trajectories - comparative and historical...

TrajectoriesNewsletter of the ASA

Comparative and Historical Sociology SectionVol 29 No 2 · Winter 2018

Section Officers

Introduction:Sociologists and theColonial Past and theImperial PresentGeorge SteinmetzUniversity of Michigan, andInstitute for Advanced Study

Sociologists based in the UShave been involved in thehistorical and comparative studyof empires, colonies, andindigenous peoples since the1870s, with a relative hiatus onlybetween the 1970s and the 1990s(Steinmetz 2009, 2018; Go

2013). This was the same periodin which sociologists in themetropoles of the formerEuropean empires such asBritain and France withdrew totheir homelands and contracted acase of severe disciplinaryamnesia about the fact that alarge proportion of theirmembers had been working inand on the colonies for almost acentury beforehand. In theUnited States, and in othercountries founded on colonialslavery and the displacement and

Conference Report

Empires, Colonies,Indigenous Peoples

genocide of indigenous peoples (Belmessous1998; Fenelon 1998), the present remainsinescapably colonial (Gregory 2004). The CHSsection panel at the 2017 ASA meetings on“Empires, Colonies, Indigenous Peoples,” soughtto showcase some of the recent efforts bysociologists to deal with the colonial past andpresent by bringing together specialists in theBritish and American empires and postcoloniesand imperial frontiers with indigenous societies.

References

Belmessous, Saliha. 1998. Assimilation and Empire:

Uniformity in French and British colonies, 15411954.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fenelon, James V. 1998. Culturicide, Resistance, and

Survival of the Lakota. New York: Garland.

Go, Julian. 2013. “Sociology’s Imperial Unconscious:

Early American Sociology in a Global Context.” In George

Steinmetz, ed. Sociology and Empire. Duke University

Press.

Gregory, Derek. 2004. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan,

Palestine, Iraq. Blackwell.

Steinmetz, George. 2009. “The Imperial Entanglements of

Sociology in the United States, Britain, and France since

the 19th Century”. Ab Imperio 4:.2378.

Steinmetz, George. 2014. “The Sociology of Empires,

Colonialism, and Postcolonialism.” Annual Review of

Sociology 40 (July): 77–103.

Steinmetz, George. 2017. “The Sociology and Colonialism

in the British and French Empires, 1940s1960s.” Journal

of Modern History, vol. 89. No. 3 (September), pp. 601

648.

Steinmetz, George 2018. “American Sociology and

Colonialism, 1890s1960s.” In John Kelly, J. K. Jacobsen,

and Marston H. Morgan, eds., Reconsidering American

Power: Pax Americana and Social Science. Oxford

University Press.

Indigenous and European laws ofnations in North America to 1763Saliha BelmessousUniversity of New South Wales

Over the last few years, I have been engaged in aresearch project that focuses on European andindigenous legal interactions. This research hasshown that European expansion was a legalprocess in which native peoples participated. Thelegal world in which Europeans and indigenouspeoples negotiated their relations was not aEuropean world. It was shaped, from thebeginning of that expansion, by both indigenousand European peoples. Each group used conceptsto engage in a continuing political conversationgrounded on a variety of European and nativelegal traditions. They also used violence, not asan alternative to legal discussion, but to back uplegal claims whenever diplomacy had failed.This paper focuses on two sites of legalengagement to illustrate the level of interactionsbetween European and Native American peoples:legal dealings concerning territorial control, anddiscourses regarding the protection of politicalsubjects.

Indigenous peoples participated in the legalprocess of European expansion mainly throughtreatymaking, in order to negotiate Europeanpresence on their territory, and through theexpression of territorial claims.

Historians tend to be dismissive of these treaties,because of the amount of fraud and treacheryinvolved in the history of treatymaking.However, they are valuable tools to uncoverindigenous understandings of this form of legalexchange, as well as indigenous strategies innegotiating with European powers.

‎Europeans promoted treatymaking as a morelegitimate means of acquiring land than conquestor occupation. In this way, they could reconcileexpansion with moral and juridical legitimacy.Native peoples engaged in treatymaking as away of furthering their interests, even thoughfrom such agreements they would gain far less

Trajectories Empires, Colonies, Indigenous Peoples

Winter 2018 - Vol 29 No 2



overall than the Europeans, and often even lessthan what they had bargained for.

Colonial treaties varied greatly. They could beabout war and peace, and trade, as well as aboutproperty and sovereignty. Some treaties were‎formal and written, others were informal andverbal agreements. Some treaties were publicagreements between sovereigns, others wereprivate agreements between individuals. On theindigenous side, those who engaged in treatymaking were sovereigns, tribal leaders, andcommunities. Northeastern Americancommunities could send several delegates whenthe interests of their people conflicted internally.There are also instances where individuals actedon their own behalf. Their signature was thenonly binding upon them. European authorities,however, refused to accept this important point,as it was inconsistent with their law of nations,in which individuals either represented asovereign or had no standing. Yet, in Algonquianpolitics, treaties had to be negotiated byentrusted leaders and then confirmed by thenation to be valid.

Europeans did not engage in treatymaking withall indigenous peoples, and historians havewondered about whether cultural stereotypescould have influenced this ‎policymaking.Scholars have argued that Europeans concluded‎treaties with local groups they saw as militarilypowerful, and did not engage in treatymakingwith weaker groups. Studies have indicated thatEuropeans concluded treaties with nonEuropeansocieties they characterized as fairly advancedculturally, while rejecting the possibility ofnegotiating with peoples they believed to beuncivilized—suggesting therefore that somedegree of cultural equality was needed. Theargument that Europeans used anthropology topromote or dismiss treatyprotocol has beenrecently challenged by Alain Beaulieu. Heargues that, in America, from the 17th to the 19thcentury, the British did not simply ‎measurenative entitlements according to their use ofagriculture and the complexity of their politicalstructures. They made treaties with nomadic

Upper Canadian groups with flexible politicalstructures, but not with sedentary and farmingcommunities such as the Iroquois of the SaintLawrence River Valley and the Hurons(Wendats) who had more complex politicalstructures. Clearly, opportunism and selfinterestmattered more than cultural perception.Europeans engaged in treatymaking when thebalance of power was favourable to indigenouspeoples, and they ignored native claims whenthey got the upper hand. Anthropology was adiscourse the Europeans used subsequently tojustify their acknowledgement or denial ofindigenous claims.

Indigenous peoples used treatymaking to furthertheir own interests. For example, Colonistsreported that Mi’kmaq initiatives to concludetreaties aimed to settle land disputes. In instanceswhere there was great anxiety about the securityof settlers’ individual rights of property, someBritish settlers sought to conclude treaties ofpurchase to get an unquestionable title on the‎land. The weakness of the Crown’s title to theland in the early decades of settlement in thosecolonies, made mere claims that native peopleshad no title, problematic for settlers. In suchcontext, they could not be certain that the landwas theirs and that nobody else would challengetheir property. This uncertainty contributed to‎recognition of a number of indigenous landowners in North America.

Native peoples also concluded treaties withEuropeans to gain support in their rivalries withother native groups. Native Americans exploitedEuropean rivalries the same way that Europeansexploited indigenous rivalries. The history ofNorth American ‎native nations up to 1763, that isof the way indigenous peoples used imperialcompetition to further their own interests,perfectly illustrates what has been characterizedas ‘balanceofpower politics’.

There is plenty of evidence contesting the ideathat the legal argumentation concerningdispossession was a product of European culturewhich indigenous peoples appropriated in the



twentieth century. Contrary to commonperception, European justifications ofcolonisation should be ‎understood in variouscontexts as a form of counterclaim.

European and indigenous peoples were able tocross cultural boundaries and enter into politicaland legal negotiations, even if they did notalways respect the terms of their agreements.Both parties included each other in processes‎that resonated within their own cultures.

Protection was one of the most important legaldiscourses and practices which European andindigenous peoples shared. European discoursesof protection originated in the ancient NearEastern and GrecoRoman worlds, andemphasised the patriarchal responsibility ofrulers in relation to their subjects. From theRenaissance, socialcontract theorists redefinedprotection as a duty sovereigns owed to theirsubjects for their obedience, rather than aprivilege they extended as paternal rulers.

Though the duty to protect was mainly exercisedwithin the limits of sovereignty, Europeansstarted extending their claim to protect outsidethose limits in the early modern period,especially in the context of their overseasexpansion. They justified their expansionthrough their Christian duty to protect otherpeoples. The promise to protect the colonised (toguarantee their security, their property, theirrights) was challenged, however, by the pursuitof domination and exploitation. To deal with thisimpossible contradiction, Spanish and thenBritish colonisers invented new categories ofpeople in need of extra protection—thenatives—and institutions were created to maketheir defence official.

Protection was not simply a European principlethat European powers imposed upon nativesocieties. The native peoples who theycolonised, employed comparable principles intheir societies. Even though their principles haddifferent meanings, the framework of thelanguage of protection facilitated the conduct ofrelations. Native American peoples understood

what protection involved, and had translatableequivalents in their own political arrangements,that, however approximate, they used to furthertheir interests. The practice of socalled‘adoption’, whereby one community would comeunder the wing of a more powerful one fordiplomatic and military matters, resembledprotection as the Europeans understood it. TheIroquois Confederacy had traditionallystimulated their demographic and military forcesthrough the adoption of neighbouring groupssuch as the Erie and Neutral refugees who wereseeking protection as their nations collapsed inthe 17th century. In the following century, theIroquois chose to bring entire nations under theirprotection, apparently to preserve the socialstructure of their own society. They established atributary network based more on their sociabilitytowards other communities than on belligerence.Within that alliance, the Iroquois used kinship toconvey the unequal relationships betweenthemselves and their allies. While the allies werereferred to as nephews and children, the Iroquoiscarried the title of uncles: as such they heldauthority over the nephews for whom they wereresponsible. In the early 18th century, both theDelaware and the Tuscaroras of North Carolinasought Iroquois protection after they had lostmost of their men in war. Protection entailed thetransfer of their territorial rights to the IroquoisConfederacy, who also became responsible fortheir diplomatic affairs.

The existence of these legal interactions raises atleast two significant questions for our‎understanding of colonial encounters. The firstquestion concerns the translation of indigenousconcepts and their characterisation as legal. Untilrecently, the emphasis of the linguistic turn uponshowing subjects in their historical contexts hasprevented historians from addressing indigenouslaw, as native peoples were not employingsimilar legal notions. I have argued elsewherethat there is ample evidence, both in the primaryand secondary literature, showing that Europeansgenerally conceded that native peoples had laws.Native peoples themselves represented theirsocieties in terms of law, when their claims were



translated on first contact with Europeans. WhenFrance ceded claims to large territories in NorthAmerica with the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, theWabanaki Confederacy objected to the newEnglish claims of title. The Wabanaki made aseries of representations culminating in a letterthey delivered to Georgetown in July 1721. Thisletter was written in Algonquian and translatedby Jesuit missionaries into Latin, French andEnglish, and it was read aloud in all fourlanguages to the English. The English versiondeclared “my land dont belong to the, neither byright of Conquest, nor by Donation, nor bypurchase.” (1) These are three of the main basesfor dominium employed in the European law ofnations. The Wabanaki were possibly consciousof the claims in the European law of nations, butthey were clearly also using those terms asapproximations for terms in their own culture. Asimilar process was evident in the recentsuccessful claim by New Zealand Māori’s forrecognition of the legal personality of theWanganui River in New Zealand law.

A second matter raised by the existence of theselegal negotiations, concerns the space in whichthey were formulated. It appears that nativepeoples recognised a system of conventions‎outside civil society and between peoples whichcontemporary Europeans described as the law ofnations and ‎later as international law. Lawyersand historians are now debating whetherdefining these indigenous legal systems asinternational law is or is not anachronistic. We‎could move beyond that discussion byappropriating the premodern notions used todescribe law ‎outside of civil society, forexample, the Roman ius gentium or the Frenchdroit des ‎gens which we might translate as the‘law of peoples’. Whether such ‎conventions existas laws given that they lack the sanction ofsovereign authority is debatable. What matters,however, is that various peoples have felt theneed to employ ‎the concept of laws that applybetween peoples and in so doing recognised acommon humanity.

Endnotes

(1) Belmessous, Saliha. 2012. “Wabanaki versus French

and English claims in Northeastern North America.” in

Belmessous, Native Claims: Indigenous law against

empire 15001920. New York, p.116.

Legacies of Suspicion: FromBritish Colonial EmergencyRegulations to the ‘War on Terror’in Israel and IndiaYael BerdaHebrew University

For over a half century, Israel has relied on theDefense (Emergency) Regulations to thwartdomestic threats, primarily targeting Palestiniansin Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories(OPT). Though this set of colonial regulationsbegan during the British Mandate of Palestine, apolitically controversial AntiTerrorism Bill theIsraeli Parliament passed in November 2016,transforms the draconian provisions of theemergency regulations into "regular" law.Ironically, the democratic process of formalizingand legitimizing antiterrorism legislation may infact sanction the sweeping curtailment of rightsfor all Israeli citizens, not just PalestinianIsraelis.

The institutionalization of counterinsurgencylegislation is an important historical juncture,whereby a state's perception of security threatsdemarcates the scope of executive power as wellas the fault lines between the boundaries ofcitizenship and what the regime considersnational loyalty.

In this paper, I conduct a critical comparison ofthe trajectory of colonial emergency regulationsin India and in Israel, in order to highlight therole of institutionalization in legitimating civilrights violations by the state. In India, theemergency regulations became part of primarylegislation (Singh 2007) shortly afterindependence. In Israel, the bill that formalizedand incorporated powers of counterinsurgencyinto primary legislation only passed in 2016.



How did this formalization influence theboundaries of bureaucratic activity that infringesupon civil rights for political and security needs?

Political scientists and legal scholars haveexamined the history of emergency laws in caseswhen democratic principles have clashed withsecurity needs in specific local conditions(Hofnung 2001), or when there is a an assumed"delicate balance" between human rights andstate perceptions of "selfpreservation" (Gross2001). Brooks (2004) looked at how emergencylaws were developed in the context oftransnational partnerships in the global war onterror, focusing on the practices and technologiesof “homeland security.” Some will argue that thelegislative activities in both Israel and India arepart of a global counterterrorism phenomenonled by the United States.

I present an alternative analysis that shows howthe antiterrorism bill encapsulates theemergency legacy of British colonialism(Hussain 2003) and produces a bureaucratictriple bind between security, loyalty and identity.By comparing India and Israel—two formerBritish Empire territories where emergencyregulations were used extensively—we can tracehow contemporary antiterrorism bills in bothcountries have strong similarities to theircolonial predecessors. The historicaldevelopment of the British toolkit of emergencyregulations for managing population is inscribedinto contemporary practices. Both the existingIndian laws and the new Israeli law harbor asimilar organizational logic and the same spatiallegal tools they inherited from colonial rule.These laws involve practices of identifying andclassifying populations according to their levelof hostility or the security risk they pose to thecentral regime, on an “axis of suspicion” (Berda,2015). Today, these tools, initially developed bythe interwar British Empire, are clearly distinctfrom the counterterrorism legislation in otherstates, including Britain (Pantazis and Pemberton2009).

Following the Defense of the Realm Act of 1914,the use of emergency regulations and decreesexpanded into a repertoire of spatiallegalpractices that proliferated across the Britishcolonies and possessions. These practicesbecame the colonial governments' maininstrument of population management. Ratherthan being directed universally at the entirepopulation, emergency laws targeted certainproblematic or "dangerous" segments of thesubject population. Although classifyingpopulations was a central theme of Britishcolonial governance (Singha 2000), the pace ofclassification accelerated when it came time todetermine who would inhabit the territory in thefuture. The partition plans in India and inPalestine were intended to resolve intercommunal conflicts. However, as is evident bythe flurry of activity in the home ministryregarding documentation of domicile andresidency, they also demanded swift bureaucraticclassification of populations along clearcategories of race, nationality and religion. Oneof my findings was that in addition to thepreoccupation with population taxonomies,classification was also according to the degree ofloyalty to the regime, or the suspicion of posinga security risk, which I call “the axis ofsuspicion”.

The classification and monitoring systems werecritical because they enabled the colonialbureaucracy to use emergency laws as a practicaltool of government. India and Israel inherited theclassification systems after independence, andthus the partition turned minorities in India andPalestinians in Israel into foreign and dangerouspopulations (Kemp 1999). The minoritypopulations were perceived as hostile becausethey were on the “wrong” side of theborder—they were supposed to be in the territoryallocated by the partition plan, in a different state(Devi, 2013). As foreigners belonging to aseparate political entity, minorities becamesuspects a priori and enemies de facto. Theinheritance of British colonial emergency lawsby the independent states included theinstitutional logic of managing dangerous



populations and preventing insurgency bybureaucratic means, using the emergencydefense regulations.

In comparison to the partition of India, noPalestinian state was ever established in Israel.The attitude of the Israeli state apparatus towardsthe remainder of the Palestinian populationblurred the boundaries between a security threatand a political threat, specifically regarding theirstatus as an enemy population whose verycitizenship was questioned until as late as 1952,when the Citizenship Law was passed. Thepracticable rights of the Palestinian minoritywent into effect de facto only when the militaryregime was dismantled in 1966 (Boymel 2002).

Despite the similarity in the legacies ofemergency regulations in both India and Israel,the relationship between citizenship and securityin the two countries evolved differently. In India,the inherited laws were used against all citizens,including members of the Hindu majority. InIsrael, conversely, the laws targeted the subjectsof the military regime who became Palestiniancitizens of Israel. Emergency regulations wereused against Jewish citizens only in a handful ofcases.

