the South and North Atlantic out of which the Enlightenment itself and what followed would be only partially understood. The first was the double articulation of the invention of the Middle Ages in the self-definition of the Renaissance and the victory of Christianity over the Jews and the Moors at the end of the fifteenth century in Castile. The second moment was the discourse of the “invention of America” and the verbalization of the colonial difference in different and interrelated domains. One was the need to revise the notion of humanness and the human being due to the appearance of the “Indians” in European consciousness. This need gave rise to the “right of the people,” widely discussed in the school of Salamanca and in Europe in general. The right of the people was indeed the conceptualizaiton of the “right of the other” and the first expression of international law in the modern/colonial world. The second domain was related to conversion and to the brutal campaign than took the name of “the extirpation of idolatry.” The extirpation of idolatry was a process of “deculturation” (as Cuban historian Moreno Fraginals puts it to describe slavery in the New World).29 Deculturation, for Moreno Fraginals, consists of a conscientious process with the goal of economic exploitation, through which those in power proceed to “remove” knowledge and memories of a given human group. These processes facilitate, according to Fraginals, the expropriation of natural resources of a territory in which the human group in question dwells and, at the same time, the use of the human community as nonqualified and cheap force of labor. He further

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adds that deculturation processes of this type have been very common since the early colonization of the New World and the main targets have been Amerindians and African slaves.30 And the third was the fact that Spanish missionaries and men of letters appointed themselves to write the history that, according to the Spanish men of letters, Amerindians did not have. In these three parallel and complementary processes there were of course mixed positions. At one end of the spectrum were those who considered Amerindians subhuman and justified war, dispossession of property, and “extirpation of idolatry,” memories, and knowledge. At the other end were those who recognized the humanity of Amerindians but couldn’t overcome the belief that as humans they were still inferior to the Spaniards. If these three lines of argumentation prevailed during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the eighteenth century was the scenario of radical changes, both in the rearticulation of colonial difference and in the inventions of the South of Europe and imperial difference. It is in this scenario that the dichotomies under consideration were put in place. Furthermore, a new set of actors entered into the game: the so-called Creoles in the Spanish colonies who began to voice their position vis-à-vis the previous Spanish colonial discourse, and the emergent colonial discourses put in place by French, British, and German intellectuals. This pre-Enlightenment moment informed the Enlightenment so much that it is known in the history of Latin America as “the debate over the New World,” although it remains ignored by the European historians of the Englightenment and their followers. Let us concentrate on three major issues in the configuration of this new scenario. First, there was the radical displacement from Spanish discourse about Indias Occidentales to French, British, and German discourses on the New World. New World acquired at this moment a “new” meaning, and this displacement impinged directly on the ideas of modernity and tradition. The term and the concept of a New World played out in an interesting way since the very concept of modernity was defined in complicity with the Old World. In the sixteenth century, the idea of the New World introduced by the Italian intellectual Pietro Martir d’Anghiera, who was living in Spain at the time of the Columbus and Vespucci voyages, meant that a world unknown to Europeans became visible. The distinction in the sixteenth century was between the New World (Indias Occidentales, and then America) and the Old World (Asia, Africa, and Europe in the Christian cosmography). By the eighteenth century, in the debates

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over the New world, the New World (or America) was distinguished from the Old World (or Europe). Furthermore, the idea of the new was taken literally by European intellectuals like Buffoon, de Paw, and l’Abee Reynal to mean, first, “newness” literally and, second, to be associated with “youth,” “immaturity,” “weakness,” contrary to the Old World that was “mature” both physically and “mentally.” Within this tradition it is not surprising that Hegel asserts that history moves from East to West. While Asia is the past and Europe the present, the “youth” of America designed “her” as the future and continuity of European history.31 Second, the “debate over the New World” was, during the eighteenth century, the main expression of colonial discourse, although it has not been much acknowledged beyond the history of Latin America. The contact between Europe and the East was, since the early fourteenth century, basically commercial. However, while the commercial contacts between European and Asian cities had been significant in the self-definition of Christendom and Europe up to the sixteenth century, from the sixteenth century on the discourse was performed on the basis of colonial discourse built on the emerging Atlantic commercial circuits.32 It was the Atlantic commercial circuits (gold and silver from Zacatecas and Potosi, for Spain; Ouro Preto for the Portuguese; and sugar, coffee, and tobacco from the Caribbean plantations for the French and the British) in which European cities found an impressive source of wealth. Furthermore, in the sixteenth century the Atlantic commercial circuit was totally controlled by the Spanish and Portuguese. It was only in the seventeenth century that the Dutch, French, and English made their presence felt, particularly in the Caribbean, with the massive slave trade needed for the plantations. The Dutch East India Company and its English rival, the East India Company, were commercial enterprises that, on the one hand, did not generate the wealth provided by the Caribbean plantations, both for the Dutch and the English. On the other hand, the commerce with the East Indies was not—during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—complemented by a colonial discourse as the one put in place mainly by the Spaniards in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the French in the eighteenth century. The discourse of the “civilizing mission” as global design, and “orientalism” as a scholarly discourse justifying—albeit indirectly—the need for the civilizing mission, were put in place toward the end of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth centuries. There was also a series of historical circumstances that should be taken into account to understand these

