{"title":"Community as a category of empire: ‘The work of community’ among Burmese Indians in Myanmar","authors":"Judith Beyer","doi":"10.1080/02757206.2023.2261958","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2023.2261958","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTIn this article I argue that ‘community' is a category that is inextricably bound up with the historical development of the British empire. It was in this context that modern social theory took root, including, eventually, publications on community in anthropology and sociology that profoundly influenced nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought and that continue to shape everyday understandings of the category within and beyond academia. I first elaborate what type of work the category ‘community' was intended to do in the British empire. I then introduce two key figures who were responsible for designing, distributing and implementing two contrasting imperial theories of community. Subsequently, I sketch the migratory history of the category following the ancestors of today's so-called ‘Burmese Indians' across the Bay of Bengal from India to Burma. The final part of the article presents the repercussions ‘community' has in contemporary Myanmar, drawing on recent legislation around ‘race and religion’ as well as my own ethnographic data from religious processions of ethno-religious minorities who find themselves in a subaltern position vis-à-vis the Buddhist majority population and an ethnonationalist state.KEYWORDS: MyanmarempireMuslimsHinduscommunalismcommunity AcknowledgmentsI wish to thank my interlocutors in Myanmar for the faith they bestowed in me, for trusting me to tell their stories and for accepting my family and me into your homes, mosques, and temples. I also thank Felix Girke for reading and commenting on this article as well as the anonymous reviewers and the editors of History and Anthropology for their constructive feedback.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Ethnographic fieldwork in Yangon took place between 2012 and 2020 (a total of 15 months). In addition to participant observation, I collected the life histories and genealogies of my main interlocutors, legal documentation, statistical information, and newspaper articles, and I followed all my interlocutors on social media. Moreover, I consulted colonial-era documents compiled by state officials and housed in the India Office Records, that is, the archives of the East India Company (1600–1858), the Board of Control (1784–1858), the India Office (1858–1947) and the Burma Office (1937–1948), nowadays all located in the British Library in London. I have profited from Mandy Sadan’s meticulously researched A Guide to Colonial Sources on Burma (Citation2008), in which she has compiled extensive lists of references from all four archives, with a specific focus on what she calls ‘minority histories’.2 These first encounters would always happen in the English language as people assumed that I would not be able to understand Burmese, being a ‘Westerner’. The noteworthy part is that the person would choose the first person plural (‘We are … ’) even when it was just the two of us speaking.3 I do not recapitulate the vast li","PeriodicalId":46201,"journal":{"name":"History and Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135592079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Field archaeology and foreign assistance during the decade of development in Iran and Turkey","authors":"Kyle Olson, Christina Luke","doi":"10.1080/02757206.2023.2261972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2023.2261972","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTDuring the 1960s, the scope of field archaeology in the Middle East transformed dramatically, driven by foreign aid funded dam-led regional development projects. The paradigm of river-basin salvage, intimately connected to dam projects first developed in the US Southeast during the Great Depression, was exported alongside the dam-building expertise, but with unanticipated results. Rather than creating a worldwide system of emergency archaeology to mitigate the threats posed to heritage by the global project of modernization, the Decade of Development resulted in archaeologists becoming consultants in irrigation, education, and finance – key prerequisites to the emergence of today’s dominant modalities of the linkage between archaeology and development centred on regulatory compliance fieldwork and the encouragement of cultural tourism.KEYWORDS: Archaeologydevelopmentdamsforeign aidtechnical assistance Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 It should be noted that while many of these organizations, USAID in particular, presented their work as neutral or benevolent endeavors, there was always an embedded economic interest – what has recently been called ‘Aid for Profit’ (see Khastagir Citation2021) – insofar as they aimed to open new markets to American firms, whether as sources of raw materials and cheap labor, or as consumer bases for American-produced manufactured goods. This legacy has continued down to the present in many cases (see e.g., Attewell Citation2023; Norris Citation2021; Svitych Citation2023).2 ‘Concerning the Preservation of Cultural Property Endangered by Public or Private Works,’ 19 November 1968, https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/recommendation-concerning-preservation-cultural-property-endangered-public-or-private-works; see also Meskell on this subject (Citation2018, 46).3 In Turkey, the salvage mandate was de facto established in 1993 but not de jure until the 2000s (Özdoğan and Eres