Looking at these cases as connected historiesallows us to investigate the impact ofinstitutional change on the legitimacy of state’stools of counterinsurgency. As we shall see,institutional structures and trajectories of lawaffect legitimacy to use state violence, and shapethe scope and depth of measures the state can useagainst its citizens.

Studies on institutional legacies in formercolonies, despite their rigor and theoreticalinnovations (for example Mahoney 2003; Lange2009), have treated bureaucratic and legislativeprocedures as almost neutral variables,overlooking how bureaucratic practices androutines are not only outcomes of policies, butalso actually produce political outcomes(Bourdieu 1994; Hull, 2012).

In this article, the institutional perspective to the

continuity of emergency laws that I introduce,reveals the links between security legislation, the"routinization of emergency" (Berda 2017), andcitizenship in "aspiring" democracies.

Relying on my observations of bureaucraticofficials and their correspondence, I argue thatthe organizational mechanism utilized by thenew states to create juridical and administrativecontinuity affected the legitimacy of usingemergency legislation against civilians. Acomparative study of emergency regulations inIsrael and in India illuminates the inherenttension of the liberal principle of “the rule oflaw”. This binary principle (legal/illegal)attributes great importance to the manner inwhich laws are passed in democratic institutions.It gives procedural formalization the politicallegitimacy to infringe on civil rights, so long asthe infringement abides by institutional standards(Lavi 2006). Yet the principle of the rule of lawlargely ignores the content of the laws, evenwhen laws preserving security include potentialinfringement of civil and political rights to sucha degree that democratic structure becomeshollow. The comparison evokes the dialecticrelationship between the ostensibly democraticformalization of colonial defense regulations,and its contents. The formalization in India led tobroader infringement of the rights of citizensacross the board. In Israel, a patchwork ofdefense regulations led to the targeted and severeinfringement of the rights of the Palestinianminority during the military regime of 1949 to1967, and in the Occupied Palestinian Territoriesfrom 1967 onwards.

The findings in this article are based on archivalmaterial from the Interior and Justice ministriesin Israel and in India, following the first fiveyears after independence (State Archives inJerusalem, National Archives in New Delhi, andNational Archives UK), and consisting primarilyof organizational correspondence betweenofficials.

In the first part of the paper, I trace how theBritish Empire established the practices of



policing and managing populations throughemergency laws in the colonial era.Classification of populations transformedemergency regulations into a toolbox forpreventing resistance to the regime. Legalanalysis sees the declaration of emergency as afoundational moment of sovereignty—whetheror not one accepts Carl Schmitt’s notoriousdefinition of a sovereign as the one who chartsthe boundary between friend and a foe (1985).However, I demonstrate that labeling apopulation as friend or foe in the British colonieswas not a moment, but a process (Shenhav2012). Labeling the population as dangerous orhostile was the product of a set of bureaucraticpractices that evolved over time. At the outset,such labeling was intended to control “securitythreats” during times of crisis, but emergencypowers spawned an everexpanding list ofadministrative categories that created a fluidinterchangeability between those who wereconsidered a security threat and those considereda political threat, through the routinization ofemergency.

I focus on the process of labeling populationsthrough the creation of “blacklists” and thesorting of prisoners into “security” and“political" prisoners. The colonial regime, whichfought against national liberation movements,saw some political activity as a security risk thatendangered the existence of the regime. Usedprimarily during crisis, classification reinforcedthe institutional logic that blurred the officialdistinctions between political and paramilitaryactivities. Among its tools are administrativedetention and spatiallegal limitations onmovement. Classifying populations as suspiciouswas one of the counterinsurgency methods usedin Ireland, India, Palestine, and other colonies(Khalili 2010). After independence, the newlyindependent states inherited this institutionallogic—but each state took a different approachto formalizing these emergency powers. In thecase of India, I focus on legal tools for copingwith potential opposition to the regime. Suchlegal tools were incorporated quickly intoprimary legislation, including administrative

detention, limitations on movement and thegranting of special powers to security forces. Inthe Israeli case, I discuss the direct deploymentof the defense emergency regulation in thepermit system operated by the Israeli militarygovernment on the Palestinian citizens of Israelfrom 1949 to 1966.

The final part of the paper discussed the last twodecades of security legislation. Since the 1990s,emergency legislation, originally devised togovern subject populations threatening colonialregimes, has transformed into antiterrorism andcounterinsurgency legislation both in India andin Israel. The political partnership between thetwo states has intensified with the "global war onterror". The scaffolding of antiterrorismlegislation in both countries has three keyprinciples, inherited from colonial legislation:broad discretion to security bureaucrats;limitations on movement; and spatial definitionof entire geographical areas as "dangerous" areasor areas of “terrorist infrastructures.” In theIsraeli bill (2016), the classification ofpopulations as hostile is broadly construed toinclude kinship or geographic links sufficient todefine a person as a terrorism supporter. In India,powers are enacted based on places defined as“disturbed areas”. In both cases, the legalspatialdefinition blurs the boundaries between identity,belonging and security risk. Through theseprinciples, the colonial logic of managingpopulations is a key component of the perceptionof “homeland security” practices in recent yearsin these two former colonies.

Both in the Israeli and Indian laws, the broadlegalspatial definitions and vague terminologyused to define the boundaries of terrorism, makeparticipation in political activity in general andpublic events in particular, a risky affair forminority populations already perceived asdangerous by the regime. It differentiates thepossible political repertoire for opposition anddissent by race. The offenses for supporting,identifying with, and abetting terrorism, aredefined so broadly (with terms like “terroristact”, “terrorist organization”, and “membership



of a terrorist organization”) that political identity,belonging to a particular community, orresidence in an area designated as “terroristinfrastructure”, can be enough to suspend one’sright to due process. Practically, defining entirepopulations as dangerous, because they live in aparticular area or identify with a general politicalcause, strongly resembles populationmanagement by the British colonial regime. Thecriminalization of belonging is not confined tothese cases, as law enforcement practices andbureaucratic repertoires deployed againstopposition are differentiated by race in the US,for instance in Ferguson Missouri PoliceDepartment.

Such legislation carries even greater force whenit is enshrined in primary legislation. In suchcontext, even a population within the statebecomes a potential enemy—in legal andadministrative terms—and finds itself at thereceiving end of the same measures reserves forexternal enemies at times of war. Theinstitutionalization of antiterrorist legislation inboth India and Israel, through its classificatorypower, charts the boundaries of politicalmembership. Antiterrorism legislation redefinesloyal citizenship because it transformsbureaucratic practices that blur the distinctionbetween political threat and security threat froma temporary toolkit into permanent legislation. Ifit follows the path taken by India, then basinglegislation on political belonging and identity inIsrael will enable a broad assault on the civilrights of not only Palestinians but also Jewishmembers of the opposition, changing the“ethnocratic” nature of the political regime(Yiftachel 2006).

References

Berda, Yael. 2015. "Managing Dangerous Populations:

From Colonial Emergency Laws to Anti Terror Laws in

Israel and India." Theory and Criticism (Hebrew), 44.

Berda, Yael. 2017. Living Emergency: Israel's Permit

Regime in the Occupied West Bank. Stanford University

Press.‏

Brooks, Rosa Ehrenreich. 2014. "War everywhere: rights,

national security law, and the law of armed conflict in the

age of terror." University of Pennsylvania Law Review

153(2): ‏.675761

Boimel, Yair. 2002. "The Military Government and the

Process of Its Abolition, 1958–1968." HaMizrah Ha

Hadash 43: ‏.13356

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Samar Farage. 1994. "Rethinking the

state: Genesis and structure of the bureaucratic field."

Sociological Theory 12(1): 118.

Hull, Matthew S. 2012. Government of paper: The

materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. University

of California Press.

Hussain, Nasser. 2009. The jurisprudence of emergency:

Colonialism and the rule of law. University of Michigan

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Khalili, Laleh. 2010. "The location of Palestine in global

counterinsurgencies." International Journal of Middle East

Studies 42(3):413433.

Lavi, Shai. 2006. "The use of force beyond the liberal

imagination: terror and empire in Palestine, 1947."

Theoretical Inquiries in Law 7(1):199228.

Mahoney, James. 2003. "Longrun development and the

legacy of colonialism in Spanish America." American

Journal of Sociology 109(1):50106.

Pantazis, Christina, and Simon Pemberton. 2009. "From

the ‘Old’ to the ‘New’ Suspect Community Examining the

Impacts of Recent UK CounterTerrorist Legislation." The

British Journal of Criminology ‏.646666:(5)49

Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political theology: Four chapters on

the concept of sovereignty. University of Chicago Press.

Singh, Ujjwal Kumar. 2007. The state, democracy and

antiterror laws in India. SAGE Publications India.

Singha, Radhika. 2000. "Settle, mobilize, verify:

identification practices in colonial India." Studies in

History 16(2):151198.

Shenhav, Yehouda. 2012. "Imperialism, Exceptionalism

and the Contemporary World." In Agamben and

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University Press, 1731.

Yiftachel, Oren. 2006. Ethnocracy: Land and identity

politics in Israel/Palestine. University of Pennsylvania

Press.

Endnotes

(1) Combatting Terrorism Law, 57762016, SEFER

HAHUKIM [BOOK OF LAWS, the official gazette] 5776

No. 2556, p. 898

(2) The contemporary laws used are the Unlawful

activities prevention act 1967, amended in 2008

http://mha.nic.in/hindi/sites/upload_files/mhahindi/files/pd

f/UAPA1967.pdf; Armed forces special powers act 1958

and others.

Imperial Returns: AmericanEmpire and Police MilitarizationJulian GoBoston University

During the Standing Rock protests in NorthDakota in 2016 and 2017, NativeAmericanactivists and their allies faced hundreds of statepolice, county sheriff’s deputies from sevenstates, and the North Dakota National Guard.The police did not come in peace. They broughtan array of paramilitary police vehicles,including bearcats, humvees, and at least oneMineResistant Ambush Protected (MRAP)Vehicle. They soon put this equipment to use:attacking protestors with rubber bullets and teargas canisters shot from grenade launchers. Atleast one thousand protestors were treated forchemical poisoning, hypothermia, rubber bulletand nonlethal beanbag wounds, among manymore serious injuries. But this was not the firsttime that a heavily armed police used forceagainst racialized minorities on American soil.Two years earlier, at Ferguson, Missouri,AfricanAmerican groups and their allies hadtaken to the streets to protest the killing of 18year old Michael Brown. They too faced aformidable police apparatus, including not onlyMRAP Vehicles but also Special Weapons andTactics (SWAT) teams wearing uniforms

resembling those of the US Marines and armedshortbarreled 5.56mm rifles based on themilitary M4 carbine. Witnesses wereunequivocal: Ferguson looked “like a war zone”(CBS News 2014).

If these two seemingly separate incidents attestto the typical repression of minority voices bythe American state, they also testify to themilitarization of American policing. Accordingto Kraska’s (2007: 3) often used definition,“militarization” is “the process whereby civilianpolice increasingly draw from, and patternthemselves around, the tenets of militarism andthe military model”, and this can involve theadoption of “material”, “cultural”,“organizational” and “operational” aspects of themilitary. The examples from Standing Rock andFerguson make clear that police have indeedadopted military materials by a program knowncommonly as the “1033 Program” (referring tothe section of the National DefenseAuthorization Act for Fiscal Year 1997). Butpolice forces have also adopted operational,organizational and cultural aspects of themilitary too. For instance, the police’s SWATteams use militarystyle training and tactics, andby 2005, they were deployed up to fifty thousandtimes per year.

This militarization of American policing hasreceived wide attention recently. Scholars, thepress, and documentary filmmakers havehighlighted its origins, extent and detrimentaleffects. But these discussions rest upon twounstated assumptions that my paperproblematizes. The first assumption is that themilitarization of policing is somehow somethingnew. Many point to the 1033 Program as thehistorical origin. Others go back further to thesocalled “War on Drugs.” But historicalanalyses of police militarization that go furtherback than the past few decades are few and farbetween, as if before the 1980s or 1990s,policing in America was some sort ofprelapsarian utopia uncorrupted by militaristicweaponry or forms.



Yet, even a cursory look at the history of modernpolicing suggests that the militarization of policeruns deep. The adoption or borrowing by policeof military tactics, forms and equipment, in fact,goes back to the very founding of modernpolicing itself. The first modern police force inthe AngloAmerican world was founded inLondon by Sir Robert Peel, with theestablishment of the London Metropolitan PoliceForce in 1829. This was the London force uponwhich the first police departments in the UnitedStates were modeled (in Boston and New York).But Peel’s London Metropolitan Police was itselfa militarized organization. Its structure,appearance, and operations were all modeledafter the Royal Irish Constabulary that Peelhimself had helped create earlier, in 1822.Operating under the aegis of the English colonialstate in Ireland, this was a counterinsurgencymilitary force created to quell anticolonialrevolts, squash protests and suppress variousother rural disturbances from unruly natives. Inthis sense, the term “police militarization” is aredundancy: at the core of the very institution ofmodern policing is a military form. Policemilitarization is hardly new.

This paper—part of a larger project on empireand militarization in the United States, theUnited Kingdom and France—overcomes thisahistorical assumption by exploring one momentin the larger history of police militarization inthe US: the socalled “modernization” ofpolicing during the Progressive Era in the early20th century. Historians of policing speak of thisperiod as a formative one. It is known as the“reform era” when police forcesprofessionalized, centralized, and modernized. Ishow that what this really amounted to, was aform of intense militarization that in turnradically increased the infrastructural power ofthe police.

The second unstated assumption is about what“militarization” actually is. Contemporarydiscussions accordingly highlight that the policehave adopted military equipment and a militarymindset, among other things. But even in these

discussions, the “military” which police forcesemulate, or from which they borrow, are thoughtof as a homogenous, flat, and transhistoricalregime of power—a static and uniformformation—which has a single function: makingwar. But while the military is surely an organizedsystem for deploying violent force and coercion,it is a multifaceted formation with differentelements deployed for a variety of differentfunctions.

If we define “police militarization” as theprocess by which police forces emulate andadopt “the tenets of militarism and the militarymodel” we need to complicate what “the tenets”of militarism might be, and recognize that “themilitary model” might be a heterogeneousassemblage rather than a singular script fororganization and coercive practice. When Peelfirst formed the London Metropolitan Police, forinstance, he did not just draw from “the militarymodel” en toto. He drew inspiration from andemulated a colonialmilitary force in Ireland thathad been formed for the specific function ofhelping to rule, manage or otherwise coercecolonial subjects into submission to empire.

The second claim of my paper follows. I arguethat the early round of police militarization in theUS during the Progressive era was really amatter of imperialism as much as “the military.”Specifically, police militarization in the USduring the Progressive Era drew from and wasfacilitated by tactics, techniques, andtechnologies associated with ruling colonialpopulations overseas and at the frontiers ofAmerica’s rising empire of the early twentiethcentury—an empire extending from theAmerican west, back down to Puerto Rico andthe Caribbean, and over to the Philippine Islands.The military was a key part of this empire, notleast as the US Army was deployed by the newcolonial states to quell resistance to Americanrule. My claim is that no analysis of the originsof “militarized” policing in the early 20thcentury can proceed without keeping this empirein view. Militarized policing at home was also aproduct of colonialism abroad, drawing upon not



just the “military” but, more specifically, amilitaryimperial regime. The socalled“militarization of policing” should be betterdescribed as “the colonial counterinsurgenization” of policing.

To make the case this paper explores the creationof the first state police department in the UnitedStates, the Pennsylvania State Police Force, andthe “professionalization” and “reform”movement for city police, originating with theBerkeley Police Department and its chief,August Vollmer. Regarding the formation of ThePennsylvania State Police, I show that thislargely modeled after the PhilippineConstabulary, a counterinsurgency paramilitaryorganization of the American colonial state in thePhilippines. Regarding August Vollmer and theBerkeley police: Vollmer himself was a veteranof the SpanishAmerican war and the PhilippineAmerican war, in the latter case serving as partof a small elite mobile counterinsurgency unit. Ishow how Vollmer brought many of the USarmy’s techniques and schemas for fightingFilipino insurgents back to urban policing in theUS. Vollmer would later become known as the“father of modern policing” in America for hisinnovations (Bumgamer 2004: 142). I show howthose innovations emerged initially from theAmerican colonial state in the Philippines.

References

Bumgamer, Jeffrey. 2004. Profiling and Criminal Justice

in America: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara: ABC

Clio.

CBS News. 2014. "Why Ferguson, Mo., looked like a war

zone this week."https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ferguson

missouriresponseshowspoliceuseofmilitary

equipment/ Accessed July 13, 2017.

Kraska, Peter. 2007. "Militarization and Policing—Its

Relevance to 21st Century Police." Policing 1(4):50113.

Standing Rock: Epicenter ofResistance to American EmpireJames V. Fenelon and Thomas D. HallCalifornia State University, San Bernardino,and DePauw University

In the summer of 2016, Native Nations and theirallies from across North America joined an epicstruggle of resistance against the Dakota AccessPipeline (DAPL) project held at the northernareas of Standing Rock (Sioux – Indian)Reservation. Their presence extended from theencampment on the reservation near Cannonballcalled “Sacred Stone” to large camps called“Oceti Sakowin”. Thousands of Indigenouspeople and their Ally protestors were on treatybased retained federal Army Corps riverine areasreferred to as “The Taken Land”. Hundreds ofNative Nations supported Water Protectors asthey marched from “The Taken Land” to DAPLconstruction sites.