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changes. The industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and the end of the Napoleon era created the condition for the expansions mainly of France and England in Asia and Africa. There was a totally different ethos, at this point, compared to the French and British possessions in the Caribbean and in North America during the seventeenth century. Third, the word colony, which originates from the early Roman Empire, was employed in the measurement of lands and city planning that involved both mensores (for the measurement and planning of urban spaces) and agrimensores (for the measurement and planning of country spaces). Curiously enough, Romans borrowed these administrative practices from the Greeks, of course, but also from other “Eastern” practices beyond.33 In any event, the word colony moved into Western vernacular languages carrying with it the meaning it had in Latin as it was employed in the administration of the Roman Empire. Thus, colony was not related to modernity until later on, after a substantial transformation of its meaning. One can surmise that the colonies were similar to the communities that the Inca and Aztec “Empires” annexed at a later date, totally independent from the “influence” of the Roman Empire, to the central administration of Tawantinsuyu (in the Andes) and Anahuac (in Mesoamerica, today Mexico and Guatemala). The arrival of the Spaniards produced a significant change in the sense that the two empires, Aztec and Inca, became colonies of Spain. Therefore, the foundation of the modern/colonial world meant that empires became colonies and, of course, colonies also became everything under “colonial administration.” Mensores and agrimensores played a similar role in the Spaish Empire. In 1532 the Spanish Crown began a process of mapping and describing the territories or colonies under their possessions known as “relaciones geograficas de Indias.” But most important, the colonies in question were no longer established in an already-known space (orbis terrarum, oikoumene)34 but in a New World whose inhabitants presented a problem for the emergent Spanish Empire (both as territory and as a territory governed by an emperor). When Charles became emperor of both Spain and Europe in 1516, the colonies in Europe and in the New World were clearly distinguished. One important distinction was that the original inhabitants of the New World (Indians) and the newcomers from Africa (African slaves) did not have the same civil position (later on, ‘citizen”) as the inhabitants of Europe. The colonies of the New World were colonies defined by colonial difference. The colonial difference

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in the New World was twice articulated during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, as I already mentioned. First by the Spaniards, for whom one of the most convincing lines was that the discovery of the New World was the most significant event in world history since the creation of the world (Francisco de Gómara). Second, by French and German intellectuals in the eighteenth century, for whom new was taken literally as if the Americas (or the native inhabitants of Tawantinsuyu, Anahuac, and Abya-Yala), or the New World didn’t exist until “discovered” by the Europeans! Fourth, with the discourse of the civilizing mission and of orientalism in particular, the idea of the “scientific” and the “industrial” revolutions became clear signs of modernity and civilization. The conviction that technology and sciences inspired among European intellectuals and men of state replaced convictions in religion and the studia humanitates during the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Thus, the current meaning assigned to modernity/colony and to the first set of terms in the paradigms of binary opposition were put in place. And this story is also helpful in understanding modern and colonial accumulation. Let us now sketch the emergence of a worldwide double consciousness as a consequence of the imperial (and therefore hegemonic) imaginary of the modern/colonial world in its successive transformations. I introduced this topic earlier in the essay. There are two significant moments that deserve attention. The first one took place toward the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries in Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac. A significant number of indigenous intellectuals in both places had to deal with a situation involving the replacement of their memories, social organization, and way of life with the one being implanted by the newcomers. The question was not worded at this time as Du Bois worded it at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the “feeling” was similar. The word nepantla was invented by Nahuatl speakers to describe a situation that they perceived as “being between two worlds,” while of course knowing that the power relations of these two worlds were not symmetric. It becomes clear that the consciousness, the double consciousness, was in place with a different name. Of course I am not arguing here about who was the first to have double consciousness; rather I am arguing for the articulation and rearticulation of the colonial difference. The colonial difference, from the perspective of those who are at the receiving end (that is, those who are identified with tradition, ritual, myth, community, emotion, etc.) always generates a double

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consciousness, whether one assimilates in silence or deals with the situation by protesting. Enduring enchantments can be explained by the fact that modernity, rationality, history, state, and reason are still taken as points of arrival, even when modernization is detached from Westernization. “Modernization without Westernizaiton” is a formula embraced by many non-Western intellectuals and state officers. However, it is not clear if modernizaiton means justice, equality, health, and education for all, and fair distribution of wealth. Modernization without Westernization implies, instead, an overcoming of the traditional organization of society and technological upgrade. The desire for modernization is always a desire emanating from “traditional,” “third world” or “postcolonial countries on the side of the colonized.” Modern societies do not have to become modern. Their problem is to remain modern. Thus, England became a postcolonial country after the decolonization of Africa and Asia, but we do not hear any claim for the modernization of England. We do hear, however, many claims from Indian progressive intellectuals who embrace the project of modernity, although not necessarily as Jürgen Habermas would have it.35 Thus, there is a catch-22 in the opposition of modernity/ tradition since the categories of tradition, ritual, myth, community, and emotion are not “realities” but categories that made possible the discourse and the very self-definition of modernity. One set of terms in the paradigm describes the exteriority created by the set of terms that are the point of reference of the paradigm of enduring oppositions. The exteriority doesn’t mean the “outside” but the exterior being created by the interior: the set of terms that function as a reference point. These are precisely the colonial conditions promoting the emergence of double consciousness and border thinking. The point here is that modernity and its categories are not only one part of the binary oppositions that are enunciated, but modernity is also a keyword in the enunciation of the binary oppositions themselves. In this regard, the binary oppositions we are discussing correspond to the same logic of Western epistemology, from the Renaissance to today. The enduring enchantments are no doubt related to the fact that in the paradigms of opposition one set of terms has a double function. Modernity, rationality, state, reason, and history are, on the one hand, part of the opposition paradigm itself and, on the other, the locus of enunciation of the paradigm. This is to say, the paradigm of opposition is not being named from a neutral perspective uncontaminated

