Clio/Anthropos: Exploring the Boundaries between History and Anthropology

§ 1 History and Anthropology: Strange Bedfellows

Eric Tagliacozzo and Andrew Willford

Academic disciplines, like political regimes, seem to generate their most assertive moments of self-rationalization when they perceive themselves to be responding to a crisis that casts doubt on the foundations upon which they stand. Academic and political processes are, of course, not simply parallel formations or the product of an odd juxtaposition. Rather, they are mutually constitutive forces in the workings of modernity. That is, the production of disciplines, cultures, and archives are part of the workings of power. This very observation has inspired much historical ethnography. The present volume recognizes and builds upon this understanding of power and knowledge¹ but also suggests further that an unsettling of academic disciplinarity—as one possible response to a perceived crisis of knowledge—opens up new opportunities for examining the inner workings of power, culture, and the archive. Put boldly, the authors in this volume, in varied ways, use the interdisciplinary boundaries of history and anthropology to reveal the contingencies of knowledge-production. By this we refer not only to the terminologies of expertise that produce disciplinary knowledge and evidentiary-based truth claims but also to the servicing of such truths in the name of political and cultural projects. Several of the essays in this volume reveal a parallel between the workings of cultural and political knowledge and the dynamic logic of the interstitial boundaries that animate disciplinary truths in academic life. In turn, this revelation proves particularly useful for producing a critique of the contradictions and contingencies within political identifications and ideologies, particularly within the various spaces of the colonial and postcolonial world.

The recent so-called crisis of representation in the social sciences (and, increasingly, in the humanities as well) has made crossing disciplines more and more common in history and anthropology. A sense of persisting urgency has been lent to this process by the publication of several seminal texts, such as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Clifford and Marcus’s Writing Culture (1986), and by the growth of the Subaltern, Postcolonial, and Cultural Studies fields since that time.² These critiques have refashioned scholarship primarily on the non-Western world, yet their combined influence has also been felt strongly in studies on Europe and North America. Anthropologists and historians alike have been grappling with these changes in vantage and representation and have increasingly been looking toward each other’s methods for answers on how to proceed. The present volume aims to tease out and explain the ramifications of each of these disciplines’ cadences increasingly turning toward each other for inspiration and for authorization. We were specifically interested in rethinking the relationship between power and culture, in reevaluating ideas and concepts of incorporation and resistance, and in examining hegemony and history in an increasingly asymmetrical global system.

As Nicholas Dirks has suggested, the imbrication of history and anthropology emerged at a time when the colonial state changed from a ‘revenue state’ to an ‘ethnographic state’ (2002: 56). Dirks argues that the colonial state authorized an ethnographic imperative to know its subjects—that is, to archive through an explosion of writings and classifications about caste and various other barbaric native practices. As an ethnographic archive and as a primary historical source, the state, he suggests, produces, adjudicates, organizes, and maintains the discourses that become available as the primary texts of history (2002: 59). In a word, the ethnographic archive became a principal form of governmentality at the same time that governmentality expressed itself through the categories of historical thought and writing (61). The sedimentation and classification of knowledge, in other words, took place through ethnographic practice, a legacy of historical anthropologizing that is troubling, to say the least. Dirks reminds us, as have many Subaltern Studies scholars, that the archive already bears the traces of the state’s anxious regimes of classificatory knowledge-production in all cases.

This troubling of the archive need not, of course, invalidate various truths of these same repositories (or of ethnography, for that matter), though it opens up to us alternative readings of both. The so-called state³ is not a monolithic or unitary subject, and the authorizing voice of its documents often betrays anxieties of rule. One of the principal contributions of this volume, as demonstrated in several of its essays, is that it lays bare various reasons behind the anxieties of rule, or of authorizing knowledges in general. This, we maintain, is felicitously deciphered through the disciplinary boundary-crossing of anthropology and history, its troubling history notwithstanding. Yet Dirks’s points are worth further reflection.