Transnational corporatedriven oil companiescame into sharp conflict with Indigenous people,from whom historically, they had stolen land andresources. At the core of this conflict, rested thelegacy of four hundred years of conquest andcultural domination against Indian tribes, nationsor civilizations and congealed where for morethan two hundred years of armed struggle therehad been a resistance to United States’ expansionover Lakota and other Native peoples (Gonzalezand CookLynn, 1998).

Standing Rock Sioux (Indian Reservation) or“Nation” is the result of more than two hundredyears of United States expansion. From 1800 to1900, the United States fought Native peoplesthat resisted conquest and incorporation in theplains through the Sioux Wars. The United Stateshad hegemony over the region, dominatingIndian reservations. American Empire was builton a very real destruction of resisting Nativenations (Fenelon, 1998).

We review sociopolitical analysts of empires ascapitalist state actors eliminating resistance orcompetitive systems against Native Nations and



Indigenous peoples (Deloria and Lytle, 1984).We consider them to reflect imperialism withperipheral resistance as opposed to conquestcolonialism, much in the same way that Wolfe(2006) sees settler colonialism shaping relations,with English colonial states as driven bycapitalism in political/cultural frontiers.Similarly, Robinson (2017) shows how thetransnational capitalist class (TCC) and theirglobal corporations push political/culturalfrontiers.

Fenelon (2016: 2330) identifies four largesystems of global expansion and relationshipswith genocide in four systems of domination:conquest, colonization, capitalism, andhegemonic global capitalism. Using policyconstructs and grounded evidence from conflictwith the Lakota in the Dakotas (Standing Rock)he demonstrates and argues that the pipelinestruggles are an extension of the United States’Indian policies into the twentyfirst century. It isclear that mediated Indian policy structurescreated favorable conditions to break up theSioux Nation into manageable Indianreservations.

We can chart the historicalcomparative roots ofthese conflicts as violent transformations: fromOceti Sakowin→Lakota Oyate→Standing Rock.Sociopolitical identity is shaped by policy

conflicts with American empire from the onsetwith Lewis and Clark. The Louisiana Purchaseannounced “American sovereignty to nativepeople" (Fenelon, 1998), evidenced by PresidentJefferson's view of the Sioux as the "extension ofAmerican power up the Missouri”, therebytransforming them to “sovereigns of thecountry..." (Fenelon, 1998).

The very first policy by the United States withthe Lakota “Sioux” targeted sovereignty. Thefollowing policies can be broadly summarizedinto five periods:

1) Attempts at Conquest and MultiTribalCompacts (18001866)

2) TreatyMaking (18661871)

3) Attempts at Removal, Relocation, Reductionof Lands (18711876)

4) LandTakings (18771889)

5) Coercive Assimilation (18831934)

The United States abrogated the 1851 and 1868Fort Laramie treaties, moved troops into Lakotaterritory, and the Great Sioux war, all involvedland takings and government controls. U.S. lawsbanned traditional culture, forced children intoboarding schools, destroyed cultural cohesion,and created economic dependence on the Lakota.

Oceti Sakowin Camp, Courtesy of James V. Fenelon



The Lakota turned to the 1889 Ghost Dancewhich caused military mobilization on StandingRock, the killing of Sitting Bull and the Lakotaseeking protection on Pine Ridge. More than 300people were killed at Wounded Knee in 1890.

We can identify U.S. policy listings for theperiods on Standing Rock, in a hundred years ofempirebuilding (see Figure 4: Policy listings forthe 1760’s – 1860’s in "Genocide, Race,Capitalism: Synopsis of Formation within theModern Worldsystem") which targetsovereignty (Fenelon, 2016). Similarly, we findinvasions from 1850, in which military envoysinterpreted events through a lens of protectingrights of settlers, with settler property rightsarrayed against treaty tribal rights. The 1862Dakota uprising and Mankato mass execution (inwhich derogatory terms like “hostile” were used)lead to 100 years of federal domination overlands, property and criminal justice.

In Figure 5: Policy listings for 1870’s – 1970’s(see "Genocide, Race, Capitalism: Synopsis ofFormation within the Modern Worldsystem"),we observe one hundred years of social controlsover peoples, land and sovereignty (Fenelon,2016). We find the legal cultural suppressionsuch as outlawing the Lakota Sun Dance; the useof citizenship in 1924 as legal assimilation; andthe 1934 Indian Reorganization Act policiesproviding mediating bureaucracies for coerciveassimilation during the Great Depression andWorld War II. Tribal sovereignty was underassault, while termination and urban relocationpolicies further weakened sovereignty.

Lakota resistance brought lawsuits over thetaking of treatydriven lands like the Black Hills,and tribal sovereignty over reservations likeStanding Rock. We model mediating socialsystems (see Figure 6: Lakota – EuroAmericanComparative Social Structures with U.S. Policiesin "Genocide, Race, Capitalism: Synopsis ofFormation within the Modern Worldsystem"),used in state corporate takeover of the MissouriRiver, outlined in the PickSloan Plan (Fenelon,2016). Deloria and Lawson (1982: xiv–xx)

viewed this plan as “the single most destructiveact ever perpetrated on any tribe in the UnitedStates”, in its efforts to “victimize byfraudulence, ignorance, and deception”; and the“subtle and sophisticated in its land acquisitionmethods” with which the “statute rather thanbrute force”, replaced “military enforcedreservation and land allotment” policies.

The 2016 Standing Rock conflict took placewhere the Oahe Missouri dams and the TakenLands meet. Interviews with Reginald BirdHorse, Vernon Iron Cloud, and traditional elderHenry Swift Horse, document Natives losinglands—“taken” by Army Corps of Engineers(ACE)—at the Sacred Stone camp, along thereservation side of ACE taken areas, at the OcetiSakowin camps, across the Cannonball, and infloodplain areas demarcated in treaties as“unceded” without formal takings.

The United States used imposters, agentprovocateurs, and government spies in theNoDAPL conflict. The First International IndianTreaty Council (IITC) of the WesternHemisphere was formed on Standing Rock in1974 adopting the Declaration of ContinuingIndependence of Sovereign Native AmericanIndian Nations, with delegates from 97 Indiantribes and Nations from North and SouthAmerica. They supported the U.N. Declarationof the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP),the kind of international organizing the UnitedStates feared.

The IITC meetings at Standing Rock wereprelude to FBI crackdowns on the Pine RidgeIndian Reservation, after the American IndianMovement (AIM) occupied the town ofWounded Knee. This was why overflowedcamps in the summer of 2016 were called OcetiSakowin: to represent unified Lakota–Dakotanations before colonization. The Lakota/Dakotapeople resisted the XL Pipeline, singing theirvictory songs in Congress, with the oilcorporations taking note. Dakota AccessPipelineroutes moved the crossings to just northof Standing Rock with possible poisoning of



Lakota lands along the Missouri River.

By late fall, big oil corporations providing deepprofits to North Dakota, were aligned againstnearly ten thousand people encamped along theCannonball River, supported by two hundredNative Nations. Transnational corporations drewtheir line in the sand and indigenous resistanceforces answered with nonviolent direct action.Global security forces tracked resistance groups,trying out “weaponized” mechanisms andtechniques throughout the nine months up to theviolent removals from Oceti Sakowin (Robinson,2017).

Security forces included companies likeBlackwater and agencies like TigerSwan, werecontracted to provide both cyber and socialmedia communication controls. TigerSwandescribed the movement as “an ideologicallydriven insurgency with a strong religiouscomponent” and compares the antipipelinewater protectors to jihadist fighters. Theyreferered to the camps as “the battlefield” wheresecurity was “defeating pipeline insurgencies”through an “infiltration of camps and activistcircles.” TigerSwan discussed protesters as“terrorists,” direct actions as “attacks,” andcamps as “battlefield,” thereby revealing howdissent was not only criminalized, but alsotreated as threatening national security (Brown,Parrish and Speri, 2017).

Native journalists identified revelatory points tothe Intercept at Standing Rock, that indicate anational level of suppression of internationalindigenous resistance. They show that TigerSwan portrayed NoDAPL as a religious

movement, akin to a jihad, and worked againstthe water protectors as if they were jihadists.Security forces had infiltrators working for them.A security contractor planted fake social mediapushbacks on social media accounts. TigerSwansaw dispersal of water protectors as a diasporathat needed to be tracked and contained. It statedthat the water protectors had “generally followedthe jihadist insurgency model while active,” andthat it predicted “the individuals who fought forand supported it to follow a postinsurgencymodel after its collapse.” They referred to waterprotector camps and associated movements inmilitaristic terms and displayed an unnervinglevel of hostility (Indian Country Today Staff,2017).

Suppression of the NoDAPL resistance campsalong the northern boundaries of Standing Rockwas tactical as it targeted local people. It wasalso strategic, because it closed down localhighways, reinforced closures with NationalGuard troops and private firms that engaged with“water protector” protest groups who wereemploying spiritual religious ceremonies andpractices, and who called upon Oceti Sakowinideologies and “unceded land” treaty claims.Extreme economic pressures on the StandingRock casino drove down Council support for themovement after it was clear that the Trumpadministration would drive the pipeline throughat all costs. Additionally, internal tensions atCannonball derailed local support.

After prolonged conflict through thewinter—including law enforcement assaults atriver, land, and Backwater Bridge in November,a December standdown with Veterans, and otherconflicts until Trump’s orders to the ACE toresume drilling—local support for the campsbegan to fade. North Dakota made it clear thatthe 1806 highway would not reopen until theOceti Sakowin camp was disbanded. TheStanding Rock Council voted to close down thecamps, which lead to reinvasion by state,federal and private security forces, and thedeployment the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)against camps on Standing Rock. Combined

Screenshot from Unicorn Riot videos



economic and political pressures caused thetribal council to give in, letting the state/federalforces, pipeline oil companies, TCCcorporations, and intelligence groups as proxyfor neoliberal empire win. It is not a stretch tocall this a recolonization of the lands and thereservation.

Conclusions on Standing Rock and U.S.Empire from the Local to the Global

Standing Rock (Sioux Indian) Reservationmakes a perfect case to study Indigenousresistance to colonizing United States expansionand the building of Empire. Initial penetrationand invasion of the territories followed classicsettler colonialism. Treaties were used bygovernment forces to demarcate lands andidentify resistance. Wars were fought to pacifydefenders, and policies were developed to divideand conquer Lakota and Dakota allies. Pipelineinfrastructure was relocated under the MissouriRiver with potential for pollution and poisoning.Like the Pick Sloan dams, required consultationwas bypassed, and construction began in 2016.Dakota and Lakota leaders on Standing Rockformed camps to resist the pipeline.

Security forces of global petrochemicalcompanies were employed using mercenarieswith attack dogs to dispel protestors in classicnonviolent civil dissent strategies. Thousandsjoined large camps at Oceti Sakowin. Twohundred Native Nations sent emissaries, eachentering camp with traditional protocols. NativeNation resistance forces and Indigenous Peoplesfrom around the world joined together in spite ofgovernment suppression. Redeployment ofmilitarized law enforcement with security firmsand intense surveillance, resembled earlierinvasive forces at Standing Rock that werearrayed against global capitalism, highlyprofitable industries reliant on fossil fuels,suppressing resistance and wiping out all thatstand in its way.

For Standing Rock, these events perpetuate theviolent suppression they have experienced fortwo hundred years. Native Nations and

Indigenous Peoples of the Americas engage inresistance and revitalization in an attempt tosurvive the American Empire of the 21st century.

References

Brown, Alleen, Will Parrish and Alice Speri. 2017.

“Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used

at Standing Rock to Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies.” The

Intercept. May 27. Retrived at

https://theintercept.com/2017/05/27/leakeddocuments

revealsecurityfirmscounterterrorismtacticsatstanding

rocktodefeatpipelineinsurgencies/.

Deloria, Vine Jr. and Clifford Lytle. 1984. The Nations

within, the past and future of American Indian sovereignty.

New York: Pantheon Books.

Fenelon, James. 1998. Culturicide, Resistance and

Survival of the Lakota (“Sioux Nation”) (foreword by

Manley Begay) New York: Garland Publishing.

Fenelon, James. 2016. "Genocide, Race, Capitalism:

Synopsis of Formation within the Modern Worldsystem"

Journal of World Systems Research Vol. 22 Issue 1 Page

2330.

Fenelon, James. 2017. “Standing Rock, Epicenter of

Resistance to American Empire” Historical/Comparative

Section panel: Empires, Colonies, Indigenous Peoples.

American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in

Montreal (Canada).

Gonzalez, Mario and Elizabeth CookLynn. 1999. The

Politics of Hallowed Ground: Wounded Knee and the

Struggle for Indian Sovereignty. Lynn. Urbana: University

of Illinois Press.

Indian Country Today Staff. 2017.TigerSwan, Counter

Terrorism and NoDAPL: 10 Astonishing Revelations in

‘The Intercept’ Report. Indian Country Today, ICMN (May

29, 2017)

Robinson, William. 2017. “Global Capitalism: Reflections

on a Brave New World.” Great Transition Initiative essay,

June.

Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. "Settler Colonialism and the

Elimination of the Native." Journal of Genocide Research

8(4): 387–409.

Author's Note: I’d like to extend warm thanksto Sam Nelson for organizing the AuthormeetsCritics panel at the Social ScienceHistory Association last November inMontréal. I am deeply grateful to critics PhilGorski, Marcel Fournier and ClaudioBenzecry for their incisive comments, as wellas to members of the audience for theirstimulating questions. While Phil’s remarkswere published in the Journal of the Academyof Religion and are not included in this issue, Iaddress them in my response. I’m indebtedfinally to Efe Peker for stepping in and

providing a new set of engaging comments. Ihave greatly benefited from these multipleexchanges and welcome the opportunity tocontinue the conversation in these pages. GZ

Secularization à la québécoiseEfe PekerMcGill University

The question of secularization is amongsociology’s core theoretical debates, and one ofthe most controversial ones. In its originalformulation in postwar sociology, classicalsecularization theorists (such as Berger, 1967;Wilson, 1966) observed and predicted asomewhat steady decline in the socialsignificance of religion through variousmodernizing forces. Then came the religiouseconomies paradigm in the 1980s, whichassumed a rational choice methodology todocument increased individual religiosity, andclaimed to have killed the secularization thesisonce and for all (Hadden, 1987; Stark &Bainbridge, 1985). “Not so fast”, said theneosecularization scholars in response. Goingback to and building on the original texts, theyshowed that secularization was never argued tobe linear, irreversible, or really about individualbelief in the first place. Instead, they putforward, secularization is best understood as acomplex phenomenon involving religious changeat multiple levels, and it almost always presentsitself in uneven, fluctuating, and contradictoryforms (Lechner, 1991; Yamane, 1997).

Whichever side one might take in the

Book Symposium

Beheading the Saint:Nationalism, Religion, andSecularism in Québecby Geneviève Zubrzycki


Trajectories Beheading the Saint

secularization conversation, there is no denyingthat the crux of the question is, at the end of theday, a comparativehistorical one. To determinewhether or not secularization occurred requirestracing the trajectory of religious change in time,and within one or more geographies. Despite thisseemingly obvious fact, the study of history,politics, and actual processes of secularizationwas surprisingly missing in both paradigms.Underlining this weakness, Gorski (2003, 2005)made a call to historicize the secularizationdebate using the tools of comparativehistoricalsociology. Historicizing would mean empiricallyand comparatively demonstrating the social,political, and cultural contentions inherent in themaking of secularization. It necessitates viewingsecularization as a dynamic and contingentconceptual variable dependent on historicalactors, events, and processes, as opposed to alatent, teleological, and homogenizingdevelopmental trend. Since the early 2000s,many casestudies and comparative worksemerged to contribute, directly or indirectly, tohistoricizing our understanding of secularization(some examples are Künkler, Madeley, &Shankar, 2018; Kuru, 2009; Mayrl, 2016; Smith,2003).

Geneviève Zubrzycki’s Beheading the Saint is animmense contribution to the historicizing efforts,although it does not intend to speak explicitly tothe secularization debate. At first glance, Québecseems like a textbook case of secular nationbuilding that corroborates the classical paradigm.During the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, thecenturiesold dominance of the Catholic Churchover the province was toppled almost overnight.Inspired by the anticolonial spirit of the time,and defining itself in opposition to EnglishCanada, the Revolution emphasized Québec’snationaleconomic development to ensurerattrapage (catching up), political selfdetermination to be maîtres chez nous (mastersof our own house), and its autonomous secularculture based on the French language. In theprocess, Quebeckers also “rid themselves ofCatholicism”, which they saw as an impedimentto modernization, and “a gangrenous limb

poisoning the national body” (Zubrzycki, 2016,p. 2). Education, healthcare, and social serviceswere removed from the hands of the Church tobe transferred to secular ministries. Massattendance plummeted as fast as fertility rates.The Church’s hold on gender relations, culture,elections, and labor unions were broken, andreligious skepticism became constitutive ofQuébécois nationalism. In 1969, when a group ofyoung demonstrators beheaded a statue of SaintJean, the patron saint of French Canada,Québec’s rupture with its religious past for afasttrack entry to secular modernity wassymbolically confirmed –hence the title ofZubrzycki’s book.