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by any of the terms of the opposition. The paradigm was an invention of the self-definition of modernity in the very act of conceiving modernity as an epoch and a point of arrival in European history. It also became the universal locus of enunciation. When a regional locus of enunciation becomes universal, it acquires the force of controlling its own criticism. In the past few decades it became customary to argue in favor of the epistemic potential implied in the genealogy of knowledges that has been subalternized from the perspective of modern epistemology. Some of those who argued in favor of the political and epistemic legitimacy of subaltern voices have been more often than not accused by modern or postmodern right- and left-wing intellectuals of defending the “epistemic privilege” of the disempowered and of confusing epistemology with political slogans. In my view the debate framed in those terms is revealing of the fact that the only epistemic privilege still lies in modern epistemology and that subaltern perspectives are not of course endowed with an epistemic privilege. They do not need that privilege because what subaltern perspectives have is, indeed, an epistemic potential. An epistemic potential grounded in what for modern epistemology has been silence and darkness. The silence of the epistemically disinherited by and through the emancipation claims of modernity (think, for instance, of the Haitian revolution) and the darkness to which the world was reduced in order to sustain the epistemic privileges of modernity, its enduring enchantments. Philosophers from the Arab-Islamic world have been dealing with the questions of tradition and modernity and how to imagine possible futures building from what is alive, today, in both “traditions”: the tradition of European modernity and the tradition of the Arab-Islamic world. Mohamed al-Jabri is one of these philosophers.36 For him, Averroës is an anchor and a point of reference for such a task. His argument is based on the fact that in both the Christian-Latin and Islamic-Arabic Middle Ages, philosophers on both sides of languages and religions built on the physics of Aristotle. But what happened since then? Descartes built his philosophy on Galileo’s physics and, later on, Kant “advanced over Descartes by building his own philosophy on Newton’s physics. Later on, Bachelard followed suit by building on quantum physics and the theory of relativity. The temporal tradition of European modernity built on itself and inscribed its own past into its own present. The colonization of the Middle Ages was the starting point to inscribe the past of modernity, Descartes, and to distinguish this past from the “temporal colonial/epistemic difference” with

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the Middle Ages. What happened in the Arabic-Islamic world? The historical and espistemic rupture between Avicenna and Averroës. (I notice, in passing, that when I type Aristotle nothing happens. But when I type Avicenna and Averroës the electronic dictionary does not recognize them and offers other word possibilities. Avicenna and Averroés are out of the memory of [Western] modernity.) Averroës then would be the equivalent to Descartes in the history of ArabIslamic philosophy. According to al-Jabri, Averroës “entered history because he broke with the Avicennianism of ‘oriental’ philosophy . . . He also broke with the manner in which theoretical thinking —both theological and philosophical—had addressed the critical relationship between religion and philosophy.” But, al-Jabri continues, Averroës did not limit himself to “rupture;” he also offered the possibilities of a “carry-on spirit.”37 Thus, the point of articulation today, from the perspective of Arabic-Islamic philosophy, consists of a double task. One is to evaluate their own tradition and the other is to articulate their modern present with the hegemony of European modernity. Thus, the question is not so much what is modern and what is traditional but, rather, the structure of power and of the coloniality of power when it comes to the face-to-face of two modernities. One secular European with a Christian/Latin foundation and expressed in the hegemonic languages of colonialism and imperialism. The other religious with a secular will, and that needs to be expressed in Arabic and in the languages of European modernity. The reverse process doesn’t apply. Modern European philosophers do not need to express themselves in Arabic. Arabic, from the perspective of Europe, is a language that is learned to “study” the Arabic-Islamic world but not a language from and in which one does philosophy or other practices of knowledge. It is Averroës’s “method” in dealing with the past that al-Jabri rescues with the will to implement it. This method consisted of the separation between the “instrument” and the “faith.” Al-Jabri quotes Averroës in the following passage, with the preface that for Averroës the Other were the philosophers of Ancient Greece and, therefore, he was able to make the distinction in the Other’s reason between the instrument and the subject matter, the method and the belief: It is clear that for our purposes (i.e., the rational study of beings) we must resort to the theses of our precursors in this field, irrespective of whether or not the latter were of our own faith. One does not ask the instrument, e.g., the knife used in the ritual sacrifice whether or not it belonged to one

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of our fellow Muslim in order to make a judgement on the validity of the sacrifice. One asks of it only to be of suitable use. By those who are not fellow Muslims, we mean those among the ancient ones who had pondered over these questions long before the birth of Islam. Under the circumstances, since all the laws of reasoning (logic and method) have already been perfectly laid down by the ancient ones, we ought to draw from their books by the handful, to find out what they have said about that. If it happens to be correct, we shall welcome it with open arms; if it were to contain something incorrect, we shall make sure not to.38