For instance, in locating a classificatory truth that is attempted by various authorizing gestures (states, laws, authorities, institutions) but never fully achieved, one might find that the logic of the supplement (Derrida 1976: 141–164) is at work in the generation of ethnographic truths about colonial or postcolonial subjects. That is, an originary lack in the Law itself may be haunted by its own violent suppression of its arbitrariness (i.e., a performative founding act). The historicity and contingency of the state’s truth claims, for instance, may require compensatory elaboration in a chain of substitutions, signifiable in time and space as ethnographic Others, thus deferring and displacing this originary lack with supplementary violence.⁴ As Derrida argues, there is a mystical dimension to authority and the Law, in its performative utterance: There is here a silence walled up in the violent structure of the founding act; walled up, walled in because this silence is not exterior to language (2002: 242). The act is haunted, he adds, as its ghostliness deconstructs from within all assurance of presence, all certainty no criteriology assuring us of the justice of a decision.... But as a performative cannot be just, in the sense of justice, except by grounding itself in the conventions and so on of other performatives, buried or not, it always maintains within itself some irruptive violence (2002: 253–256). In this sense, an originary lack inherent in the irruptive violence of Law is supplemented through the archive fever (Derrida 1995) of an ethnographic state. Grounding itself in conventions provides an aura of retroactive historicity to the violence of the state and Law; and the ethnographic archive, in turn, is a critical part of this exercise and the exercising of the Law’s ghostliness. That is, the contingency inherent in the violence of the letter of the Law, or the colonial or postcolonial state more generally, requires a continuous source of exteriority as a source of authority. This is the function of the ethnographic archive.

Read in such a light, our understanding of the governmentality of the colonial state is enriched. The limits and excess inherent in the practices of the ethnographic state allow us to see, paradoxically perhaps, how scholars can deconstruct, interrogate, and critique official historiographies while simultaneously theorizing the dialectical push and pull between state imaginaries and various subjects as they are constituted, circumscribed, and affected by the illocutionary force of state practices, ideologies, and discourses.

The authors in this book are concerned with the problem of agency and subjectivity vis-à-vis the powers of the law or the state. As David Arnold (Chapter 2) argues, through an optic first opened by Foucault, colonial governmentality . . . allows for seeing colonialism as a form of modernity sufficiently powerful and persuasive to impel (in his case) Indians to rethink themselves. Second, it exemplifies agency in that Indians alone are capable of translating, negotiating, and reconstituting that modernity as their own. The instability of the state, law, or authority does not necessarily lead to an agency or intentionality that is not subject to the gaze of the state’s disciplinary arm or identificatory imago. Put simply, subalterns are not making history of their own choosing, free from the force of law, or the traces of the historical archive. Nevertheless, in the silences and elisions of the disciplinary gaze, as David William Cohen (Chapter 9) argues, there is fertile ground for rethinking both knowledge-production and subject-making.

In our view, the stark choices between subjection and intentionality, or between closure and openness, are not tenable intellectual positions. Rather, in seeing oscillations within disciplines and subjects, an interpretive spectrum opens that avoids historicism or romanticism. That is, just as the apparent historicism of context appears to determine how actual subjects would think, feel, and identify, we see an interruption coming from two juxtapositions of authoritative knowledge. First, the purported governmentality of power structures that be—and with them the state practices including, though certainly not limited to, the ethnographic archiving of difference—is itself supplemented through the agentive practices of discrete subjects. Through this the lacking force of law is reiterated by subaltern subjects who appropriate authorized knowledge to their own ends (but not of their own free choosing, of course). That is, the suturing of ideological gaps occurs in the face of suppressed or contingent knowledges through the work of agentive subjects who complete or silence the ideological gaps, rather than piercing the veil of ideology, which would represent a more romantic view of subaltern agency. Indeed, the excess of identification that often occurs where ideology appears most absurd and untenable suggests that the tenacious hold of ethnic and religious hierarchies, purities, and boundaries is contingent upon the irruptive violence (and the supplementary archive practice of the ethnographic state), as Derrida would have it, of colonial and postcolonial statecraft. The ghostliness that deconstructs from within does not, in other words, (necessarily) produce critical reflection, but rather, excessive identification in the shadow of the Other’s lack, as in Lacan’s designation of neurotic and compulsive identification. The impossibility—yet tenacity—of certain identifications are elucidated in several of these essays, though in different theoretical registers, be they Foulcauldian, Marxian, Lacanian, or Derridean.