Zubrzycki’s purpose, however, is not to retellanother epic story of Québécois secularization,which is itself part of the national mythologytoday. Instead, she sets out to make sense of itsambiguities and contradictions. Her book digsinto the historical and symbolic trajectory of theprovince to understand why “the new nationalconfiguration still very much depended onCatholicism to serve as its foil”, and how, eventoday, this “ghostly presence … haunts newsocial projects” (Zubrzycki, 2016, pp. 9, 10).Indeed, the reasonable accommodation debatessince 2006, the Charter of Values controversy of20134, and the 2017 burqa law revealed theparadoxes in Quebeckers’ contemporaryrelationship with Catholicism. In contemporaryQuébec, only 6% attend mass, belief in God isthe lowest in Canada, but 80% declarethemselves Catholic. Confused? There is more.Since 1995, the government spent close to $300million to preserve and maintain Catholicheritage buildings and artifacts. A Québec courtupheld Catholic prayers in municipal councilmeetings as compatible with secularism, becauseit was deemed a patrimonial –and not areligious– practice. Likewise, legislatorsmaintain that the crucifix hanging in the Québecnational [provincial] assembly since 1936 doesnot represent religion, but heritage.

Québec’s Catholaïcité, or secularism withCatholic partialities, is due to a convoluted



relationship with the Church, Zubrzycki’shistorical account demonstrates. AlthoughQuébécois nationalism developed through therejection of the Church in public life in the1960s, Catholicism continued to represent adistinctive cultural marker to hold on to against–the largely Protestant– English Canada. Andafter the nonChristian immigration wave of the1980s and 1990s, Catholicism is now becominga cultural marker in the face of newcomerreligions such as Islam, Sikhism, and ultraorthodox Judaism. However, the return ofCatholicism as a core element of Québécoisidentity is happening in novel and secularizedforms, where Catholicism is embraced not asreligion per se, but as “religious tradition”.Zubrzycki borrows the distinction from the workof Riesebrodt (2010), where the latter termdenotes “the historical continuity of systems ofsymbols” that derive from religion, which oftengets intermingled with ethnicity, nationalism,and the larger cultural framework in which it hashistorically grown. In the case of Québec,Zubrzycki observes the making of what sheterms the “patrimonialization” of the Catholictradition, that is, “the discursive, material, andlegal ways in which religious symbols, artifacts,and practices are sacralized as secular elementsof the nation and its history” (Zubrzycki, 2016,p. 164). Conceptualizing patrimonialization andhistorically tracing its symbolic transformationsin Québec stands out as one of the centralachievements of the book.

Patrimonialization attests to the theoreticalassertion that secularization is not unilinear;religion may indeed come back in differentforms, such as tradition, and may get reblendedwith ethnicity and nationalism. Secularization,moreover, is replete with contradictions, asexhibited by Québec’s unique mishmash ofCatholic heritage with fervent religiousskepticism. Secularization is also the product ofcontentious processes where symbols andaesthetics play a significant role (see ClaudioBenzecry’s review in this issue). Although itsrevolution was rather quiet, and anticlericalismwas not its defining character as it was in France,

Québec’s secularization took form in a politicocultural battle against the Catholic Church, aswell as against English Canada. In the face of theEnglish, the will to preserve the language ledQuébec to prioritize Frenchspeakingimmigrants, an unintended consequence ofwhich was the arrival of Francophone yet nonChristian minorities from North and West Africa.The politicocultural question was thus furthercomplicated, because the new religions “shiftedthe meaning of Québécois and pressed an oldergeneration … to reflect on secularism and theirhistoric rapport with Catholicism” (Zubrzycki,2016, p. 15). Secularization is no longer anisolated debate among Québécois de souche(oldstock Québécois); it now involves therelationship with the “other”. Québécois desouche, although not at all religious themselves,fear that the complete undermining ofCatholicism may be equivalent to theundermining of the FrenchCanadian culture inNorth America, as religion and ethnicity havebeen inseparable to them for centuries.

This is precisely what is known in the literatureas “cultural defense”, a countervailing forceagainst a secularizing trend. In such cases,“identity and sense of worth are challenged” byan alien source, and “religion often providesresources for the defense of a national, local,ethnic or status group culture” (Bruce, 2009, pp.152153). Scholars who study secularization inthe colonial context, or the Western cases ofPoland and Ireland, are all too familiar with thephenomenon, where the dominant local religionbecomes an element of national unity and/ormobilization. Québec’s patrimonialization of theCatholic tradition in response to the growingreligious “aliens” at home is one such exampleof cultural defense, which has been provokedand capitalized on by opportunistic politicians inthe province since at least the 1990s. Zubrzycki’sbook helps the reader to consider the new rolesreligions/religious traditions may assume in theage of rising populisms around the world, andcan be considered as part of that growingresearch agenda (Arato & Cohen, 2017;Marzouki, McDonnell, & Roy, 2016).



Finally, and relatedly, another importanttheoretical conclusion of the book is to reframethe relationship between religion andnationalism. While the literature on nationalismtraditionally assumed that the secularnationalidentity was born to fill the void caused by theretreat of religion, Zubrzycki proposes that theQuébécois case witnessed rather the opposite. Itwas the emergence of Québécois nationalismduring the Quiet Revolution –along with itsideals of economic development, politicalautonomy, and cultural sovereignty– that pushedthe Church aside, as it was deemed a hindranceto this project. Reversing the causal mechanismmatters due to two reasons: First, because itbreaks the linear understanding of secularizationas a smooth transition from the traditionalreligious to the modernnational, and second, itmakes visible the contingent and nonteleological nature of secularization. In reality, assecularization à la québécoise demonstrates,religion and nationalism can be intermingled invarious and everchanging ways based on thecourse of sociopolitical as well as culturalsymbolic contentions. Zubrzycki’s work is proofthat historical sociological perspectives have alot to say on the matter.

Nationalism and Religion inQuébec: Saint-John-the-BaptistDay as Ambiguous NationalHolidayMarcel FournierUniversity of Montreal

For over a century, the feast of SaintJohntheBaptist, celebrated on June 24th on the Catholiccalendar, served as both a religious feast and anational event in French Canada. The holiday isrooted in preChristian times related to summersolstice and midsummer festivals; afterconversion to Christianity, elements of thesefestivals were syncretically combined with feastdays for Christian saints. In France, thecelebrations around the nameday of SaintJohnthe Baptist were widely enjoyed and French

settlers brought these traditions with them toNorth America. St. Johnthe Baptist eventuallybecame the Patron Saint of the French Canadiansin North America. Until 1970, the holiday wascelebrated on its eve with bonfires and dances,and on the day itself with a great parade withbrass bands and elaborate floats. The closingfloat was dedicated to the Saint, Patron of theFrench Canadians, who was typicallyimpersonated by a blond and curlyhaired boywith a lamb at his feet. The holiday is nowadaysprimarily celebrated with popular concerts androck shows, and although wellknown by all theQuebecers, it has been the object of few seriousstudies. Geneviève Zubrzycki provides the firstimportant sociological study of this holiday.Born and raised in Québec, the author knows theholiday through her own experiences, butconducted rich archival research on its origins,evolution and transformation. It is through theholiday that she analyzes the shifting relationshipbetween national identity, Catholicism andsecularism in Québec.

Zubrzycki embraces the "iconographic turn" insocial sciences, relying on a multiple visual datasuch as commemorative posters, documentaryphotos and family snapshots, commerical ads,satirical cartoons, amateur films and televisionbroadcasts. The result is an amazingly originalstudy: she documents and analyzes the subtleand notsosubtle transformations in therepresentation of the national icon/patronsaintsince the 1960s, paying attention to the heateddebates at the source of these transformations.For example, she shows how the lambaccompanying the saint became the object ofderision as it came to symbolize not the FrenchCanadians’ Providential mission in NorthAmerica, but their problematic passivity. Itsremoval from the parade in 1963 led to a seriesof material and symbolic transformations thatultimately resulted in the title’s beheading of thesaint, when on June 24 1969 members of theleftist Front de libération populaire overturnedthe float and its papier mâché statue, breakingthe saint’s head in the process. The event wasseen and read in the days to follow according to



the biblical script, in which Saint John wasbeheaded at the request of King Herod’s stepdaughter Salomé. While the head of the biblicalStJohn was served to the beautiful youngwoman on a platter, that of Montreal’s Saint wasnever found. And with that "beheading" ended acentury of religiopatriotic celebrations of theFrench Canadian nation. The parades wereabolished and Saint John disappeared.Zubrzycki, through her detailed visual andsemiotic analysis of a decade of debates aboutthe saint and the parades, sees the crystallizationof a new identity, that of secular Québécois. Thatidentity, in formation in the 1960s, was cementedwith the "eventful" death of the patronsaint ofCatholic French Canadians.

Although the saint and his parades disappeared,the holiday survived as a national and secularholiday, renamed la Fête nationale. Zubrzyckishows in that peculiar evolution a new syncreticfusion. The new national fête is a double hybrid ;it is a religiosecular one as it blends both theCatholic tradition (the saint’s name day) withsecular national(ist) ones ; and ethnic (FrenchCanadian) with civic (Québécois) nationalism.The hybrid, in the end, underlines the unfinishedcharacter of Québécois nationalism since theholiday relies on a cultural tradition instead ofcommemorating a political institutionalizationthat never occurred.

Zubrzycki argues, in the last chapter of the book,that this ambiguity, hybridity, of Québécoisnational identity and nationalism is at the sourceof two important debates of the last 15 years:that of the reasonable accommodation of thereligious practices of cultural minorities, and thatof a proposed “charter of values”/ “charter ofsecularism.” Zubrzycki shows, in her analysis ofproposed bills, legal briefs, court decisions anddebates in the public sphere that (and how)Catholicism is discursively turned into culturalheritage. She concludes, provocatively, that mostof (French) Quebecers remain Catholic in theirsecularism.

What Zubrzycki beautifully shows, in the end, is

how difficult it is for a (national) collectivity toforget its past and reinvent itself, and seeminglyeven more difficult when that past is a religiousone.

The Paradoxical Material Work ofCultural RecognitionClaudio E. BenzecryNorthwestern University

My first year as a grad student in the US, I wastaken by a fellow sociologist and conational toEl Gauchito, an Argentinean restaurant inCorona, Queens. As many recent migrants, I hadhad a hard time reconstructing in the new contextthe ways in which I felt “myself” when I livedback home. The restaurant had a tile muraldepicting famous musicians, sportsmen, andactors. It depicted some local figures I could notidentify, but the props they carried suggestedthey were tango and folklore musicians. Morerecently, Pope Francis was added to the mix.Despite the obvious kitsch character of themural, sitting at a barbeque joint with littleresemblance to the places I spent my time whileliving in Buenos Aires, and warmed by the heatof the kitchen and the familiarity of the figuresthat served as a background landscape, I felt athome. El Gauchito – its name already a markerof national identity – provided me with someobvious material and cultural opportunities forfeeling, narrating and embodying who I thought Iwas in relationship to national selfidentification.Reading Beheading the Saint was an opportunityto revisit that experience and make sense of it; torealize that being part of a nation is not aboutbeing surrounded by people like you andartifacts you attach yourself to, but rather anopportunity to engage in a conversation withpeople you might be different from or evenagainst. In doing so, the book directs ourattention to the role of recognition in engagingwith cultural forms we are not invested in orthose we aim to distinguish ourselves from.Beheading the Saint provides us with avocabulary to think about how cultural materialsare able to generate patterns of national



identification that are durable yet multivocal andcontested.

The book’s organizing question is about hownational secularism shares, inhabits, anddistinguishes itself from religious forms ofaffiliation. More specifically, it wants to show ushow it is that being Québécois went from being acatholic ethnic identity to a secular identificationbased mostly on language and territory. Inadvancing a detailed and meticulousreconstruction of the key moments under whichthis can be studied, Beheading the Saint (OrZubrzycki) provides us with a template for howto think about the role of objects in identity(trans)formation. We learn both what it is thatpeople do with objects and what objects do topeople.

A central line of inquiry within culturalsociology has been to analyze the longtermpurchase of particular objects by establishing aonetoone set equivalence between objects andcollectives, in which objects mean only onething and there is a takenforgranted linkbetween meaning and emotion. TheDurkheimian tradition (which can be recognizedin the work of scholars as different as Bourdieu,Lamont and Fournier, Alexander, and Collins)emphasizes the role of cultural structures,focusing on the collective effervescenceproduced by rituals that aim to generate fusionand catharsis between the object qua totem, andthe collective. The book engages with anddeparts from this idea by scrutinizing “national”objects as the site of struggle, with differentconstituencies trying to imprint competingmeanings. The object goes from being acemented and a given to a site where competingclaims are mobilized.

In an earlier work, Zubrzycki (2011) coined theidea of “national sensorium” to call attention tothe multiplicity of media and sites – includingsoundtracks, advertising, food, and film – thatbring to life relatively abstract and oftenemotionladen ideas that link self and nation. InBeheading the Saint, she delves deeper into how

materiality and imagination (a conceptnotoriously absent from cultural sociology)become intertwined. This happens in threedifferent ways:

1. The first one – best exemplified by whatZubrzycki called a process of aesthetic revolt –fully develops the role of conflict and conflictinginterpretations and practices about the sameobjects in generating linkages among people.These linkages are as strong, patterned, anddurable as the solidarity produced by collectiveeffervescence and collaboration. In observinghow adversarial parties contest and rework icons,Zubrzycki shows how agents are paradoxicallycompelled to give entity and recognition to thatwhich they want to oppose, something we couldcall the LacanianHegelian problem of modernpolitics. Why do we ask for recognition fromthose we actually aim to oppose or supersede?While political theory has explored this in depthover the last two decades, recent culturalsociology has not been interested in this keydimension of meaning in social life in the sameway. This is particularly salient with issues ofnational selfidentification given the inescapablecharacter of the discursive social formation wecall “nation” in modern life.

2. This inescapable character of the nation isunderscored in the book’s second analyticalmove regarding the way we see culture as anartifact as well as an environment. Though muchof the data in the book is about the materials thatmake the nation (more on this later), we alsolearn by seeing icons and their materiality as partof a larger ecology of meaning: one that becomesorganized as a semantic field of positions andone that you can be for or against, but that youhave to engage with regardless. We can see theinterrelation between the two versions ofmeanings and materials by looking at whathappens with the introduction of a new elementto a preexisting and relatively finished object.The new element transforms the objects, ofcourse, but at the same time transforms theplacement of the object within the preexistingconstellation of meaning – think here of the



original idea behind Weber’s use of the term“elective affinity.” Taking a page from hercolleague Webb Keane (2003), Zubrzyckiobserves how the intended meanings and useswe assign to objects fracture over time, givingway to new meanings. So the bundle of qualitiesaffect both the cultural object and the meaningwe attribute to it.

For example: we learn how the lamb – which ispart of the original iconography as a companionto Saint John the Baptist– is erased over time,changing the meaning of the saint himself. Withthe removal of the lamb, SaintJohn is no longerrecognized as the patronsaint, but as an effeteand passive child, infantilizing the nation. Thatnew interpretation moved the organizers of theparade to virilize the icon. Paradoxically, indoing all this work to both stabilize the meaningof the festive occasion, the parade becomes moreof a profane event and ultimately lesssymbolically effective.

These affordances and resistances can be seen inthe reluctant beheading of the saint, what shecalls after the work of Bruno Latour, iconoclash.The book’s title indeed refers to the fact that thenational patronSaint’s head, made of papiermâché, resulted in the physical separation of itscranium, and the desecration of the symbol atlarge. The St John’s parade provides an ideal siteto understand the intimate connection betweenthe material and the tropes that make the deepculture of the Québécois.

3. While culture operates at multiple levels andthrough multiple means in Beheading the Saint,the third contribution of the book is to show thatculture is not only about narrative turning points,but also about understanding the deep tropes thatcement a certain continuous “character” in apatterned national way. Zubrzycki shows hownarrative turning points are key elements in theproduction of the eventful character of social lifeand how the deep, culturallyingrained, nationaltropes serve as common ground forinterpretation, even while they change over time.In this latter version, culture becomes a model of

experience that operates through contextualbarriers. By doing so, Zubrzycki shows how thenational sensorium generates a particular kind ofaffect.

The threepronged version of culture isemphasized by the organization of the book intothree narrative threads. Zubrzycki uses the coretext, five interludes in between the empiricalchapters called Key Tropes, and the figurecaptions to produce different kinds of analysis.The captions and figures work as a particularkind of text and paratext, allowing us to see indetail the multiple images alluded to in the text.This layering allows the reader to reconstruct theeveryday life of some of the images as theycirculate, helping us to grasp theirtransformations over time and the multiplecontextualized meanings attached to them indifferent historical periods. The work of thatthread is contrasted with the idea behind the KeyTropes interludes, in which the author analyzespoems, songs, and images from advertising toreligion, to make the case for deeper and morecontinuous patterns of culture. This adds aparticular dynamism to the argument advancedby the book, since the text resembles thepolyvocality of claims as Zubrzycki analyzesdifferent agents posing their own interpretationsof the national and religious icons.

I have three questions specifically related to thebroad empirical analysis and its conceptualimport: 1. What does nationalism provide thatothers sensoria do not? What does it mean tonarrate yourself through the nation instead of,say, religion, soccer or music? 2. Is the nationalsensorium something specific to Quebec? Arethe models of culture and subjectivity proposedin the book transposable to other cases? To theUS context, for example? Could this be a fruitfulframework to study the debates over monumentsand flags ongoing in the American South?