Al-Jabri draws the following conclusions from this excerpt. First, read the past as Averroës read his Others, the Ancient Greeks. Second, apply the same criteria to read the present in space—al-Jabri’s Others (in the same sense as Averroës’s: those who are not Muslims and do not speak Arabic), that is the hegemonic texts of the European modernity. This al-Jabri calls the “Averroist spirit.” And he explains, I simply mean this: It must be made present in our thought, in our esteem and in our aspirations in the same way that the Cartesian spirit is present in French thought or that the spirit of empiricism, inaugurated by Locke and by Hume, is present in English thought, we would be bound to answer that only one thing has survived in each case. We could refer to it as the Cartesian spirit in France providing specificity to French thought, or the empiricist providing specificity to English thought. Let us therefore construct our specificity upon what is ours and is particular rather than foreign to us.39

Al-Jabri is aware that in the Arab-Islamic world there are intellectuals that would prefer to go the other way: to “bring” European modernity to “traditional” Islam. He thinks that it is erroneous to imagine the future in that direction because, he argues, “when we ask the Arabs to assimilate European liberalism, we are in effect asking them to incorporate into their consciousness a legacy that is foreign to them with the themes that it raises, the problematic that it poses, and the languages in which it is expressed; a legacy which therefore does not belong in their history. A nation can only bring back to its consciousness a tradition that belongs to it, or something that pertains to that tradition. As for the human legacy in general, with its universal attributes, a nation always experiences it within its own tradition and not outside of it.”40 Let me make a couple of final comments. I believe that al-Jabri’s invitation to revamp Averroës method would be embraced by many other intellectuals in the peripheral modernities of the modern/ colonial world. And I believe that there will be a significant number of postmodern and North Atlantic intellectuals who would scratch

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their heads when they read about the complicity between the spirit, the nation, and tradition in the prose of an Arab-Islamic intellectual, even if he is a progressive one. And they, the North Atlantic and postmodern intellectuals, may be right. We should be equally concerned by the complicities between the spirit, the nation, and tradition in both cases, the “tradition of European modernity” (Descartes and the spirit of France, Hume and the spirit of England) as well as the “tradition of the Arabic-Islamic world” and other worlds in similar subaltern position in relation to Europe and the epistemic privilege of North Atlantic modernity. NOTES 1. See Robert Heilbroner, The Wordly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992); Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 2. See Denys Hay, “The Medieval Notion of Europe and Its People,” in Europe: The Emergence of an Idea (Edingburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968); Robert Bartlett, “The Expansion of Latin Christendom,” in The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 950–1350. 3. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Penguin, 2000), book 4, 8.2: 609. 4. Karl Marx, Capital (London: Penguin, 1976), Vol. 1, chap. 33, 931. 5. Ibid., 931–32. 6. This is the crucial point of the articulation of the modern/colonial world that Anibal Quijano has been theorizing since the late 1980s. According to Quijano, “The project being developed under the name of ‘coloniality of power’ refers to the overall frame of power, established worldwide since the sixteenth century, with the formation of the Atlantic commercial circuit and the so-called Discovery of America. Such overall frame has been constituted by the articulation of two fundamental axes. One of them was a system of domination of the subjectivity and establishment of authority, based and crossed by the idea of ‘race’ as the basic criteria of social and cultural classification of the entire planet. This is the ‘racial frame of the coloniality of power.’ The second was a system of control and exploitation of labor based in the articulation of all known systems of exploitations related to capitalism (for instance, social relation of the exploitation of waged labor) and, consequently, of the market. Given the dominant function of economy in this configuration it could be called ‘the capital frame of the coloniality of power’” (personal communication, May 2001). Coloniality of power emerges for Quijano

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at the moment in which the “racial frame” and the “capital frame” work in tandem and complement each other. See Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Knowledge, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1 (2000): 159–60; see also http://www.clasco.org/libros/lander/10.pdf. 7. Lewis Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2001), 74. 8. Francisco López de Gómara, Hispania Vitrix (Madrid: Editorial Iberia, 1946 [1552]), xx. 9. Antonello Gerbi, La disputa del Nuevo Mundo, trans. Antonio Alatorre (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958), 129–95. 10. For an overview of this issue, see Antonio-Enrique Perez Luño, La polémica sobre el Nuevo Mundo: Los clásicos españoles de la Filosofia del Derecho (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 1992). This topic that has been extensively discussed, and continues to be in Spain, Europe, and Latin America, has recently received the attention of postcolonial legal studies. For a general, well-informed although somewhat superficial debate (in the context of the existing debate published in Spanish), see the presentation in English by Antony Anghie, “Francisco de Vitoria and the Colonial Origins of International Law,” in Laws of the Postcolonial, ed. Eve Darian-Smith and Peter Fitzpatrick (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 89–108. 11. I have analyzed this overarching discourse of the modern/colonial world as Occidentalism. See Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). For an earlier formulation of this critique, see Fernando Coronil, “Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Non-Imperial Geohistorical Categories,” Cultural Anthropology 11 (1996): 52–87. 12. See Quijano, “Coloniality of Power,” n. 6, and Mignolo, Local Histories, 3–48. 13. For a brilliant analysis of the reconfiguration of “racial” classifications in eighteenth century secular philosophy, see Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology,” in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, ed. E. C. Eze (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 103–40. 14. See Theodoro W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control, Vol. I (New York: Verso, 1994), 1–26. 71–90. 15. Eze, “The Color of Reason.” 16. Walter D. Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture 12 (2000): 721–48. 17. On the racial configuration of the concept human being in European history and philosophy and the ethical, political, and epistemic consequences of such configuration, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), and Gordon, Existentia African, 62–95.