A second point, and one that parallels the first, concerns the production of knowledge at the interstices of disciplinary authority. One might ask, as does David William Cohen here, whether gesturing toward another discipline acts to complete or to further authorize the disciplinary status that is borrowing or smuggling from the other. The logic of the supplement again shadows the interdisciplinary move. Is anthropology’s or history’s lack supplemented or reauthorized through their respective boundary crossings? Are new gaps and fissures created by the cross-boundary intervention leading to a reiteration of the very notion of disciplinarity, and the very need to fill in those gaps with the authority of the archive and ethnography, respectively? As Cohen puts it succinctly, the blurring model (with regards to interdisciplinarity) evades epistemological reflection. Rather, what we call for, and hopefully achieve, is a critical reflection upon the processes of authoritative action and disciplinarity. This is a call for seeing without the enframing disciplinary logics of vision.⁵ The interweaving of, and parallels between, academic knowledge-production and knowledge, power, and subjection in the political field are, we claim, better understood through this attentiveness to the interstices and boundaries that lie at the heart of these essays.

Toward that end, the editors invited essays from several prominent practitioners within both fields, whose interests, methodologies, and expertise spanned disciplinary and geographic boundaries. For the anthropologists, the editors selected Claudio Lomnitz of Columbia University, two of whose books, Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space (1992) and Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (2001), spoke directly to these processes. Also invited was Danilyn Rutherford of the Anthropology Department of the University of Chicago. Rutherford’s recent book, Raiding the Land of Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier (2003), exemplifies the interdisciplinary spirit we were seeking in its combination of theoretical innovation, ethnographic sensitivity, and historical breadth and depth.⁶ The third anthropologist asked to present work was Viranjini Munasinghe of Cornell University, whose book Calaloo or Tossed Salad: East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad (2002) is an ethnography simultaneously concerned with the processes of history.

The historians are represented through David Arnold of Warwick University, formerly at the University of London (SOAS), who is the author of two works which themselves cross boundaries, this time in India—Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in NineteenthCentury India (1993) and Police Power and Colonial Rule, Madras, 1859–1947 (1986). A second historian invited was David William Cohen of the University of Michigan, whose books (including Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape [1989] and The Combing of History [1994]) have dealt with these themes in Africa. Our third historian was Prasenjit Duara of the University of Chicago / National University of Singapore, whose books Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (1988) and Rescuing History from the Nation (1995) cross the boundaries between history and anthropological approaches as well. Both of the editors then wrote a chapter for the ensuing volume too, Willford tacking from the anthropological side of things and Tagliacozzo leaning in historically.⁷ The geographical expertise covered in this volume is quite global, therefore; Mexico, the Caribbean, Africa, India, China, Southeast Asia, and Oceania are all explored.

The turn toward anthropological methods and questions by scholars engaged with history has been under way for quite some time now. Though we will not offer a comprehensive assessment here,⁸ perhaps the signal moment in this process was the series of essays that appeared in the Journal of Modern History in the 1980s; these came in direct response to the publication of Robert Darnton’s Great Cat Massacre (1984).⁹ Darnton, heavily influenced by his Princeton-area colleague in anthropology, Clifford Geertz, undertook a social history of events surrounding Carnival in Paris in the 1730s. His avenue of vision was explicitly symbolic, following ideas first suggested by Geertz in Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight (1973). This was history as it had not been done before, and the results both pleased and outraged a range of specialists on both sides of the Atlantic. Since this great debate, other historians have made use of the techniques and methodologies of anthropology; some of the better-known practitioners include Prasenjit Duara (for China), Robert Harms (for Africa), and Ann Stoler¹⁰ (for Indonesia, and, increasingly, for colonial societies generally).¹¹ The successes (or failures) of these experiments have been judged differently by different scholars, but the debate on how historians see has certainly been richer as a result.

