The Formation of New Identities

Colonial Legacies 2:

Who are we?

The Nation-State and Global Capitalism

Secures private propertyOrganizes and disciplines working classProvides and maintains economic infrastructure (transportation, communication, judiciary, education)Regulates conflict (at home and abroad)

Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History

The Tasks of the Nation State

Monopolize ForceControl Economic LifeMobilize Spiritual Values

The Nation

Natural?Constructed?

Nationalism: Some explanations of causes

The drive to be close to others of shared blood or cultureThe formulation of national ideologiesFostered by dominant classes to obscure structural contradictionsExternal PressuresInternal Pressures

Ernst Gellner

Cultivating Nationalism

Reconfigure social relations to focus upon the state“Deep, horizontal comradeship”Self-sacrificing loveSelf against the Other

Propagation of Nationalism through Interconnected Systems

LanguageBureaucracyEducation

American Anthropological AssociationStatement on "Race"

“Early in the 19th century the growing fields of science began to be reflected in public consciousness about human differences. Differences among the "racial" categories were projected to their greatest extreme when the argument was posed that Africans, Indians, and Europeans were separate species…”

Sources of Knowledge of Colonized Peoples

New Sciences classified populations and territories and made them visible in particular ways:

-- Archaeology, Geography, Cartography, Philology, Ethnology, Demography, Anthropology

ethnicity is natural -- ‘tribal’ – primordial differences – ‘primitivism’ -- hierarchy of peoples – races of man

Social Darwinism

-- and the Races of Man

Social Darwinism

-- and the fear of the masses

Assimilation? e.g., Latin America

What do we mean by Latin What do we mean by Latin America?America?

• Spanish and Portuguese speaking

• Mexico to the southern tip of S. America

• 33 states–13 Caribbean

–20 Mainland

Spanish colonial architecture, Quito, Ecuador

Schoolchildren, Cartagena, Columbia

Banana processing, Ecuador

Colonial landscapes in Latin America

16 "racial" categories based on the percent of one's ancestry from different groups:

Bermejos 100% European Indios 100% Native American Negros 100% African Mulatos European and African mixture

(7 categories) Mestizos European and Native American

mixture (5 categories)

17th century Spanish colonial America

9 categories of African and European mixture based on the assumption that people have 128 parts of inheritance:

Blanc European (128 parts European ancestry)Négre African (128 parts African ancestry)

Mulâtre 64 parts European and 64 parts AfricanSacatra 8 to 32 parts EuropeanGriffe 24 to 39 parts European Marabou 40 to 48 parts EuropeanQuateron 71 to 100 parts EuropeanMétif 101 to 112 parts EuropeanMamelouc 113 to 120 parts European Quateronné 121 to 124 parts EuropeanSang-mêlé 125 to 127 parts European

18th century French colonial Haiti

Segregation: e.g., Southern Africa

-- Race Classification

-- Work permit

-- Territories

-- ‘Group Areas’

-- Policing

e.g., laws, passes

Stallard Commission of 1922:

“the native shall only be allowed to enter urban areas, which are essentially the white man’s creation, when he is willing to enter and to minister to the need of the white man, and should depart therefore when he ceases so to minister”

Racialized landscapes

Complex Identities

NationRaceEthnicityClass

From Ryukyu to Japan

Destruction of Ryukyu: 1879

Denial of China-Ethnic Purification

Intellectual Complicity?

Iha FuyuAssistant to Torii RyuzoMentor to Yanagita KunioHistorian, Linguist,Ethnographer

Exemplary Proletarians

Devoted Imperial Subjects

Into the abyss…