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18. Michel Foucault, II faut défendre la societé: Cours au Colllége de France, 1975–1976 (Paris: Du Seuil/Gallimard, 1977), 217–39. I am quoting from the Spanish translation, Defender la sociedad, trans. Horacio Pons (Mexico: Fondo Cultura Economica, 1997). 19. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996). 20. Editorial from the journal History of European Ideas, the official journal of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, sponsored by the European Cultural Foundation. I am quoting from volume 6, a special issue entitled “Europe and Its Encounter with the Amerindians.” With the exception of the article by Rolena Adorno, the entire issue is unidirectional and monotopic. That is, there is no concern about the “Anahuac, Tawantinsuyu, and their encounter with the Europeans.” The indigenous people do not count because their function was precisely to be there in order for European narratives to build Europe and Europeans as “modern” and the Indians as “traditional.” Here we have at work a revealing trick, or strategy, as to how tradition is a construction of modernity and not a “reality” in itself. Tradition is the exteriority, the outside created from the perspective of the outside. 21. This text is, of course, my own version based on the previous one, the text from the History of European Ideas. 22. José Antonio Maravall, Los factores de la idea de progreso en el Renacimiento español: discurso leído él día 31 de marzo de 1963 en el acto de su receptión pública (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Politicos y Constitiucionales, 1963): José Antonio Maravall, Estado moderno y mentalidad social (siglos XV a XVII) ( Madrid: Alianza, 1972); José Antonio Maravall, Estudios de historia del pensamiento español (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1973). 23. Edmundo O’Gorman, La invención de América: El universalismo de la cultura occidental (Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958). 24. See “Decolonizing the Middle Ages,” ed. John Dagenais and Margaret Greer, a special issue of The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000). While decolonization was introduced to map the movements of “independence” from Europe in Latin America, Asia, and Africa and, therefore, was implicitly spatial, the “independence” from the Middle Ages in the Renaissance is implicitly temporal. However, and in retrospect, the European Renaissance put in place two kinds of colonial matrix: temporal (colonizing the Middle Ages) and spatial (colonizing the Americas, and then Asia and Africa). The “double colonization” during the Renaissance allowed, for example, Europeans to colonize the memories as well as the space of the Amerindians. See Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). That is, traditions were invented temporally in Europe and spatially in America, Asia, and Africa.

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25. See Vicente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance. 26. Coronil, “Beyond Occidentalism”; See also Fernando Coronil, “Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism’s Nature,” in “Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism,” ed. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, a special issue of Public Culture 12.2. (2000): 23–53; Walter D. Mignolo, “Postoccidentalismo: el argumento desde América Latina,” Cuadernos Americanos 67 (1998): 143–65. 27. Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2000). 28. Mignolo, Local Histories. 29. Manuel Moreno Fraginals, “Aportes culturales y deculturación,” in La historia como arma y otros estudios sobre esclavos, ingenios y plantaciones (Barcelona: Critica, 1999), 24–29. 30. Ibid., 25-26. 31. See Gerbi, La disputa del Nuevo Mundo, 47–101. 32. Janet Ahud-Lugod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250-1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 33. Claude Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 90. 34. See O’Gorman, La invención de América. 35. See Partha Chatterjee, “Talking about Our Modernity in Two Languages,” in A Possible India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 263–85. 36. Mohamed Abed al-Jabri, Introduction à la critique de la raison ´árabe (Paris: Du Seuil, 1994). There is an abridged translation in English, Arab-Islamic Philosophy: A Contemporary Critique, trans. Azioz Abbassi (Austin: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1999). 37. Al-Jabri, Introduction a la critique de la raison árabe, 123. 38. Ibid., 127. 39. Ibid., 128. 40. Ibid., 129.

chapter twelve

Contributors Gyan Prakash

Ishita Banerjee-Dube is associate professor at the Colegio de México’s Center for Asian and African Studies in Mexico City. She has written Divine Affairs: Religion, Pilgrimage, and the State in Colonial and Postcolonial India (2001); Emergent Histories (Anthem Press, forthcoming); Fronteras del Hinduismo (El Colegio de México, forthcoming); and edited Caste in History (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Her articles have appeared in Subaltern Studies, Studies in History, and Estudios de Asia y Africa. Santiago Castro-Gómez is professor of social sciences at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá and researcher at the university’s Instituto de Estudios Sociales y Culturales PENSAR. He is the author of Crítica de la razón latinoamericana (1996) and editor of La reestructuración de las ciencias sociales en América Latina (2000). He coedited Teorías sin disciplina (with Eduardo Mendieta, 1998) and Pensar (en ) los intersticios (with Oscar Guardiola-Rivera and Carmen Millán de Benavides, 1999). Rubén Chuaqui teaches the history of the Islamic world at the Colegio de México’s Center for Asian and African Studies in Mexico City. His research interests include the problem of objectivity and the history of logic. Saurabh Dube is professor of history at the Colegio de México’s Center for Asian and African Studies in Mexico City. His authored books