I’d like to shift gears here and move to theauthor’s use of psychological and psychoanalytic metaphors in the text. I found myselfwanting more on the sociopsychological work



done by cultural materials, especially given thatone of its main warrants was to empirically studyidentity transformation. Beheading the Saintconvincingly shows the process of identificationand how it is produced; it does not denounce itsartificiality, but shows the variable character ofits production. In advancing this idea, the bookpresents a proto theory of the lashup betweenpeople, objects, and meanings that flirts withclassic psychology and psychoanalyticvocabulary but falls short in moving towards thestudy of the psychosocial undertaken by othersociologists like George Steinmetz, ClaireDecoteau or Debbie Gould. While there is animplicit theory of identification and subjectivity,this is never spelled out in full, and ultimately isleft in the background. I said “flirting with,”because the book is full of psy metaphors andpsy vocabulary inserted between sociologicalconceptualizations. This leads me to thefollowing question: What model of personhooddo we need to make sense of the theory ofculture advanced by the book? The book’s titleresonates already with a psychology meetspolitical theory. If we read it as the body of thesovereign and its public representation – a lot ofit seems to be in conversation withKantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies, a piece ofscholarship conspicuously absent from the book.It is, after all, the beheading of the saint thatworks as the myth of origin that allowed forsecular parades to exist. But the use ofpsychological vocabulary does not stop with thebeheading: we read about the ghostly presence ofthe past through haunting, the gangrenous limbsof the national body, and the use of classicanalytical categories like repression, trauma,phantom form, unconscious, impotence, orempty symbolization. This adds up to the pointthat the text itself playfully asserts, whendiscussing an important debate about the place ofreligion in the public sphere, that “Quebec wasput on the couch!”

And so while not fully developed, the processesof identification that correspond to thismultiform version of cultural theory arethematized. This is, of course, a prerogative of

being an author, choosing what to foregroundand what to leave in the background or set aside.I am however curious about what would happenif we chose to theorize those metaphors. Wouldwe go beyond the prevalent vocabulary ofsociology in which personhood is mostly amatter of selfhood? Would we go from selves tosubjects in the processes of libidinal investment(cathexis, in Bourdieusian parlance), makingrecognition and misrecognition central elementsin the construction of our own identifications?Would this produce a better version of howculture and agents become imbricated, goingbeyond the prevalent cognitive metaphors andthe dual model of how we process meaning andact?

Geneviève Zubrzycki, in this book, shows whystudying objects hermeneutically is important,since materials are – to paraphrase FernandoDominguez Rubio (2015) – not external thingsthat need to be accounted for as one more extradimension of social life, but rather as a centralcomponent of how culture operates; a keymedium for practice, and a unique site to betalked and acted upon. After Beheading theSaint, we understand how even in totemlikesituations, there is always the potential for adifferent affordance or a different claim aboutthe totem’s importance and meaning. There isalways the possibility for the correspondencebetween affect, individual, and object to bedifferent from a onetoone homology. The keylesson of its 226 elegant pages is that thosehomologies should not be taken for granted andmust be investigated; that doing sociology with,and of, cultural materials should focus on thework it takes to hold such correspondencestogether.

Author's ResponseGeneviève ZubrzyckiUniversity of Michigan

Nationalism, Secularization, Secularism

While crude secularization theories have been



productively refined (e.g. Casanova 1994,Gorski 2000, Riesebrodt 2010) to be lessideologically driven, more empirically accurate,and theoretically more robust, the scholarship onnationalism lags behind. Problematic causalassumptions linking the rise of nationalism to thedecline of religion are still common. Theparadigmatic narrative claims that thesecularization of society in the nineteenthcentury not only made room for the articulationof new identities and modes of politicallegitimacy, but that national identities andnationalism emerged because of the void left bythe retreat of religion. As Phil Gorski and EfePeker point out in their comments, Beheadingthe Saint shows that the secularization ofnational identity and the articulation of a newsecular, territoriallybased Québécois identity inthe 1960s was not the result of the secularizationof institutions and the building of the modernwelfare state in Québec, but that, rather, a newconception of the nation fueled thosestructural/institutional reforms. I demonstratethat through a mesolevel analysis of debatesabout of the annual StJeanBaptiste parades andthe material modifications in the representationof the national icon preceded institutionalchanges. Heated contests over Catholic “FrenchCanadianness” afforded by the annual parade inhonor of the patronsaint were far from beingpassive reflections of ongoing institutionalreforms; they instead made possible thearticulation of a secular Québécois identity thatin turn provided ideological muscle forambitious institutional reforms. Of course, theStJeanBaptiste feast was not the only occasionto discuss and debate national identity; but it wasa privileged one because of the cyclical andritual nature of the event.

It is the focus on the saint himself—the icon’srepresentations in the parades—that made itpossible to uncover the 1969 beheading’ssignificance. At the microlevel, I show thedirect consequences of specific materialmodifications of the national patron saint’s icon,from the removal of the lamb from the saint’sside to the childsaint’s maturation; from the

severing of the saint’s head to the interpretationof that incident as “a beheading” in the days andweeks that followed. I show the chains ofsignification created by a rich web of visual,material, and discursive/scriptural interpretationsthat led to a widely shared “reading” of the eventthat resulted in the invention of new modes ofnational celebration. With the material anddiscursive “beheading” of the saint in 1969, themacro, meso, and micro levels fatefullyintersected to produce an event in the Sewelliansense, crystallizing a secular Québécois identitythat had been in construction for a decade andinstitutionalizing that new identity through theinstitutionalization of new national practices.

Beheading the Saint therefore focuses on theprocess of becoming secular—on the aesthetic,social, and political practices of enacting secularidentities. Becoming secular does not imply thetotal disappearance of religion. Rather, itinvolves reconfigurations of the religious andsecular spheres. By examining the process ofpatrimonialization of religion, through whichreligious symbols, artifacts, and practices aresacralized as secular elements of the nation andits history, I show the continued significance ofreligion under conditions of secularity. If wewere to look at more “traditionally religious”spaces in Quebec, we might very well miss thatreligion still matters, as well as how and why itdoes. By doing so, the book participates in theelaboration of the “new sociology of the secular”(Asad 2003; Taylor 2007; Warner,VanAntwerpen and Calhoun 2010).

National Sensorium and Aesthetic Revolt

Marcel Fournier notes the diversity of sources Iconsulted and the wide array of data I use. Thiswas necessary to get a feel for the time andplace; to capture how national identity,articulated by religious and political elites, wasexpressed on the ground by ordinarypeople—what I call the “national sensorium”.The national sensorium consists of the visualdepiction and embodiment of historicalnarratives and national myths in cultural forms,



the built environment and the landscape. Associal actors sensorially experience nationalnarratives and myths, the abstract idea of thenation becomes concrete, acquiring politicaltraction and potentially mobilizing groups.Within a certain sensorium and aesthetics, eliteconstructions can cue paradigmatic stories andsentiments, or their subversion in iconoclasticacts. My companion concept of “aestheticrevolt” likewise is useful to capture the dualprocess whereby social actors discursivelycontest and materially rework iconic symbols,granting those symbols new significations thatpush forward the articulation of new identitiesand provide momentum for institutional reforms.

What is the comparative purchase of thatconceptual framework, asks Claudio Benzecry.How useful are the concepts of nationalsensorium and aesthetic revolt for the analysis ofother cases? I first developed the concept of thenational sensorium in my work on Poland (2011)and productively used it to study nationalism inQuebec. It is also useful to understand Americannational identity and nationalism. In today’sUnited States, the American national sensoriumis being challenged from two sides: from ultranationalists who adopt the rituals and symbols ofwhite supremacy, borrowing both from theKKK, Nazi Germany, and Trump rallies to createits own aesthetics; and from African Americansand their White supporters who kneel duringnational anthems in sporting events to protestracism in American society and implore fellowAmericans to face up to its promise of equalityand fairness. Both are examples of aestheticrevolts that have acquired political traction andare shaping nationwide discourse about“Americanness”. Together, they can potentiallyproduce change. The point is that nationalsensoria differ from nation to nation. It is up tothe analyst to identify the key sites, symbols, andrituals of national reproduction/subversion in thesocieties they study.

Benzecry also asks what the differences may bebetween different types of sensoria. Onedifference is the extent of the national

sensorium’s dissemination. Because nationalismtends to use state (or statelike) institutions, thenational sensorium tends to be spread in amultitude of spaces. It is also widely sharedacross social groups—much more so than more“specialized” sensoria like sports or religion.Different types of sensoria can however overlap,reinforcing each other. In Poland, the Catholicsensorium has been integrated into the nationalone. In the US, the sensoria of sports such asbaseball and football are interlocked with thenational sensorium that create a sense of“Americanness.”

Finally, Benzecry notes my use of psychologicaland psychoanalytic metaphors in Beheading theSaint, lamenting that I do not explicate whichmodel of personhood I adopt. I’m afraid that myresponse here will be rather disappointing, sincemy use of bodily metaphors was itselfunconscious. It was guided not byepistemological stances but by aesthetic andliterary preferences. I shall be more careful in thefuture and consider what my choice ofmetaphors might suggest.

Ultimately, what I propose in Beheading theSaint is an approach to nationalism that paysequal attention to the ways in which theideological and material are imbricated, and howtogether they become involved in institutionalarrangements and identity formation andtransformation. One of the book’s objectives wasto provide a methodological blueprint forsociologists intrigued by visual studies and thenew materialism but unsure about how to tacklethe task. I’m therefore especially gratified thatmy critics found the approach I develop in thebook both original and productive.

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Admirers of this eighteenhour tenepisode seriesthat aired in September 2017 praise it for havingrevived interest in the American war in Vietnam.For some followers, that appreciation is rooted inthe humanist insight that to know ourselves weneed to know our past. More prosaic viewersfind lessons in the series that need to berelearned to not let the mistakes made inVietnam be repeated. The “lessons” reason forwatching seem especially compelling now, asAmericans see their military bogged down onceagain in conflicts that lack purposes and endgame definitions.

The Vietnam War is destined for the classroomand the “lessons learned” objective will occupymany course syllabi. But historians can also usethe film to hone student skills for viewingdocumentaries. By naming the techniques thatBurns and Novick use to narrate the history ofthe war, and pointing out how those methodsthemselves become part of the message, thecultural literacy of students is raised and theircompetence in critical thinking is increased.Along the way, of course, the historical andpolitical details of the war itself become moreappealing subjects of inquiry.

Framing

The technique of framing is as old as writingitself: you tell the readers what you are going tosay, say it, and then tell them what you havesaid. That is how speedreading a book can beginwith reading the introductions and conclusionsof each chapter.

Each of the ten Episodes of the Burns andNovick film can be viewed as a chapter, andmost of them begin and end the same way: U.S.veterans featured as victims of the war itself orthe divisiveness that ensued on the home frontover the war. Episode 1 begins with veteran KarlMarlantes recalling that “coming home was astraumatic as the war itself”. It ends with veteranTim O’Brien recalling his fear of losing an armor leg on a boobytrapped trail. Episode 2 openswith John Musgrave describing the night terrorshe still suffers and the difficulty of explaining tohis children why he sleeps with a light on. Itends with strains of Sam Cook’s Mean OldWorld. Episode 3 uses the story of “Mogie”Crocker—the model “good kid” who enlists inthe Army at age 17 and dies in Vietnam—tobegin constructing the narrative of Americaninnocence betrayed by the antiwar movementand government deception about the war (both ofwhich are graphically imaged at the end of theepisode).

The spaces between the beginnings and ends ofEpisodes are filled with scenes and accounts ofbattles—battle after battle, 25 battles in totalaccording a New York Times review.

Segments on the history of the Pentagon Papersand audio clips of White House tapes thatdocument government lying about the war willshock all but the most jaded viewers.

No matter their actual content, however, themiddle episodes of the series continue to beframed as veteran cominghome stories.

But it is the framing of the series as a whole that

Sociologists Visualize History

What Can We Learn about Story-telling Technique?Review of Ken Burns' 2017 Documentary, The Vietnam War

by Jerry Lembcke, College of the Holy Cross


Trajectories Sociologists Visualize History



matters most. The closing episodes intensify thecues provided by the early episodes that the realwar was played out within the United States asopposition to the military mission in Vietnamand distain for its veterans. Karl Marlantes, whoopened the series recalling the disparagement hefelt upon arriving home, leads off Episode 9 witha dramatic story of having been met byprotesters after deplaning from Vietnam:“snarling” he says, as they “pounded on the car”while it pulled away from the terminal. “Ithappened over and over,” he says.

As Marlantes describes his unwelcomed arrival,we see it visually “documented” with whatappears to be newsreel footage. But it is notnewsreel because it never happened. The truth isthat the antiwar movement recruited veterans tothe cause of ending the war. For the scene wesee, Burns and Novick patchedin footage fromsome other source creating the false impressionthat the images support what Marlantes issaying. Troublingly, the scene they havecomposed resembles closely the airport arrival of“Bob” the Marine officer in the 1978 filmComing Home that starred Jane Fonda. (1)

It is probable that Burns and Novick tapped thatfilmic iconography because they knew it wouldresonate with viewers. A later segment ofEpisode 9 treats credibly the organizedexpression of veteran resistance, VietnamVeterans Against the War (VVAW), but thepolitical significance of that movement has beenpreemptively neutralized by Marlantes’sframing. (2)

Episode 10 is punctuation for the Burns andNovick narrative that the war was lost on thehome front, the loss registered most acutely onits veterans. The filmmakers put into play all theclichés pertinent to that storyline: the Vietnamveteran so unnerved by the war that a honkinghorn launches him onto the car’s hood, theabandonment of POW Hal Kushner by hiswife—having been likened in Episode 9 to JaneFonda, aka “Hanoi Jane”, the penitence offormer activist Nancy Biberman for having

slandered Vietnam veterans as “baby killers”—anowcommon meme in the cominghomefromVietnam discourse for which there is no evidenceof its happening.

The Limits in Oral History as PrimarySourcing

Oral history is the practice of collecting andrecording participant and witness accounts ofevents as they happened. It gained currencyduring the 1960s as part of reform movements inthe humanities and social sciences that wereskeptical about the validity of historical accountsshaped by the experiences and values of elites inestablished institutions. Alternatively, oralhistory privileged the “view from the bottom”,the testimonies and interpretations asremembered but never recorded in written form.Labor historians and students of race and genderstudies pioneered the field.

Veterans of the war in Vietnam provided fertilenew subjects for oral history. The widespreaddistrust of White House and Pentagon authoritiesas sources of information on the war madereturning soldiers valuable witnesses forjournalists and scholars interested in “what isreally going on over there.” A halfcentury later,suspicion sill lurks about official accounts of thewar, which makes Burns and Novick’scommitment to groundlevel memories of it aninviting quality: “No historians or other experttalking heads” they promised New York Timesreviewer Jennifer Schuessler. “Instead,” shereported matteroffactly, “79 onscreeninterviews give the groundup view of the peoplewho lived through it.”

But knowing, as we do, that lawyers and courtsdistrust eyewitness accounts of crimes that areonly hours old, what should we make of veteranmemories that are fifty years old? The gruntlevel views provided by Burns and Novick comewith additional baggage of intense reworking bymovies, novels, newspapers, and television. Inthe hands of a skilled professional, interviewmaterial can be turned into a valuable classic likeChristian Appy’s Patriots: The Vietnam War



Remembered from All Sides. In the hands offilmmakers, conversely, they are too easilymisused, as they are here, as another kind offraming that disarms viewers’ alertness to theactual preponderance of views from the top.

Burns and Novick do give us lots of excitingfootage of Marines in rice patties and GIsjumping out of helicopters—gruntlevelstuff—but the prevailing interpretations of whatwe are seeing come from elites, some of whomwould be better cast into confessional boothsthan onto PBS screens. John Negroponte? Whatwere Burns and Novick thinking? Negropontehas used diplomatic appointments to cover hiscovert maneuvers in a halfcentury of U.S.engineered regimechange, coup d’étatoperations from Vietnam to the nearpresent. Asambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s, hebuilt the small nation into a staging area forincursions against the leftist Sandinistas inNicaragua. At the United Nations in the early2000s, he helped sell the false claims thatSaddam Hussein had weapons of massdestruction. Characterized by journalist StephenKinzer as “a great fabulist,” Negroponte’sappearances in the film are strikingly discordantwith the unheard voices and views that thefilmmakers promise to bring to us.

We also see Duong Van Mai Elliot in everyepisode. Identified as Vietnamese with familymembers on both sides of the conflict, Duongworked during the war for the U.S. RandCorporation contracted by the U.S. governmentfor military intelligence gathering. Herbackground is upperclass, with ancestors whofor generations served the French colonialregime. She and her husband David Elliot, not inthe film, were both advisors to the film’sproduction. Joe Galloway was at Ia Drang Valleyas a reporter, but his use of that experience tobuild a career as the bestselling author on hiswork We were Soldiers Once . . . and Young, the2002 film starring Mel Gibson was based, hangssome asterisks on his credentials as a source fororal history—qualifiers only accentuated by hisaffected John Wayne drawl.