From the anthropological side, Eric Wolf ’s influential Europe and the People Without History (1982), aside from providing a masterful political-economic history of the last five centuries, provoked anthropologists to reconsider their privileging of fieldwork-derived hypothetical isolates. Wolf historicized the largely synchronic paradigms in sociocultural anthropology of the 1950s and 1960s by demonstrating their emergence in reaction to the ethnocentric excesses of cultural evolutionism. While synchronic analyses attempted to demonstrate the functional validity of non-Western societies and institutions, the elision of history and questions of power within such studies privileged structure over agency and stasis over change. While Clifford Geertz’s ideas may have inspired some historians, his focus on the semiotic process—his famous ever-changing webs of meaning—suggested the importance of temporal inquiry. Indeed, much of Geertz’s writing incorporated a long-range analysis (Islam Observed, 1968; Negara, 1980; The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973). However, Geertz, while inspiring interest among historians, also inspired a historical and political-economic critique of his analysis of meaning. Both the camps of Marxian theorists interested in the social production of value within and between societies (e.g., Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz) and the postcolonial- and Foucault-inspired scholars of the genealogies of cultural / political discourses (e.g., Bernard Cohn [1990], John and Jean Comaroff [1993–1997], Nicholas Dirks [1987], Renato Rosaldo [1980], Talal Asad [1993], and Michel-Rolf Trouillot [1995]) are attentive to power and hierarchies of knowledge. Also, the more structurally oriented analyses of social continuity and dialectical engagement within global systems (Marshall Sahlins [1982], Jonathan Friedman [1994], and Bruce Kapferer [1998], for example) looked to questions of practice and agency through history. It might be said, particularly for Sahlins and Kapferer, that indigenous notions of history were always already theorized through culturally distinct logics that generated their own understandings of temporality.

Therefore, while we cannot and should not envisage an anthropology that does not look to historical analysis in doing historical work, from this culturalist structuralist perspective, academics cannot deploy a transhistorical category to understand the very academic category we call history. In a famous debate between Gananath Obeyesekere (1997) and Marshall Sahlins (1995), however, Obeyesekere accused Sahlins of robbing the Hawaiians of the capacity to reason, in effect Orientalizing the Hawaiian conception of temporality, personhood, and cosmology by subsuming their conceptual capacity under the culturally distinct logic of mythico-praxis. Sahlins, in turn, accused Obeyesekere of silencing Hawaiian (cultural) voices and of projecting a universal Western subjectivity upon the reading of the archive. While we do not wish to enter into the merits or demerits of this debate, the theoretical differences between the two revealed the disjunctures between a postcolonial, psychoanalytic, and transhistorical intervention (Obeyesekere) and that of a culturally relative structuralist (Sahlins) reading of the archive. The key point being suggested here is that no amount of data being marshaled by either scholar would satisfy the other, given that their intractable positions vis-à-vis the evidentiary sources were grounded in their different epistemologies.

Comparative questions, never more urgently asked in an ever-globalizing capitalist world, require an understanding of the contingencies of difference. The current academic seductions of globalization and the pressing need for theorizing diaspora, displacement, inequality, violence, and revivalism within an increasingly polarized world system tempt social analysts into making categorical, and often teleological, generalizations. These ultimately privilege Western epistemic forms alongside elite, non-Western assertions of cultural difference. Rather than allowing such academic, and ultimately politically charged, discourses to become naturalized and inevitable (as suggested by the now infamous Clash of Civilizations hypothesis authored by Samuel Huntington [1996]), the present volume seeks avenues for studying the contingencies of global interaction and the politics of cultural representation. By drawing on the anthropological perspective of local knowledge, to use Geertz’s designation, coupled with the longitudinal genealogy of how the local has been produced, we seek dialogue and new directions for future interdisciplinary collaboration.¹²

MAP 1.1: Sites discussed in the volume.

These essays achieve these aims in different ways. David William Cohen, who is both a professional anthropologist and a historian, working on materials from Africa, argues in Chapter 9 that the metaphors of smuggling, backing into, and blurring have served as several means of explaining the development of historical anthropology. These movements have been particularly pronounced in the post–World War II relations between the disciplines of anthropology and history. However, Cohen stresses that these frames provide at best only a restricted view of the unfolding of new work claiming the status of historical anthropology. For Cohen, to hold that historical anthropology can be understood by reference to the biographies of disciplines is to suggest that there are no other languages, paradigms, and epistemes other than those emergent within the disciplines. Important elements within the unfolding literature associated with historical anthropology may also be reckoned as developing outside the disciplines, or against discipline. There may be an ethic reflected in this work that the potential power of historical anthropology may lie in the absence of disciplinary configuration and in the absence of an encompassing and controlling account of the field. In this his work is profoundly democratic: It shuns the idea of a master narrative. In fact, one of the great possibilities of historical anthropology, according to Cohen, is this transgressive quality of the marriage between the disciplines, as the union between the two approaches destabilizes the notion that any one journey toward understanding local truths is going to be the correct one.