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include Untouchable Pasts (1998); Stiches on Time (2004), as well as a trilogy in historical anthropology in the Spanish language comprising Sujetos subalternos (2001); Genealogías del presente (2003); and Historias esparcidas (forthcoming). He has edited Pasados poscoloniales (1999); Historical Anthropology (Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Postcolonial Passages (2004); and a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly titled Enduring Enchantments. Madhu Dubey is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic (1994) and Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (2003). Enrique Dussel is professor of ethics at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. He is the author of The Invention of the Americas (1995), The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Taylor, and Rorty (1996), Etica de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y de la exclusión (1998; forthcoming in translation from Duke University Press), and Towards an Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1861–63 (2001). Edgardo Lander is professor of social sciences at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas. He recently compiled La colonialidad del saber: Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales— Perspectivas latinoamericanas (2000). Andrés Lira is president of the Colegio de México and a member of the Mexican Academy of History. His books include El amparo colonial y el juicio de amparo mexicano: Antecedents novohispanicos del juicio de amparo (1972) and Comunidades indígenas frente a la Ciudad de México: Tenochtitlán y Tlatelolco, sus pueblos y barrios, 1812–1919 (1983). María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo is associate professor of English at Rutgers University. She has conducted extensive research in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Chiapas (Mexico) on the intersection of indigenous subjectivity, peasant culture, and development politics within revolutionary movements. She has written Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (2003). Sudipta Sen, professor of history at the University of California Davis, is the author of Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (1998) and Distant Sovereignty: Nation, State, and the Origins of British India (2002).

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Ajay Skaria is associate professor in the University of Minnesota’s Department of History and Institute of Global Studies, and the author of Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers, and Wildness in Western India (1999). He is currently working on a book on Gandhi and liberalism. Guillermo Zermeño is a professor and researcher at the Colegio de México’s Center for Historical Studies in Mexico City. The author of many works on the theory of history, synarchism, and church-state relations, he is currently working on the intellectual and cultural history of Mexico. He has written La cultura moderna de la historia: Una aproximación teórica e historigráfica (2002).

Index

Africa 172–74, 176, 178, 180, 218, 229, 233–34, 238, 243, 245, 247; African-American 16, 100, 102–09, 111; West Africa 106 anthropology 14, 16, 60–67, 69–71, 81, 120, 238, 265 Arab-Islamic 248–51 Asia 99, 117, 159, 172, 218, 229, 233, 238, 243–45, 247; South ix, xiii, xiv, xxiv, 6, 7, 18–19, 26n4, 230 Atlantic 21, 55n7, 106, 167, 172, 218, 219, 242, 244, 250, 251, 251n6 Austin, John 18, 138–39 Baker Jr., Houston 16, 104–05, 107 Bentham, Jeremy 18, 138, 151 Bertrand, Artus 146 Blumenberg, Hans 212–13 bourgeoisie 150–51, 175, 183n11 Bulnes, Francisco 63

capitalism 16, 21, 99–100, 112, 146, 167, 169, 171–73, 179, 183n9, 185n24, 123, 217, 220, 230, 233, 239, 251; and global capital 8–9, 16, 21–22, 24, 189, 198, 222; and transnational capital 22, 83, 190, 198 Cárdenas, Lázaro 38–39, 61 Caso, Alfonso 39 caste 36, 37, 52, 99 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 80, 90n7 China 20, 21, 166–76, 178, 182n2, 182n8–11, 184n15–16, 184n18–19, 231, 234, 239 Christianity 34, 68–69, 118, 229, 232–36, 239–42 civilization 10, 13–14, 18–22, 62, 64, 67, 69, 91n8, 117–18, 135, 154, 159, 166, 168, 176, 180–81, 186n27, 189, 214–20, 225n4, 238, 246 civilizing mission 160, 192, 238, 244, 246

Index colonial modernity xv, xviii, 4–6, 10, 12, 33, 40, 42, 52 colonialism ix–xv, xvii–xix, xxiv, 4–13, 18–19, 23, 32–33, 35–36, 40, 66, 85, 119, 150–54, 160–61, 169, 201, 212, 217–18, 232, 249 coloniality ix, xii, xiv–xvii, xixn9, 22–24, 89n2, 90n8, 173, 217–20, 235–41, 249, 251n6; of power x, xii, xiv–xvii Cortés, Hernán 155, 231 cosmopolitanism 99, 237 counterculture 106 Creole 12, 26n4, 36–37, 50, 160, 214, 243 cultural politics 15, 95–99, 110–12 culture x–xii, 2, 8, 10–11, 16, 19–21, 33, 35–36, 39, 46, 51, 66, 69, 77, 79, 82–87, 95–96, 98, 101, 104–10, 112, 117–19, 121–22, 125, 127, 152, 160, 165, 168–69, 175–77, 178–81, 191–92, 205, 218 decoloniality ix, xii, xiv–xvii; of knowledge ix, xii, xiv–xvi; see also coloniality Descartes, René 222, 248–49, 251 Díaz Polanco, Héctor 35, 53n3 Dussel, Enrique xv–xvii, 8–9, 19–22, 91n8, 160, 190, 219, 225n3 Elias, Norbert 216 empire x–xiv, 2, 4–7, 10, 12, 18–19, 46, 85, 149, 153–54, 159, 235, 245; Aztec 36, 245; British 135, 139, 143, 158, 160–61; Mughal 154, 157; Roman 143, 245; Spanish 19, 232, 245