The actual veterans brought to the screen aseyewitnesses to the war in itself are a curiouscollection. Merrill McPeak, a former Air ForceChief of Staff, is no groundup witness, havingflown bombing missions from 30,000 feet in theair that created 72 cemeteries along the Ho ChiMinh Trail—but he is used repeatedly by Burnsand Novick. Hal Kushner is used to recount thePOW story, the chapter essential to the history ofthe war having been strung out for years by theNixon administration, and the vilifying of theVietnamese as torturers. But the POWexperience is given shortshrift in the series, anddistorted beyond recognition by their reliance onKushner. Kushner was a doctor taken prisoner inthe South, not a pilot shot down over the Northas were most of the POWs. His memory of theVietnamese’s “brutal torture” conforms to thetopdown “official story” of the POW historyrather than the betterdocumented accountprovided by historians such as Craig Howes inhis Voices of the Vietnam POWs. Mostly, Burnsand Novick use the Kushner story for its value tothe homefront betrayal thesis they want viewersto come away with. While he is in prison, he tellsus, his wife Valerie came out against the war,endorsing George McGovern for President at the1972 Democratic Party national convention.

Next to Karl Marlantes, the raconteur with thehomefromwar war stories, the veteran groundpounder we see most often is Tim O’Brien.O’Brien is the bestselling novelist who writesriveting stories about combat in Vietnam and themen who fought there. But he writes fiction andhas made up the stories he reads for the camera.O’Brien is rightly celebrated for capturing andconveying the existential reality of combat, buthe is not a historian or war correspondentcredentialed for documenting the war—which isthe forte claimed for The Vietnam War.

Collateral Messaging

French cultural theorist Michel Foucaultimplores us to ferret the representations ofhistory for their subliminal or hiddenmessages—finding “what is being said in what



was said,” as he phrased it. In their May 29,2017 New York Times oped, Burns and Novicksaid the film is about “healing,” a themereiterated in the film that is loaded withunspoken messages.

The discourse of healing insinuates that prewarAmerica was a harmonious unity, an America ofprimordial goodness descended from its origin asthe City on a Hill. The Australian sociologistKeith Beattie chided the idea a prelapsarianAmerica as a myth; in his 2000 book The Scarthat Binds: American Culture and the VietnamWar, he points out the real America was riven byracism, class conflict, and political ideologybefore the war began. But the comfortable onesieof a suburban and rural America that was tornapart by the war, is exactly what Burns andNovick slide us into. Episode 3 of the seriesintroduces us to the Crocker family: a white twoparent household with four kids and a home inthe college town where Dad is a professor. Thefirst image of mom holding babyboy Mogie,born in 1947, is followed by a series ofsnapshots and her remembrances of him as thekid who loved to read about American heroes.With Bob Dylan’s soulful With God on TheirSide providing the audio backdrop, we are cued:American innocence is at stake as the war inVietnam playsout in families like the Crocker’s.

Mogie Crocker is in Vietnam by the end ofEpisode 3; strains of Little Drummer Boy tell usit is Christmas. The family listens to the tapedmessage from Mogie and worries. Later episodesrevisit the Crocker’s story. Episode 7 opens withThanksgivingready turkeys on parade inWorthington, Minnesota, the turkeygrowingcapital of America that happens, also, to be thehometown of novelist Tim O’Brien. In shortorder, we see snapshots of boy scouts and LittleLeague baseball boys, and a vintage convertible,top down, festooned with a VFW banner and anolder veteran perched atop its backseat. As ifthose images are not evocative enough of anidyllic America, O’Brien’s voiceover tells us ofhaving grown up with “the great virtues” of“smalltown America”—all of which a visit to

Worthington’s Gobbler Café would confirm.

This was the America disrupted by the war inVietnam, the Purple Heart nation through whichwe can best know the war itself, and the Americathat is still healing from the war. O’Brien’sremembrance of growing up in Worthingtonserves Burns and Novick especially well for thispurpose because his book The Things TheyCarried already has iconic status with highschool teachers, making his voice credible, andthe film and book natural companion pieces forteaching.

The arc running from childhood innocence towar to postwar distress, drawn by Burns andNovick through veterans’ biographies, ismetaphoric for the societal trajectory traced byAmerica from the early 1960s through the early1970s. The photographs of babies and youngboys are the anchors for that arc, and thefilmmakers use boys’ ages to vivify theimpression that it was teenagers, innocents, whowere sent to fight: Crocker and Musgrave were17, Earhart and Vincent Okomoto (prominent inEpisode 8) were 19. Reporter Joe Gallowaytestifies to the valor of the “kids” who fought atIa Drang, writer Neil Sheehan likens the “kids”sent to Vietnam to the WWII generationremembered as “the greatest”, Okomoto andMarlantes confirm the quality of the ”kids” theyled into combat.

The imaging of U.S. troops as youthful innocentswas so important to the way Burns and Novickwanted America depicted that they resorted tomyth to do it. The actual mean age of the troopswas 22—not kids.

False Balancing

Their careless uses of framing, oral history, andcollateral messaging serve Burns and Novickwell for the technique of “false balancing” that isthe real hallmark of The Vietnam War. Falsebalancing is the use of one storyline to counteranother, to create the impression of objectivity.Its use here is most evident in treatment of theantiwar movement, whereupon we get a



collection of veterans and veteranactivistsrecounting their pride in having resisted the war,followed by their feelings of regret. Jack Todddoes the right thing by deserting the Army andgoing to Canada, but now regrets havingrenounced his U.S. citizenship. In Episode 4,antiwar leader Bill Zimmerman begins withtestimony to the sincerity of the movement, butthen recalls the selfinterest of middleclass draftresisters. Clips of Marines lowcrawling throughmud in Vietnam are interspersed with hippyrevelers dancing in mud at Woodstock withvoiceovers callingout the indignities inherent inthose contrasts. Episode 8 tells about theThanksgiving Day antiwar fast of medicalpersonnel at the Army hospital in Pleiku, butfollows that with veteran John Musgrave’srecollection of being “so hurt” when campusprotesters called him “baby killer.” (3)

The numerous images of American casualties,helicopter extractions, grieving families, andVietnamese dead piled like cordwood mightthemselves compose a powerful antiwarmessage, but Burns and Novick have thatbalanced too. Strikingly, they pair combat sceneswith the rockandroll period: we hear “MustangSally” as young recruits deploy, Hendrix’s “Areyou Experienced” accompanying a beachassault, and a Marine company heading intocombat to CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising”—hardstuff to resist for young men today looking formeaningful life. (4)

The discordance of the hearthandhome framing

of The Vietnam War with the scenes ofdestruction rained down on Vietnam only makessense when coupled with the damage on thehome front represented by emotionallytraumatized veterans, scared witless in combatand attacked by protesters upon return. Thefaintly discernible throughline of the film is itscollateral iteration of President Jimmy Carter’s“Mutual Destruction” thesis that the U.S. andVietnam were left equally damaged by the war.The irony, as the film would have it, is that theU.S. damage was selfinflicted—dishonesty inWashington and disloyalty in Berkeley andMadison cost America dearly.

The attribution of the defeat in Vietnam to thewarathome has underwritten the backlashfueling conservative political culture for overforty years, it is the wellspring of resentfulnessthat Donald Trump tapped for his run to theWhite House. It also recalls the legends oftreachery and betrayal that fueled Europeanrevanchism following World War I that led to asecond World War.

The America seeking repair and restitution for itslost war in Vietnam, that Burns and Novicksketch, is dangerous imagery which, leftunchecked, can lure us down dark paths withdeadly endings.

Endnotes

(1) I wrote about the demonizing of Jane Fonda as Hanoi

Jane in Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal

(Umass Press, 2010).

(2) For the history of VVAW, see Andrew Hunt’s The

Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War

(NYU Press, 2001).

(3) The best history of inservice resistance to the war is

David Cortwright’s Soldiers in Revolt. The 2006

documentary film Sir! No Sir! is also a good source.

(4) Doug Bradley and Craig Werner’s We Gotta Get Out of

This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War is a

compendium of GI interests in music.

"False balancing is the use ofone storyline to counter

another, to create theimpression of objectivity. Itsuse here is most evident in

treatment of the antiwarmovement..."

The making of a nation is accompanied by theconstruction of a legitimate representation of thesocial world. The State is at the foundation of theproduction and inculcation of these categories ofperception. Once these forms of classificationare imposed and get normalized in the minds ofthe subjects, “State thought” perpetuates thepolitics ruling the economy of injustices(Bourdieu, 2014). The elitesponsored historyhas been one of the key instruments used tomaintain this order, and to make invisible thesocial practices that can threaten its structure ofdomination. The study of a mass annihilationfrom below in the Caribbean offers a uniqueaccount of how people subvert this Statethought. It contradicts the idea according towhich ordinary people follow the mandate ofpower and execute symbolic and physicalviolence in the circumstances of a massacre(Arendt, 1963). Rather, it confirms that even insituations of rule by terror (De Swaan, 2015)people resist authority by creating forms ofjustice in the margins of the legitimacy. Thispaper is about this pragmatic culture performedby the clandestine lives of the official history .

In October 1937, one of the most atrocious yetleastknown genocides of humanity wasexecuted. Between 15,000 and 20,000 Haitiansand Dominicans of Haitian descent were cruellykilled with machetes and clubs in the border areaof my country, the Dominican Republic.Although this massacre has been documented bymultiple sources, including the testimony ofmany survivors, international records, andhistorical research, the State has neveracknowledged it. Worse still, they have hiddenits real history as a way to keep silencing the

population of Haitian origins on the Dominicansoil up to this day.

I was born in 1984 in Santo Domingo. Like mostof the people from my generation, I had justvaguely heard about this massacre. As a child, Inever sought to know how or what led to theextermination of this population solely becauseof their ethnic origin. People commented aboutthe existence of a common grave just a fewmeters from the hill that bordered the house ofmy greatgrandparents in Puerto Plata, a northernprovince of the Dominican Republic. I grew upwithout knowing what really happened there. Ionly knew that I didn’t want to get close to thatplace when I played nearby.

Only recently have I become interested inlistening to my grandmother’s testimony. Somesay that it is in moments of crisis that one is ledto question one’s history. This time was nodifferent. My grandmother’s neardeathexperience from an asthma attack, in which shealmost died in my arms running to the

Trajectories The Clandestine Lives of Solidarity


Essay

The Clandestine Lives of SolidarityResistance to "State Thought" during a Massacre in the DominicanRepublic

by Amín Pérez, Princeton University

"I was born in 1984 in SantoDomingo. Like most of the

people from my generation, Ihad just vaguely heard about

this massacre."

emergency room, prompted me to ask moreabout her memories of the massacre. Theexperiences of this rural woman, who livedthrough this inhumane slaughter, not onlyconfirms that our official history is a fraud butalso explains why a recounting of solidaritybetween Dominicans and Haitians poses adanger to the guardians of the Nation.

The Strength of Sociability

Abuela was born in 1924 in Ranchete, a smallvillage located on the north side of theDominican Republic, not far from the borderwith Haiti. Her name is Anadilia Jiménez,although at home we all know her by Aleja. Sheis the oldest of seven siblings. Her father, DonToño, was a small farm owner in the area. Heowned several plots on which he harvestedcoffee, cocoa, and root vegetables. When Abuelawas born, this part of the Cibao enjoyed a highdegree of political and economic autonomy visàvis the central power in Santo Domingo. Aconstant daily flow of people from one side ofthe border to the other had brightened the socialreciprocities between the two populations sincethe end of the nineteenth century. Haitians livedin nearby villages such as Marmolejos,Ranchete, Laguna Salada, Monte Llanos, andBajabonico. They grew coffee and cacao, cutsugar cane, and planted yucca with which theymade and sold casabe in the village. Onefrequently saw Haitian kids in Dominicanschools and trade between Dominicans andHaitians; the formation of bicultural families, thedaily use of Spanish and Kreyol, and theexchange of music and religion stood in contrastto the borderlines devised by the elites andintellectuals of the capital. As historian RichardTurits points out, these elites wanted to portray“the Haitian presence ... as a 'pacific invasion'endangering the Dominican nation. This'invasion' was supposedly 'Haitianizing' and'Africanizing' the Dominican frontier, renderingDominican popular culture more savage andbackward, and injecting new and undesirableAfrican admixtures into the Dominican socialcomposition .” State policies aimed at curbing

this sociability, regulating the migratory flowthrough taxes on travel and permits of stays onboth sides of the border, emerged. But this policywas roundly avoided in practice by a populationthat did not find any sense to these rules. Indeed,they were based on racial prejudices and socialbarriers that people who did not even live therewanted to impose.

One case of this refusal was my grandmother.Aleja did not perceive it as an "invasion" ofstrangers or believe that people were inferior toher because they were black. Abuelasympathized with Antoine, one of the Haitianworkers in her home. In the fields, everyonecalled him Antonio. But it was more pleasant toher to call him by his Kreyol pronunciation:Antuén. Don Toño gave him a conuquito (a smallpiece of land) where he grew cacao andharvested and collected coffee. Antoine had thebest breeding hens in the area, which heexchanged with the community for somethingmore than money, quickly gaining the trust ofpeople and popularity by his friendly personalityand work skills. Unlike other Haitians who livedthere for decades, Antoine had been living therefor five years. He had no wife or children. Hisfamily was the people of the village.

State Violence

But during the first nights of the fall of 1937, thiscoexistence was drastically transformed by thedark turbulence of a political mandate. Thedictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo ordered theimminent extermination of all the inhabitants ofHaitian origin living in the border zones of thecountry. By September 28, three hundred peoplehad been killed in a town called Bánica.Everything was unexpected. There were nowarnings or signs of tension. But the State,craving economic control of the trade in theborder area as well as political and racialdomination in the region, triggered the forces ofhate that perpetrated this massacre. For thispurpose, Trujillo mobilized the military. To makeit look like a pogrom, there were few deaths bybullet. Their method was to kill them with



machetes or big wooden clubs. Some were ableto escape. Others were trapped when, on October5, the Dominican State decided to close theborder and kill them in the waters of theMassacre River that separates Haiti from theDominican Republic. Aleja tells me that asidefrom her house, “the Haitians passed by with alltheir tereques, bed sheets, clothes, well,whatever they could carry on their shoulders.They took the path by Marmolejos, and whenthey came from the Cruce de Guayacanes toMamey, that was their ending. Down the hillnear my house, was the slaughter... There theywere killed. Poor Haitians, my God, that had nocomparison! They were given a hit with a bigclub on their heads and later thrown into a hole.It was a huge hole. They killed them and threwthem there. The point was to disappear them.”

In this area, the carnage lasted for weeks, and insome places, it lasted for months. The militaryprevailed with all the weight of physicalviolence, but they did not always render itvisibly. Aleja tells me that they came medioincógnitos to the houses where they knew thatthere was a long coexistence between Haitiansand Dominicans, as in the communities ofRanchete, Cabia, and Bajabonico. The armyforced the local people to murder. This seems tobe the case with my greatgrandfather. Mygrandmother tells me she never knew if he hadkilled someone when they took him to the ridge.In Unijica, by the house of her fatherinlaw,Don Tibe, she remembers hearing the rumor that

the workers from the village butcheryslaughtered a large number of people of Haitianorigin.

But, as these brutalities were carried out, thisterror story also had a back of the coin in whichsolidarity and resistance were decisive.Historians have shown how crucial this solidaritywas (Derby 1994, Hintzen 2016, Paulino 2016,Turits 2003), and reported that civilians andmilitary were killed for refusing the order to killHaitians. Abuela saw how many people alsohelped them escape: "They hid them in thehouses so that the guards could not see them.Dad gave Antoine money to leave. But the Statemilitia caught him on the way.” Trying to escapeto Haiti, Antoine was caught when he wascrossing the Yaque River and was murdered byCornelio, another employee of my grandmother'shouse. After this, Cornelio was not welcomedback to work in my grandmother's house.

Sorrow and fear followed in the months after thishorrible event. Aleja tells me that people in thevillage were shocked. They couldn’t understandthe meaning of so much violence against peoplewho had worked in the same places where theywere dismembered, and others that had evenbeen born and grew up there. At school, theycouldn’t talk about it. The fear became private:‘‘Oh god, people were sad, very sad. I can hardlydescribe it. We kept talking about that in thevillage, between us. Do you know what it's liketo kill all these innocent people? Trujillo wantedto end the normal life that we had withHaitians.’’

Illegalizing History

Abuela is right. This genocide was the beginningof the making of a history of division betweenDominican and Haitian populations. Theguardians of the State had declared war on thiscoexistence. In their eagerness to perpetuate theirpolitical hegemony — from what theyunderstand should be and not what actuallyconstitutes our Nation — the Dominican rulingclass tries to make invisible the social logics thatcreate community through distorted narratives



"In this area, the carnagelasted for weeks, and in someplaces, it lasted for months.

The military prevailed with allthe weight of physical

violence, but they did notalways render it visibly."

and disturbing policies that seek to createantagonisms.

Since this massacre, a history of constantrejection of any form of community between thetwo populations has been built. The cutting ofthe sugar cane in the Dominican Republic wasscrupulously reserved for Haitians. It would notkill them physically, but socially. Everything wasdone to deny them their very right to life, fixingthem to the most sordid social and laborconditions on land, with no possibility to claimtheir rights. Everything was done to avoid theirsocialization with the Dominican population,reducing their existence strictly to the confinesof the bateyes (a type of barracks) that stillsurrounds the sugar cane fields of the country.

Today, as in 1937, we have been led to believethat these two populations are incompatible. Asif antiHaitianism is the definition of what isDominican. This rejection by the elites of thevery heterogeneous Dominican populationcomes to fulfil a function: to legitimize socialinjustice by dividing the working classes andmaking up a false enemy within it. The purposehas been to dissimilate the State’s responsibilityfor the social misery in which they live byexacerbating tensions between the “They” and“We,” the “Black” and the “Others,” which endsnefariously by punishing them for this situation.