Citation2016, 66–67) and in Iran in 1988 (Sardari Citation2016; Citation2021).4 The Unified Development of the Khuzestan Region, 28 Aug. 1958, [Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library] P[apers of] D[avid E.] L[ilienthal], S[ubseries] 18C [1955–1958], box 409. https://findingaids.princeton.edu/catalog/MC148_c03234.5 ‘The Unified Development of the Khuzestan Region,’ 1–3.6 Donald Wilber to David E. Lilienthal, 1 December 1958, PDL S-18C, box 409.7 ‘The Oriental Institute Archaeological Newsletters, Oct 15, 1950-Mar 11, 1973: Robert McCormick Adams, Iran,’ 388–390, 30 January 1961. https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/archeological-newsletters.8 Leo Anderson to Robert Braidwood, 30 July 1959, Directors Correspondence. Records. [Box 287, Folder 09], I[nstitute] [for the] S[tudy] [of] A[ncient] C[ultures] M[useum] A[rchives] at the U[niversity] of C[hicago].9 Robert McCormick Adams, 26 May 1994, Smit","PeriodicalId":46201,"journal":{"name":"History and Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135344785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Medicinal rule and the interdependent duality of power between <i>ntemi</i> (chief) and <i>ngole</i> (queen): A historical ethnographic work on Sukuma chiefdom Busiya","authors":"Paulien Broens","doi":"10.1080/02757206.2023.2261966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2023.2261966","url":null,"abstract":"By employing a historical ethnographic method in approaching Sukuma chiefdoms as spaces of medicinal rule, this article argues that the basis of the functioning and the prevalent well-being of these very chiefdoms lied in the duality and interconnectedness of ntemi (male) and ngole (female) as interdependent figures. Contrary to this observation that will be made, within works on Sukuma – and additionally more broadly across ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa – there has been a male-biased assumption that the singular figurehead who was foundational to exercising medicinal rule within the chiefdoms studied, is the male chief. This assumption was based on decades of colonialism and (mis)understanding of chieftaincy power systems. The article counters this male-biased assumption by placing the gendered nature of medicinal rule in the chiefdom centre-stage and by radically questioning the lack of writing present on female figureheads. A case study of the Busiya chiefdom in Shinyanga region of Northern Tanzania will illustrate the intrinsic connection between the ntemi (chief) and the ngole (queen) in facilitating the continuing functioning of the chiefdom throughout ever-changing circumstances.","PeriodicalId":46201,"journal":{"name":"History and Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135719108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Charting a Malay-Islamic past: An emerging transnational geography of meaning and the consolidation of an exclusivist identity in Malaysia","authors":"Sumit K. Mandal","doi":"10.1080/02757206.2023.2249478","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2023.2249478","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTThis article examines an emerging historical narrative that invokes an exclusivist Malay-Islamic identity in Malaysia through a sacred geography centred on Aceh in Indonesia. The examination is located against the growing sacralisation of space across the world and its often contentious if not violent political outcomes. It considers the role of scholarship on sacred geographies in the face of output on the same subject by an informal expert – a person working outside of established institutional frameworks. The article focuses on the writings of Radzi Sapiee, a Malaysian informal expert who advances an exclusivist Malay-Islamic identity based on field observations, scholarly works, and inner wisdom. His partially completed book series constitutes an autobiographical return to Aceh and articulates a transnational geography of meaning that consolidates the exclusivist identity within the already racialised politics of Malaysia by further grounding it in space and time.KEYWORDS: Geography of meaningexclusivist Malay-Islamic identityinformal expertscholarship on sacred geographiesAcehMalaysiakeramat (Muslim gravesite-shrine) AcknowledgementsThis article grew out of a fellowship and workshop at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden, the Netherlands, in August and September 2017, and the conversations and unstinting support of Marieke Bloembergen and David Kloos. The second part of the article includes in much revised form a paper delivered at the workshop ‘Circulating the Bay of Bengal, Miraculously: Translating Wonder and Travel in Southeast Asia’ organized by the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre in Singapore in February 2017. I am grateful to Teren Sevea for inviting me to this meeting and his unfailing encouragement. I thank Dag Yngvesson for his careful reading and detailed comments of a draft and two anonymous reviewers whose insights helped to better frame and contextualize the argument.