259

enchantment xiii, 25, 82, 84, 89n2, 228–29, 232–35, 238, 240–41, 247–48; and disenchantment 84, 89n2, 91n9, 108, 212, 224 England 141, 150, 153, 158–59, 161, 162, 169, 176, 183n10–11, 184n15, 184n19, 231–32, 234, 237–38, 245, 247, 251 Enlightenment xii, xiv, 2, 20–21, 25, 81–83, 86, 90n7, 166, 167, 174, 176, 228, 233–34, 240, 242–43, 246 epistemic privilege 235, 238, 241–42, 248, 251 epistemology xvi–xvii, 106, 235–42, 247–48 ethics xvi–xvii, 9, 20–21, 88, 120, 170–71, 183n12, 198, 206n7 Eurocentrism 8–9, 16, 20–22, 117, 166–68, 174–78, 182n6, 183n12, 189–91, 205 Europe xvi, 1, 5, 6, 8, 9, 18, 20–21, 23, 26n4, 62, 80, 90n7, 116–17, 118, 146, 149, 151, 159–61, 165, 166–67, 168–80, 230–38 EZLN 12, 40–45, 53n2; see also zapatistas Foucault, Michel 68, 119, 161, 176, 217–19, 222, 237, 253n18 French Revolution 174, 238, 245 Gamio, Manuel 10, 13, 14, 39, 60–71 Gandhi, Mahatma 26n4, 257 Gayle, Addison 16, 105 gender xii, 122, 162, 224 Germany 166, 180, 231, 234 globalization 2, 5, 20–21, 24, 87, 165, 167–68, 173, 178,

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Index

180–81, 185n24, 186n26, 191–92, 204, 211–12, 221, 224, 225n6 Gómara, Francisco de 231–32 González Stephan, Beatriz 23, 214–17 Gordon, Lewis 231 grammar 23, 214, 216 Guatemala 33, 44, 55n13, 245 Gunder Frank, Andre 20, 53n1, 169, 171 Halhed, Nathaniel 158, 159 historiography 44, 65, 80, 133, 146, 162, 232 history xi, 1–3, 5–7, 10–11, 13, 15–20, 24, 36, 38–39, 52, 65, 68, 70, 76–77, 79–88, 90n7, 95–96, 102, 108, 134–35, 138, 140, 146, 149–50, 152–54, 156, 159–62, 166–68, 174–75, 181, 182n2, 185n22, 190–92, 190n2, 193, 199, 213, 228–29, 230–31, 233–36, 238–39, 240–41, 243–44, 246–50, 252n17; of anthropology 13; of antiquity 136; of capitalism 229; of modernity 90n7, 192 Huntington, Samuel 181, 186n27 India 7, 10, 17, 18, 19, 21, 53n4, 77–78, 80, 91n8, 133, 136–37, 139–43, 145, 150–54, 156–62, 170–71, 182n1, 205, 231, 234 indigenismo 12, 36, 37–39, 49, 55n8–11, 60, 62 Knight, Alan 35, 38, 55n8, 55n9 knowledge ix, xii–xvii, 3–4, 7–8, 10–11, 14–16, 21–23, 24–25, 42, 52, 60, 62, 65–69, 76–77, 79, 91, 95, 106, 118–23,

135, 189–90, 194, 196, 198, 200, 202–04, 206, 213, 215, 217–20, 222, 229, 235, 238–39, 242–43, 249 Laclau, Ernesto 12, 32, 42, 47–51 language xviiin1, 23, 33, 64, 121, 123, 135, 158–59, 182n1, 216, 222, 232, 245, 248–50 Latin America ix, xiv–xvi, xxiv, 5, 6, 11, 18, 23, 26n4, 32, 35–36, 39, 43, 55n7, 99, 143, 150, 160, 165–66, 170, 176, 178, 180, 182n1, 214, 215–18, 238, 243–44 Levinas, Emmanuel xvi–xvii, 176, 178 liberalism 52, 151, 159, 250, 257; and neoliberalism 42, 45, 46–47, 50 literary criticism 16, 106–07, 111, 129n1 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 24, 176–78, 212, 222–24 memory 110, 125, 131n10, 176 Menchú, Rigoberta 44 Mesoamerica 11, 13, 33, 34, 155, 241, 245 metaphor x, 4, 49, 56n11, 69, 86, 107, 112, 121 Mexico xv, 10–14, 17, 18, 27, 35–40, 42, 45, 46, 48–50, 55n8, 55n10–11, 60–64, 69, 71, 73n9, 73n11, 80, 134, 144, 150, 155, 172, 231, 238, 245 Michelet, Jules 65 Mignolo, Walter D. ix, xiv–xvi, xixn9, xxiv, 1–2, 7, 24–25, 27n6, 91n8, 190, 221 modernity ix, xii–xv, xvii–xviii, 1–10, 19–20, 59, 62, 80–84, 87–88, 89n2, 90n7, 95–96, 106–09, 112, 161, 165–68, 171–74, 177–80, 191, 211–23,