Far from being just a past, this history keepsupdating its incidence in the present day. InSeptember of 2013, a decree of theConstitutional Court (the highest judicialinstance in the Nation) ordered the revocation ofDominican citizenship to men, women, andchildren born of at least one Haitian parentbetween 1929–2007. This mass racializeddenationalization does not seek to expel thispopulation from its territory but to maintain themin the most vulnerable social and laborconditions (Martínez, Wooding 2017). Throughthe force of law, the real goal for the State islegalize inequality and to make coexistenceillegal. Today, as yesterday, the true fear of theDominican elites lies in the transgressive

practice of solidarity and pacific coexistenceamong peoples that blur border lines, transcendtheir political visions and substitute them byprinciples of hospitality. In brief, by humanity.

The Socialism of the People

Abuela opened my eyes on how troubling thiscohabitation between Dominicans and Haitianshas been for the State. But also, to how apeople’s version of this massacre brings uscrucial lessons about the power of a history frombelow. Her story makes visible the social processthat shaped the will to continue living together,and which continues to shape the unthinkablenation. Every day in the country, the officialhistory is subverted.

This is what I observed in the city of Santiago ofmy childhood, where I spent time helping mygrandparents sell groceries in the bodega.Recently, the residents of a workingclassneighborhood subverted an order of the mayor,expelling the municipal police who werepreparing to arrest and dismiss the Haitians wholived and worked there. I also lived it a fewmonths ago conducting fieldwork in the sugarcane fields of the country. There I found theanswer I was looking for, of how, despite theanimosity that is created from above between thepopulations, and that longedfor social explosionthat many sectors are looking for (and that fromtime to time, tend to happens), most of the time itdoesn’t occur. The answer is simple. Thesepopulations are permeated by the experience ofcommunity that I call the socialism of thepeople. This is not a politicalideological issue,much less morality inherent to a particularcultural group. It is rather that solidarity tends todevelop within a community as a result of acommon historical situation of domination. Theforce of this social bond emerges in the dailyconditions of precariousness, consciously andunconsciously, creating ideals of communaljustice and structuring and giving meaning tocollective life, overcoming the particularinterests of the elites. Mostly, it is in those innercities confined to segregation where new



nuances of solidarity arise from the feeling ofliving and fighting the same conditions ofmisery. And, it is in those fields and bateyeswhere the question is not where do you comefrom, but what makes us stand together andwhere do we hit from now on.

Aleja will soon be ninetyfour years old. Shehasn’t mourned the loss of her friend Antoineyet, but the State has never been able to destroyher love of building community. People fromthis Caribbean island have paid a very high pricefor freedom (Eller, 2016) — a price too high tokeep letting a political order trap the sense of ourhistory and impose boundaries that dehumanizeour social relations.

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report

on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press

Bourdieu, Pierre. 2014. On the State. Lectures at the

College de France 19891992, Polity Press.

De Swaan, Abram. 2015. The Killing Compartments. The

Mentality of Mass Murder. Yale University Press.

Derby, Lauren. 1994. “Haitians, Magic, and Money. Raza

and Society in the HaitianDominican Borderlands, 1900

1937”, Comparative Studies in society and History, 36, no.

3., pp.488526.

Eller, Anne. 2016. We Dream Together. Dominican

Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean

Freedom, Duke University Press.

Hintzen, Amelia. 2016. “A Veil of Legality”. The

Contested History of AntiHaitian Ideology under the

Trujillo Dictatorship, New West Indian Guide 90: 2854.

Martínez, Samuel and Wooding Bridget. 2017. “Anthi

Haitianism in the Dominican Republic: A biopolitical

spin?”, Migración y Desarrollo, n.28, vol.15, UNESCO.

Paulino, Edward. 2016. Dividing Hispaniola: The

Dominican Republic’s Border Campaign against Haiti,

19301961. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Turits, Richard Lee. 2003. Foundations of Despotism:

Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in

Dominican History. Stanford ca: Standford University

Press.



"...solidarity tends to developwithin a community as a result

of a common historicalsituation of domination."

Political crises resonate in academe. Recentpurges of thousands of academics in Turkeybrought visibility to the scale of the plight of ourcolleagues. Violation of academic freedom,however, is never a problem on its own. It is asymptom of a larger issue. Targeting theproduction and the dissemination of knowledge,along with the academic cadres who carry thistask, also implies a struggle to secure a particularrégime of truth—as appears to be the case inTurkey today. The crisisridden politicallandscape in the contemporary worldcomplicates this picture and makes it harder toinstitutionally respond to a situation like theTurkish case. Indeed, the contemporarydynamics bear disturbing resemblances to the1930s (1), and the international régimes of truthdeveloped in the post1945 era to address theruins and ruination (2) of the Second World Waroffer important insights to reconsidercontemporary dynamics, especially from theperspective of alterity management.

At the time, the atrocities of the World War IIand the massive refugee crisis that accompaniedit were widely identified as a crisis of Humanityor of Civilization. Given the magnitude of thecrisis, one might have logically expected to seethe racialized logics and archives ofknowledge—including repertoires offascism—that contributed to such crisis to be putinto question. An overview of the 1950s’international management of alterity, however,demonstrates how despite an epistemologicaland institutional push against scientificracialism, the effort remained largely a liberalhumanist one. (3) Liberal humanism (4)emphasized brotherhood and equality through a

shared human essence anchored in the body,instead of social and political rights, orsolidarity. UNESCO spearheaded such efforts,while United Nations, on its onset, was gearedtoward maintaining the status quo. (5)

Demographic policies included enforcedassimilation and mass “transfers” of minorities,widely deemed to bring instability and war toEurope. It clearly mattered which groups’numbers were to be regulated, not merelythrough birth control or mass killings, but alsosystematized population transfers en masseoperating on a segregative principle.Unsurprisingly, the fusion of fascist eugenics anddemography has continued to inform policies offorced migration and refugee integration.Scholars who had previously supported fascism

or adopted a biological approach to socialmatters moved swiftly to the terrains of refugeestudy after the war.

Throughout the 1950s, spatial redistribution ofracialized populations widely continued at alocal level in different

Trajectories `Logics of Crisis Resonate in Academe


Essay

Logics of Crisis Resonate in AcademePerspectives from the Post1945 Era to Contemporary Turkey

by Aslı Iğsız, New York University

"Targeting the production andthe dissemination of

knowledge, along with theacademic cadres who carry

this task, also implies astruggle to secure a particular

régime of truth..."

parts of the world. Racialized thinking waspervasive, even in cases where race did notappear to be a primary concern. Spatialregulations of alterity may differ in details, butthey shared the general concern with “unmixing”and segregation: walls, partitions, apartheids,population exchanges, among other practicesexemplify this trend. In that context, every caseof mobility was simultaneously a case of socialand/or physical immobility.

At the same time, ending human suffering andfinding solutions to human pain were promotedinternationally as depoliticized slogans of peaceand coexistence. As for the emphasis onsuffering, it lent itself to liberal humanistdiscourses: accordingly, because we are allhumans and are capable of feeling pain, weshould consider this capability as part of ourshared humanity. Liberal humanism thuspromotes a brotherhood that configures beinghuman as an essence which unites people despiteracialized differences, rather than through areconsideration of politics and history. In thatrespect, liberal humanist emphasis on sufferingrisks divorcing the affect from its political andhistorical contexts and thus obscures modes ofrelationality other than human feelings oressence to consider segregative biopolitics thatmarked the post1945 era.

Those who previously supported fascism likerenowned Italian eugenicist and statisticianCorrado Gini collaborated with Turkishsociologists such as Hilmi Ziya Ülken andTurkey’s leading eugenicist psychiatristFahreddin Kerim Gökay (6) to work on therefugee crisis. Their collaboration led to thefounding of a refugee study association inEurope, and several years later, to launching asister organization that expanded its scope fromEurope to the study of refugees in theworld—the Association for the Study of theWorld Refugee Problem. The sphere of influenceof the associations was broad: members of theCouncil of Europe, UNHCR and the Red Cross,as well as leading political figures regularly tookpart in their conventions. Gökay served as the

elected president of both refugee associations forabout ten years. The objective was articulated asalleviating pain and human suffering.

In September 1954, the European refugeeassociation held its convention in Istanbul—thehome town of its president Gökay, who was alsoboth the mayor and governor of the city. At theconvention in Istanbul, Turkish Prime MinisterAdnan Menderes and Fahreddin Kerim Gökayrepeated the same mantra of no more sufferingand declared their wish to end all human misery,only to be involved in a plot that targeted theGreek Orthodox of Istanbul within a year. Whenthe stateorchestrated antiGreekpogrom—comparable to race riots in somerespects—swept the city on 67 September 1955,Gökay was the official responsible of Istanbuland the safety of its residents. He was reportedlycomplicit in the plot. Menderes and Gökay werethus instrumental in reproducing exactly thesame kind of human suffering they had grandlycondemned the year before. Who exactly then,one might ask, qualifies as human?

The most controversial figure of these circleswas arguably Corrado Gini, wellknown fordeveloping the Gini coefficient to calculateincome inequality. In Italy, he was a formerpresident of the Italian Society of Genetics andEugenics. In 1936, after he spent a year teachingat Harvard University, he also received anhonorary degree in Sciences from there. (7) Bythat time, he had published “The Scientific Basisof Fascism” in English (8), had a significantimpact on Mussolini’s political campaign, andserved as President of Central Institute ofStatistics in Italy. (9) After the Second WorldWar, when UNESCO launched an initiative tofound the International Sociological Association,Gini attended the initial meeting in Oslo,together with Hilmi Ziya Ülken, who representedTurkey at the meeting. UNESCO publicationsand meeting minutes at the time indicate how anemphasis on the international study of “socialrelations” was configured as a move towardbuilding peace. In Oslo, Gini infamously soughtto bring the organization under his power when



he declared his revival of the InternationalInstitute of Sociology—an organization that hadstopped its activities during the war. Ülkensupported Gini’s proposal to combine the twoorganizations, but the proposal was rejected.

Ülken’s newspaper columns at the time suggestthat he saw no difference between UNESCO’sand Gini’s initiatives. Is it possible that he wasunaware of the political implications? It seemsunlikely. In 1952, when the GiniledInternational Institute of Sociology convened inIstanbul, Ülken gave a speech in favor of Giniand complained that the president of the ISA hadput pressure on the Turkish government toprevent the conference from taking place inIstanbul. The attempts to prevent the IISconference did not succeed, however, thenumber of international attendees was a recordlow, and Turkish state officials did not attend theopening. Yet, the same figures who did notattend the conference, or distanced themselvesfrom IIS on the grounds that it was tainted byfascism, did not show the same scruple incollaborating with Gini’s circle, including Ülken,when it came to refugee integration. Thissuggests that at best, institutions associated witha certain reputation were put into question—if atall, as distancing does not necessarily meanputting the underlying logics into question. ThatGini was a complex and controversial figure,there is no doubt. Indeed, in the late 1950s, Ginicollaborated with scholars in the racialist campthat were either overtly in favor of segregation inthe United States or did not oppose it. In manyways, he is a leading figure in the first fusion offascism, demography and eugenics. Hecontinued this line of work in the context ofrefugee integration.

In 1950, Gini was invited to Turkey to found theInstitute of Statistics at Istanbul University,where he would also teach a course ondemography. The Turkish Parliament assembledto issue his work permit, and he was offered ahandsome salary—about fifteen times more thanÜlken’s wage, who also taught at the sameuniversity. Ülken was the president of the

Turkish Sociological Society and together withthe vicepresident of the same organization,author Peyami Safa, he organized tea receptionsto introduce Gini to other colleagues andstudents. Today, the lecture notes from Gini’sIstanbul University course and translated workscan be found at the Turkish Parliament’s library.In Turkey, he was indeed a valued scholar.

At the refugee association, Gini promoted thenotion of the human capital—calling forengaging the refugees and the displaced in termsof laborready bodies whose training was alreadypaid by the country of origin, and therefore aprofitable business for the host country. Yet,what happens to those who do not qualify as ahuman capital, to use Gini’s terms? (10) At therefugee association conference in Istanbul,Walter Schätzel, a German scholar ofinternational law, addressed the case of thoseemigrants and refugees who have no exchangevalue as capital and are thus deemed to be the“undesirables” (les indésirables). He explainsthat this group of refugees are often called“social burden” (bagage social). The socalledsocial burden includes “the old and sickly, theorphans, criminals and the asocials, in short allthose people that no State wants to receive” andwho, according to Schätzel, cannot be easilyemployed. It is indeed a primarily economicmove that is materialized here: one that focuseson rendering the refugee or the emigrantproductive, but addressed in humanist terms viathe concurrent mobilization of discourses toalleviate pain and suffering. Integration thusimplied both economic productivity and culturalassimilation. Considering the prevalence ofbiopolitical approaches in configuring socialorder—as a means to remedy the “crisis”—notjust as a social, political and economic problem,but also as an epistemological one, it is notsurprising that controversial eugenicists found aniche in matters of refugee integration in theaftermath of the war. Emigrants who were sick,orphaned, or too old—that is, for the most part,those who were in a precarious position—wereconsidered to be a social burden, a deadweighton society. These dynamics, in turn, raise



questions about the limits of humanitariandiscourses to alleviate suffering: if the sociallyvulnerable are considered to be a nuisance, whatexactly is defined and recognized as pain?

In an article in the first issue of Corrado Gini’srevived Revue Internationale de Sociologie in1954, Carl Schmitt asserts that what at the timewas called “world history in the West and theEast is the history of development in the objects,means, and forms of appropriation interpreted asprogress.” The implications of Schmitt’sassertion are threefold: in form, it is offered aplatform by Corrado Gini’s controversial revivalof International Institute of Sociology—Revuebeing its official publication—in what appears tobe a power struggle with the UNESCOsponsored International SociologicalAssociation; in content, it reminds how everyform of appropriation generates its own régimeof truth that configures dispossession as“progress”; in praxis, it crystallizes the broaderdynamics of the post1945 era, when UNESCO’sliberal discourses, institutional patronage andcultural policies toward building peace after theSecond World War were widely interpreted asprogress. In an attempt to ensurepeace—necessary for economic growth withinthe capitalist world after the Second World War,UNESCO launched new transnational cultural,epistemological and educational initiatives todevelop new policies. In addition to promotingthe ISA, UNESCO also organized conferencesthat led the path to reconfigure the study ofHumanity as Humanities—in the plural, as agesture of recognition of alterity. Towering uponthe ruination, ruins, and the biopolitics of theSecond World War, Humanities at the time waspresented as a way to inform students ofdifferent cultures. It was thus deemed to be amedium to build peace and coexistence, despitethe clear shortcomings of this project.

Much happened from the “crisis of theHumanity” of the post1945 era to the “crisis ofthe Humanities” in the contemporary worlddominated by securitarian capitalism, rise ofauthoritarian tendencies, systematized regimes of

surveillance and incarceration, capitalist andauthoritarian encroachment on relativelyautonomous professional fields—includingacademia, proliferation of digitization andinformation technology, segregative biopolitics,and racism, among other things. Yet again, wefind ourselves in another era marked by amassive refugee crisis and an array of responsesthat range from humanist slogans (exemplifiedwith the signs “we are all refugees”) tosegregative logics that simultaneously seek tobuild visible walls or invisible frontiers—like theMediterranean that has turned into a massivedeath sea and the borders of Turkey that turnedinto a metaphoric wall separating Europe fromthe refugees en masse. The exchange value ofhuman life is racialized. The management ofalterity through segregative biopolitics is intact,and liberal humanist discourses are far fromoffering a remedy. In fact, in the hands ofpoliticians, discourses of brotherhood havebecome tools to domesticate demands forrestitution. Securitarian campaigns tap intoeugenicist paradigms of crime, castingcategorized groups as potential threats based ontheir background. From the United States toTurkey, the political landscape offers a starkpicture.

In Turkey, the social mobility of minorities havelong had its limitations, depending on thecommunity and the demands from the state.Internal forced migration, resettlement policiesto dilute the numbers of certain groups likeKurds have long been a practice. On 67



"The management of alteritythrough segregative

biopolitics is intact, and liberalhumanist discourses are far

from offering a remedy."

September 2015, on the sixtieth anniversary ofthe gruesome antiGreek pogrom, Turkey’snewspapers reported that events were organizedto condemn the violence of sixty years ago. Thepages of the newspapers were decorated with thepictures of people writing “never again” whenthe thousands of Kurds were segregated from therest of the country and not allowed to leave theirhomes for weeks in a series of brutalcounterinsurgency and urban warfare. Disturbingreports that the law enforcement did not allowhealth care providers, firemen, among others tohelp the local residents were abundant. Entiretowns and neighborhoods were leveled to groundzero. Rumors of urban renewal and resettlementhave since been circulating in the public domain.