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 ‘Sesi bicara di DBP – Mengenali Kepustakaan Ali Hasjmy,’ http://merahsilu.blogspot.com/2019/02/bicara-di-dbp-mengenali-kepustakaan-ali.html.2 The blog is titled ‘Catatan Si Merah Silu [Notes of Merah Silu]’ and can be accessed through the following URL: http://merahsilu.blogspot.com/.3 Thailand is the only country in this list that was not colonized.4 These were Monash University Malaysia, University College Sedaya International, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (National University of Malaysia), and the University of Oxford.5 The Hikayat Mareskalek (Story of Mareskalek) written by Abdullah al-Misri in the early nineteenth century tells of a European governor-general who in a fit of vanity took the title Susuhunan, an honorific used to address the nine saints who are said to have converted Java’s population to Islam. He is haunted by a visit in his dreams by one of the said saints and decides, as a result, to make penance ","PeriodicalId":46201,"journal":{"name":"History and Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135063544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Meditation matters: The politics and networks of yoga and spiritual reform between Indonesia, India and the West, 1900s–1970s","authors":"Marieke Bloembergen","doi":"10.1080/02757206.2023.2249474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2023.2249474","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Starting from sites of yogic and Buddhist learning connecting Indonesia and India this article explores the politics, practices, transformation, dissemination and uses of knowledge on yoga and meditation in late colonial and postcolonial Indonesia, and their relation to moral geographies of Greater India. It follows, across (violent) regime changes, the trajectories of learning of a number of self-made experts and entrepreneurs in this field who were also involved in the postcolonial Buddhist reform movement in Indonesia: the Chinese Indonesians Souw Tjiang Poh (b.1929), better known, also as yoga guru, under his Buddhist name Yogamurti; and his meditation teacher, Tee Boan An (1923–2002), who, as Ashin Jinarakkhita, is more famous as motor behind the Buddhist reform movement in Indonesia from the 1950s onwards. Yogamurti's and Tee Boan An's histories of ‘yogic’ transformation reach back to ‘alternative’ spiritual reform trajectories of the Theosophical Society of late colonial times, and continue, across decolonization and the violent regime change of 1965, to those of the hippie trail of the 1970s. These spiritual and ‘Indic’ religious revivalist entrepreneurs provide alternative perspectives to the grand narratives of political history, yoga, ‘Indian religion’ or ‘Greater India’. Across regime changes, their paths crossed and they exchanged knowledge, thereby changing and reshaping social hierarchies as they moved within an ‘alternative present’ in which spirituality seemed a way to move forward to ‘alternative futures’.","PeriodicalId":46201,"journal":{"name":"History and Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135878206","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"(Un)Earthing violence: Ecologies of remembering, forgetting and reckoning","authors":"E. Çaylı, Erol Sağlam","doi":"10.1080/02757206.2023.2248165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2023.2248165","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46201,"journal":{"name":"History and Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74357866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nationalism and knowledge: Othering and the disciplin(e)ing of anthropology in India","authors":"Irfan Ahmad","doi":"10.1080/02757206.2023.2237064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2023.2237064","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay is about how Indian anthropology-sociology has historically theorized Islam and Muslims. In it, I demonstrate how anthropologists’ discourse on Islam and the majoritarian Hindu discourse on nation – Muslims being its constitutive other – dovetail into each other. Three main catalogues through which anthropology has dealt with Muslims are: silence, alienness and erasure. Against anthropology’s self-perception as the most reflexive discipline, I argue how Indian anthropology has been intertwined with nation-state as both an ideology and a set of practices. I also identify connections between symbolic violence of anthropology-sociology manifest in the othering of Islam and anti-Muslim political violence in postcolonial India. Discussing influential texts, schools of thoughts, departments, individuals, institutions, professional association in a framework that comparatively alludes to the ‘anomaly’ of Jews vis-à-vis German anthropology, this essay also charts out a different genealogy of anthropology in India, one that remains hushed in the regnant accounts. In so doing, it maps the discipline’s trajectory from its moment of formation to the present. One key aim of the essay is to unveil the theory behind methodological nationalism to discuss the (im)possibility of writing an alternative anthropology-sociology of India.","PeriodicalId":46201,"journal":{"name":"History and Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83182358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Remembering through possessed treasures? Landscapes and memories of societal violence in contemporary Turkey","authors":"Erol Sağlam","doi":"10.1080/02757206.2023.2248164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2023.2248164","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46201,"journal":{"name":"History and Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74221108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Finding Zion: Spectral intimacy and state indeterminacy at an erased American cemetery","authors":"Michael Vine","doi":"10.1080/02757206.2023.2248159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2023.2248159","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46201,"journal":{"name":"History and Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78931630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}