Index

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228, 232, 234–40, 248–51; and postmodernity xiv, 9, 20–21, 24–25, 177–81, 219, 221–22; subjects of x, xii–xv, xviiin6; and trans-modernity xvi, 9, 165, 168–69, 177, 180–81, 182n6, 238; see also colonial modernity modernization xviiin4, 24, 39, 52, 83, 96, 99–101, 105, 107–10, 112, 185n22, 192, 216, 218, 220, 247 Molina Enríquez, Andrés 63 Morrison, Toni 16, 103–11 myth 64, 81, 85, 173, 180, 181n1, 220, 228, 236, 239, 242, 246–47 mythology 137, 184n15

orientalism 16, 116–18, 129n2, 240, 244, 246 Orme, Robert 156–57 otherness 2, 14, 68, 82–83, 90n8, 128

Napoléon I 62, 245 nation xvii, 2, 4–5, 10–15, 18, 26n4, 37–42, 45–46, 49, 54n7, 82–83, 85–86, 96–98, 144, 155, 161–62, 196, 216, 228–30, 237–238, 250–51; multinational 72n8, 99, 112, 144; nation-building 7, 38; nation-state 8–9, 13, 23–24, 32, 36, 55n10, 63, 68, 149–50, 212–13, 217, 219, 221, 225n6, 236–37; national identity 12, 32, 35–37, 42, 54n7; nationalism 3, 7, 10, 12–14, 33, 38–42, 49–51, 54n7, 69, 82, 90n7, 186n27; nationhood 154, 161; and transnational 21–22, 83, 177, 181, 183n13, 186n26, 190, 196, 198, 204, 205n1–2, 206n8 New World xiv, 19, 25, 33, 37, 53n3, 91, 154–56, 160, 162n1, 170–71, 175, 231, 240–46

rationality 2, 62, 81, 89n2, 144, 218, 228, 236, 238–39 religion xiii, 39, 77, 81, 91n9, 106, 131n11, 156–57, 162, 202, 233, 234–38, 241, 246, 248–49 Renaissance xiv, 25, 155, 167, 169, 173, 229, 233–34, 237, 239–42, 246–47, 253n24 representation x–xii, xixn9, 1–5, 11–12, 16, 26n4, 33, 49, 69, 76, 80–82, 84, 86–87, 102, 213, 217, 223–34; democratic 51–52; political 46, 153 Ricoeur, Paul 13, 59, 60, 69, 180

Oaxaca 33, 41, 52, 55n10 Old World 171, 175, 177, 243–44 Olympic Games 15, 84, 86

political economy xii, 63, 110, 149–53, 156, 160–61, 229–33 Portugal xiv, 91n8, 167, 171, 173, 176 progress 1–2, 5, 10, 13–15, 17, 24, 26n4, 60, 63–64, 69, 76, 83–86, 90, 96, 109, 118, 135, 138, 141, 150, 158–59, 190n2, 192, 215, 220, 230 Quijano, Aníbal xv, 89n2, 91n8, 173, 190, 218, 251n6

S. Maine, Henry 17, 18, 133–46 Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de 10, 14, 61, 63, 64, 66–70 Said, Edward 16, 116, 183 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos 42, 50 Sarmiento Domingo Faustino 216 Smith, Adam 169, 170, 172, 175, 229–33 South Asia xiii, xiv, xviiin1, xxiv, 6–7, 19, 26n4, 230 space-time 234, 242

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Index

Spain xiv, 12, 36, 54n5, 63, 91, 155, 167, 171–73, 176, 180, 183n10, 219, 232, 237, 238, 241, 243–45 subaltern xiii, xvii, 3, 10, 44–45, 47 subjectivity xviiin5, 23, 35, 39, 44, 71, 171, 177, 213–15, 220–22, 251n6, 256 teleology xiii, 39–40, 51, 60, 67, 95 United States (U.S.) 11, 15, 16, 37, 43, 46, 53n4, 61, 63, 95, 96, 98, 99, 106, 108–10, 119, 177–78, 180–81, 184n19, 185n24, 186n26, 192, 193, 195, 197, 202, 205n1, 213, 225n9, 231, 239 Venezuela 5, 80, 214, 216 voice 15, 79, 87, 233, 248 von Humboldt, Alexander 63, 155 Walker, Alice 16, 103, 107, 111 Wallerstein, Immanuel xv, 20, 53, 98, 166–67, 173, 175, 178, 182n8, 213, 217

Weber, Max 20, 166, 170, 174, 176, 182n6, 183n12–13, 212–13, 216, 225n4 West/Western xi–xv, xviiin6, 1–6, 16, 26n4, 44–47, 78, 80–86, 90n7, 91n9, 105–06, 112, 116, 140–41, 165–67, 170, 172, 175, 186n27, 190n4, 191–92, 198, 202–03, 207n11, 212, 218, 228–29, 233, 235, 239–40, 244, 245; see also modernity Wittgenstein, Ludwig 121–22 world-system 5, 8–9, 20–24, 32, 98, 165–68, 170–75, 191, 217, 219, 221, 223–24 World Trade Organization (WTO) 22, 190, 193, 195–202, 205n1, 207n8 World War II 166, 192, 197 zapatistas 10, 12–13, 33, 35, 40, 42–52, 53n2, 56n15 Zedillo, Ernesto 52 Zorita, Alonso de 18, 145, 146, 147n2