The targeting of Turkey’s academe became moresystematic during that time, and because of itsscale, gained more visibility. In this case too,grievances of academic freedom were asymptom of a broader problem and a particularrégime of truth was reconfigured. For instance,Mardin Artuklu was an important university nearthe Syrian border, where for the first timeKurdish and Syriac studies were established.Shortly after these programs were launched,Middle East Studies Association in NorthAmerica has reported what appeared to be asystematic campaign of changing the academicclimate at the University, which eventually led tomultiple dismissals and lawsuits, as well asdisciplinary investigations. And when more thanone thousand scholars signed a petition thatcondemned the government’s Kurdish policiesand counterinsurgency campaigns, they havebecome visible targets. Their persecution and theexodus that followed brought a limited visibilityto the broader problems, but simultaneouslyrisked instrumentalizing the hardship of theseacademics in generating a smokescreen to thedisturbing reports of violations of rights. It iscrucial to be able to address the precarizationand persecution of our colleagues in Turkey,while recognizing that theirs is part of a largerproblem. Today, the political and economicpowers in the world appear to try to manage thecrisis.

In Turkey, rather than addressing the problemsthemselves, professionals—doctors, lawyers,academics, journalists—who articulate theproblems have been persecuted. Scholars andscholarship have been targeted before, and notjust those who worked on the Kurds like İsmailBeşikçi, or the criminalization of addressing1915 as the Armenian genocide. Targetedscholars included those who brought up publichealth issues such as the case of OnurHamzaoğlu, the former Chair of Public Health atKocaeli University, who publicly shared hisresearch findings on the health hazards causedby pollution in two industrial towns. He foundchemicals such as lead in breastmilk and infantfeces and warned the residents of industrialpollution. The mayors of the two towns, Kocaeliand Dilovası, filed a lawsuit against him allegingacademic misconduct. The list of grievances islong. Yet what brought the visibility to anexisting problem was the scale of academicpurges that followed the bloody coup attempt of15 July 2016. Since then, Turkey is officiallyruled in a state of emergency—declared toprevent a military coup, and the emergencydecrees issued have resulted in multipledetentions, purges of thousands of academics andcivil servants. Important to note that the legalinfrastructure for the presentday policies hasbeen established by the military in the past coupd’états, and that militarism is not confined tomilitary coup.

In sum, today’s world might disturbinglyresonate the dynamics of the 1930s, but what wecan reconsider in the light of some of thedynamics discussed in this piece is how policiesand the régimes of truth developed to deal with acrisis manage it at best, rather than getting to thecore of the problem and exposing its underlyinglogics. In that respect, the management of thecrisis of Humanity of the post1945 era hasimportant implications to rethink presentdaydynamics and the exchange value of the humanlife. It also points to the importance ofmaintaining a critical distance between “crisis”as a category of analysis and as a set of practicesthat manage, prolong, delay, or simply



perpetuate the problem by continuing to operatewithin the structural limits of its underlyinglogics. The management of alterity is animportant site to begin to address thesequestions.

Every day in the country, the official history issubverted.

Endnotes

(1) George Steinmetz, “Crisis of History and the History of

Crisis: Historical Sociology as a ‘Crisis Science’.” Critical

Historical Sociology, Blog. http://chs.asacomparative

historical.org/thecrisisofhistory/

(2) Yael Navaro, “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects:

Ruination and the Production of Anthropological

Knowledge,” in Anthropology in Theory Issues in

Epistemology. Second Edition. Henrietta Moore and Todd

Sanders, eds. (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 514

20. Ruins of Modernity, edited by Julia Hell and Andreas

Schönle (Duke University Press, 2010).

(3) The archival material presented here are drawn from

Aslı Iğsız, Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the

GreekTurkish Population Exchange. (c) 2018 by the

Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University.

Forthcoming from Stanford University Press.

(4) Faye Ginsburg, “Producing Culture: Shifting

Representations of Social Theory in the Films of Tim

Asch,” in Timothy Asch and Ethnographic Film, E. D.

Lewis, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003), 149162. Roland

Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” in Mythologies,

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 100102. Liisa Malkki,

“Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and

Dehistoricization,” Cultural Anthropology 11:3 (August

1996): 377404.

(5) Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of

Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 134,

14041.

(6) Ayça Alemdaroğlu “Politics of the Body and Eugenic

Discourse in Early Republican Turkey,” Body & Society

11:3 (2005): 6176.

(7) Eugenio Regazzini, “Corrado Gini.” Leading

Personalities in Statistical Sciences: From the Seventeenth

Century to the Present, eds. Norman L. Johnson and

Samuel Kots (New York: Wiley, 1997), 291296.

(8) Gini, “The Scientific Basis of Fascism,” Political

Science Quarterly. 42:1 (1927): 99115.

(9) Daniele Macuglia, “Corrado Gini and the Scientific

Basis of Fascist Racism.” Med Secoli. 26:3 (2014): 821

855. Also see, JeanGuy Prévost, Total Science: Statistics

in Liberal and Fascist Italy. (Québec: McGill—Queen

University’s Press, 2009); John P. Jackson, Science for

Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case Against Brown v.

Board of Education (New York: New York University

Press, 2005), 106. As quoted in Jackson, also see Paul

Weindling, “Fascism and Population in Comparative

European Perspective.” Population and Development

Review. 14 (1988): 109. Francesco Cassata, “A ‘Scientific

Basis’ for Fascism: The NeoOrganicism of Corrado Gini.”

History of Economic Ideas. 16:3 (2008): 4964.

(10) I am grateful to Begüm Adalet for calling my

attention to the fact that while human capital was

implicated in Adam Smith’s work, it was widely promoted

during the Cold War, especially in the 1960s.

Trajectories Logics of Crisis Resonate in Academe


"...the management of thecrisis of Humanity of the post

1945 era has importantimplications to rethink

presentday dynamics."

Interview with Manu Goswami (NYU), GeorgeSteinmetz (IAS/Michigan), and AndrewZimmerman (GWU) by Nadin Heé (FreeUniversity of Berlin) and Alexandra Przyrembel(University of Hagen, Germany).

Editor's Note: This interview grew out of anInternational Workshop at the FreieUniversität Berlin on February 1617, 2015 on"(De)Colonizing Knowledge: Figures,Narratives, and Practices". The conversationis broken into two parts; the second part willappear in the Spring issue of Trajectories.

Question 1: The history of knowledge is one ofthe most dynamic fields in historiography. Howwould you explain the intensity of recentdebates? And what would be your definition ofknowledge?

Manu Goswami

Response

I think we are at a consequential juncture inhistories of knowledge. There is an impassegenerated by, on the one hand, the challengeandriposte structure between abstractuniversalizing frameworks (whether beholden toorthodox Marxism or variants of modernizationtheory) and, on the other, the epistemologycentered version of negative dialectics that keystrands of postructuralism and postcolonialtheory forged. In many ways, this encounter wasbeholden to a particular historical and theoreticalmoment, a moment that has now passed. Oneconcrete illustration of this superseded dynamicis the ways the caution about claims ofuniversality advanced by postcolonial theories

(and varieties of poststructuralism) has beendomesticated across regional historical fields.Such theories now serve as an implicit point ofdeparture for studies of such apparently distinctthemes as: the geopolitical underpinnings ofsocialscientific discourses; the constitution ofenlightenment discourses; or the entwinedgenesis of slavery and capitalism in the Atlanticworld. It is not an exaggeration to say, I think,that the once regionally circumscribedproblematic of postcolonialism has migratedfrom the periphery to the very center of whatDipesh Chakrabarty conjured as a “hyperrealEurope” (Chakrabarty, 2000). At the same time,postcolonial scholarship tended to focus less onproviding alternate explanations of social andcultural formations than marking the limits ofinherited and dominant conceptual schemas. Thisinternal limit is now more acute. That is, it isboth more visible and untenable, in acontemporary historical landscape marked by averitable explosion of “global and transnational”studies. A shared characteristic of this diverseresearch horizon is the way historians andhistoricallyminded scholars have begun to wrestconceptual and empirical terrains away from the‘harder’ social sciences. Consider, for instance,the following subjects: the recasting of olderdebates about the differentiated regional andexperiential histories of capitalism; theburgeoning literature on the making ofinternational regimes, institutions, and projects;or the growing literature on the variegatedgenesis and trajectory of such keywords ofpolitical modernity as democracy andsecularism, liberalism and political economy,decolonization and internationalism.

The reanimation of questions of ‘the social’ inhistories of knowledge has broadly coincided

Trajectories Decolonizing Knowledge


Roundtable

Decolonizing Knowledge (Part I)Roundtable on New Directions in the History of Knowledge and

Postcolonial Theory

with the forging of multiscalar and multitemporal modes of analysis that no longerassume stateterritorial boundaries or the nationas their default units of analysis. Scholarsinterested in “the social” are alert to thedifferential and multiple temporal rhythmsinternal to historical temporality. Some of themost persuasive scholarship in this arenawhether histories of political economy andeconomic thought or the multisited genesis ofkeywords, institutions, and practices associatedwith political modernityneither treats the‘social’ as a fixed representational whole nor as aclosed totality. A recent wave of criticalhistoriographical stocktaking has proclaimedthat ‘we’ live and think, at least in the USacademy, in an “age of fracture”, where theobjects and aims of regnant models of socialhistory and analysis have been decisivelydismantled (Rodgers, 2011). Yet the orientationof “actually existing” historiographical practicesseems to suggest less a singlestranded ordecisive cyclical movement (from social tocultural approaches or the rise of big history)within histories of knowledge than a kind ofopenended juncture. This juncture recalls theGramscian notion of a transitional crisis, wherethe new has not fully appeared and revenantspersist. As historians have long claimed, suchjunctures are often incubators of substantivelynew objects and practices of knowledge.

I should conclude by noting some of thechallenges that histories of knowledge facetoday, in light of the above sketched shifts. Howcan we attend to the contemporaneity orsimultaneity of the appearance of concepts andcategories across regional and local domainswithout supposing that temporal contiguityimplies substantive convergence? How do wemake sense of both the “formal similarities”across sociopolitical forms (whether the nationstate, projects of development, or modes ofaccumulation) and their variable, regionallyinflected political valence and experientialpurchase? How might we underscore thecommensurability of categories of analysis andpractice without bracketing the lived actuality of

“durable inequalities” that have subtended thetransposition and transfiguration of practices,institutions, and categories across a differentiatedand uneven global terrain? A central task, I think,is to foreground a critical and reflexive notion ofcomparability within histories of knowledge. Todo so would elucidate both homogenization anddifferentiation as a dialectical product of aparticular historical process, conjuncture, orformation. This requires, at the outset, movingbeyond notions of comparison as a neutral metricor formal method as well as counterclaims ofincomparability and singularity. We need insteadto attend to the conditions or grounds ofcomparability across domains (whether scienceor political forms or political economy). Inother words, we need to treat comparison itselfas a historically variant, politically partisan, andsocially embedded epistemological practice. Thatis, comparison is not just an object of histories ofknowledge but their substantive ground.

Question 2: Before we come back to thequestion of ‘transitional crisis’, what didpostcolonial theories actually add to the historyof knowledge?

George Steinmetz

Response

Postcolonial theories made a series ofcontributions to the history of knowledge. Takenindividually, none of these arguments and theircontributions are entirely unique to postcolonialtheory. Taken as a whole, however, the



"We need to treat comparisonitself as a historically variant,

politically partisan, andsocially embedded

epistemological practice."

postcolonial intervention shifted the terms ofdebate.

The first central argument is that metropolitanforms of knowledge are constituted at least inpart by imperial and colonial peripheriesoftenin ways that are unnoticed or disavowed (Spivak1987;E. Said 1993). Historians now routinelytrack the flows of locally sited forms ofknowledge between metropoles and colonies orimperial outposts. Of course, comparablearguments were also present in colonial socialscience prior to postcolonial theory, especiallybetween the 1930s and the 1960s. It is alsoimportant to keep in mind the difference betweenarguments for global determinants of localknowledge and imperial or colonial sources. Theconceptual slippage between colonial situationsand transnational or global conditions isreminiscent of earlier elisions of the concept ofempire with capitalism or colonialism withimperialism.

A second argument associated more withcolonial historiography than with postcolonialtheory is that modern colonialism entailed a veryspecific form of political rule, one that wasdifferent from ancient and nonwestern Empires,different from most cases of state formationwithin Europe, and different from continentalimperial expansion by Napoléon and Hitler.Colonial rule entailed foreign conquest orannexation of territory, followed by the partial orcomplete seizure of sovereignty and ongoingrule over a population treated as inferior by theconquerors. Geopolitical domination andconquest are not specific to modern colonialism.What is specific to modern colonialism,however, is the combination of conquestfollowed by loss of sovereignty and theinstallation of a form of governance organizedaround definitions of the conquered as inherentlyinferior to their rulers. This is the “rule ofcolonial difference,” as defined by ParthaChatterjee (1990). The rule of difference wasoften written directly into colonial law.

A third and related argument was stated

succinctly by Edward Said: “From travelers’tales … colonies were created” (Said 1978: 117).Historians have explored the ways empires andspecific colonial policies were shaped bymetropolitan forms of knowledge about theperiphery, including ethnographic andcivilizational discourses (Burke 2014; Steinmetz2007; Goh 2007).

Fourth, postcolonial theory contains an array ofpsychoanalytic arguments about colonialsubjectivity (Fanon 1952, Memmi 1957, Bhabha1990) and epistemological arguments aboutaccess to the Other and the singularity of“southern” philosophies and cultures(Chakrabarty 2000). Once again the basicstructure of these arguments is not specific topostcolonial theory. German Historicism insistedon the irreducible uniqueness of cultures(Steinmetz 2014a). Psychoanalysts andsociologists examined dominated and marginalforms of subjectivity. Marxists and feministstheorized the epistemic privileges putativelylinked to dominated status (Lukács 1968).Cultural anthropologists discussed theplausibility of understanding radically differentcultures. What was unique to postcolonialtheory was that it connected these questions ofsubjectivity and epistemology to the colonialsituation (Balandier 1951) and colonialism’saftermath.

How does the forgoing relate to the history ofknowledge? I do not want to suggest that allhistories of knowledge would benefit fromtaking colonial and imperial power relations intoaccount. Postcolonial approaches lose allanalytic power when they are applied to any andall situations. The word colonialism changesfrom a concept into an epithet when it is usedmetaphorically. But any intellectual history thattakes contextual influence seriously needs tohave theoretical categories for making sense ofthe relevant contexts. What postcolonial theoryhas done is to call attention to imperial andcolonial determinants of knowledge that werepreviously invisible.



The history of scientific work in and about thecolonial and postcolonial Africa points to thecontributions and the limitations of postcolonialapproaches. On the one hand, Europeanknowledge was produced in despotic colonialand imperial conditions. On the other hand,colonial science was partially shielded fromexternal contextual determinations of this sort byvirtue of being produced within the semiautonomous arenas that Pierre Bourdieu calls“fields.” This was especially true of Europeanthinkers in Europe, where cultural fields alreadyconsolidated their autonomy during the 19thcentury (Bourdieu 1996; 2013), but it was alsotrue of some of the knowledge produced inoverseas colonial sites (Steinmetz forthcoming).This is not to say that semiautonomous fieldsare realms of intellectual freedom, however,since fields are traversed by differences,conflicts, and power asymmetries. Nonetheless,the determinants of knowledge that exist inside aspecific intellectual field are of a fundamentallydifferent sort from the determinants existingouside that field. Postcolonial theory, likeMarxist sociological approaches to the sociologyof knowledge, has not been attentive toprotections against the heteronomization ofknowledge. Both tend to trace cultural works todeterminants that are usually quite remote fromthe point of intellectual production, such ascapitalism or colonialism. Bourdieusian fieldtheory resembles Marxism and postcolonialtheory in seeking to explain cultural productioncontextually, but it has a more capacious sense of

the relevant determinants of knowledge, most ofwhich are located at a more proximate distancefrom intellectuals and their work than intraditional approaches to the sociology ofknowledge. Bourdieu’s approach also overcomesthe opposition between sociological approachesthat limit themselves to explaining the conditionsof production of works and humanitiesapproaches that focus on the formal analysis andunderstanding of works (see Bourdieu andHaacke 1995). Intellectual historians should nottake sides with contextualist or internalistaccounts or with some simple combination of thetwo, but should try to establish the exactconstellation of determinants of knowledgeincluding those that are irreducible to theindividual author.

Postcolonial theory has criticized metropolitanconceptual and explanatory formations in thesocial sciences that take a universalizing form. Iagree with M. Goswami that the divisionbetween a universalizing Marxism and aparticularizing postcolonial poststructuralism is adead end. A good example of overcoming thisdivision, despite the author’s own intentions, isChibber (2013; Steinmetz 2014b). Chibber’saccount, though putatively Marxist anduniversalist, acknowledges that the “ensemble ofsocial relations in any region need not besubsumed under one set of rules,” and that thevarious practices that comprise a historicalregional whole can be governed by verydissimilar logics, even as capital tries touniversalize itself at the same time (Chibber2013, p. 239). At the opposite end, Chakrabarty’sProvincializing Europe (2000) emphasizes“dissimilar logics” rather than universalizingones, but fully acknowledges the latter. Thisdebate is reminiscent of the late 19th centuryGerman methodological debates aroundHistorical Economics and theGeisteswissenschaften (Steinmetz 2014a). Tosome extent Chakrabarty’s approach aligns withthe German historical school and Chibber’s withthe generalizing, universalizing approach of theAustrian School or the “positivist” historian KarlLamprecht. The resolution of that earlier



"Postcolonial approaches loseall analytic power when they

are applied to any and allsituations. The word

colonialism changes from aconcept into an epithet when it

is used metaphorically."

historicism debate in the work of Rickert, Weber,Troeltsch, and Meinecke retained the idea of thesingular, unique historical fact or event butargued that it could also be explained. Thisdebate and its resolution appear to be veryrelevant for the current discussion.

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