Prasenjit Duara, writing about China in Chapter 7, extends this by considering the circumstances under which anthropology becomes part of the project of nation-making in mid-twentieth-century East Asia.¹³ Japanese anthropology, which flourished under imperialist expansionism, made racially and culturally based anthropogenetic claims upon indigenous peoples and the land upon which they lived in regions such as Manchuria. Chinese anthropology developed its own historically based ethnography in response to such claims in these contested regions, thereby creating some of the conditions for absorbing the peripheries of the old empire into the emerging nation-state. The confluence of these two forces is fascinating: it shows in one arena one of the larger themes of this volume, which is that both history and anthropology were continually used and reused for different ends by different parties at different times. Though the Japanese surveys of Manchuria were among some of the most detailed ethnographic work ever done in Asia up until that time (and still in fact hold up well in certain cases and on certain topics), the very production of such knowledge under the very political circumstances of occupation rendered this same knowledge as problematic and suspect to the Chinese who inherited Manchuria as part of their own nation-state after 1949. Duara explores these dualities over a period of time when his very oscillation of authenticity and reliability was cast into doubt, not so much by the nature of the findings, but by the process of knowledge-production itself during a turbulent political era in East Asia.

David Arnold, whose research focus has been South Asia generally and India in particular, considers different historical and anthropological approaches to colonialism and argues for the importance of colonialism as a subject of scholarly investigation in and of itself. In Chapter 2 Arnold focuses on the idea of a colonial subject, primarily with respect to recent writing on South Asia. He considers the impact of historical anthropology on writing about this part of the world, and of Foucault, Said, and Subaltern Studies as well. Arnold argues for a positive view of the colonial subject and of his or her agency, rather than a passive one in which the subject is simply made by the colonial state. His chapter, therefore, has resonance far outside of South Asian Studies proper—the birthplace of Subaltern Studies where he was one of the founding members of that collective. If the colonial subject enters these discussions as a modulator of these paradigms and not just as an object of classification, typification, and rule, then some of the power dialectics inherent in these questions of how knowledge and order are produced quickly change. Arnold has been one of the scholars most responsible for helping along this sea change in vantage, and his views are quite apparent in this volume.

Eric Tagliacozzo, a specialist on Southeast Asian history, takes a different tack in examining these questions, concentrating instead on the meeting between history and anthropology in inanimate objects. In Chapter 4 Tagliacozzo explores the life histories of export ceramics in various Philippine societies, as seen from both historical and ethnographic points of view. Trade ceramics have come to the Philippines for well over a thousand years, and they have been incorporated into local lifeways in a bewildering variety of uses. Tagliacozzo shows how some pieces are said to be able to fly and / or talk, while others have been powdered down to make medicines, and still others have been used to bury the dead. Historical notices on the use of ceramics in local cultural complexes are abundant, and the twentieth century saw anthropologists doing concerted fieldwork to uncover the many uses of these objects in various Philippine societies. Tagliacozzo explores the history of tradewares in the Philippines from both historical and anthropological vantages and asks how they should be interpreted in the longue durée narrative of Philippine culture and society. His concern for the role of inanimate objects as part of these discourses shows how the meeting between the two disciplines is not only geared toward explaining human beings, but geared toward the larger world that human beings live in, alter, and exploit at the same time. Few objects contain in their physical structures and in their historical passages a better lesson toward these ends than tradewares, since these pieces have been prized and traded for a very long time. They have also undergone metamorphoses in meaning at numerous points along their journeys.

The historians’ essays in this volume show how much anthropology as a discipline, and more importantly as an epistemological means of inquiry, has penetrated into historical writing. Each of the authors has appropriated different aspects of anthropological thinking into the fiber of his or her discussion. For David William Cohen, who works on Africa, there is a concern in bringing forth life histories of people for whom almost all historical records have been produced by colonizers. For David Arnold, who works on India, the concern has been subalternity: how, as others in this school have asked before him, do we get the colonial subject to speak? Arnold resists a frequently expressed ethnographic romance with voicing the subaltern, noting that speaking is not enough when the conditions of enunciation are such that such speech is inaudible or ineffectual in producing political agency for the subaltern subject.¹⁴ Can ethnographic methods provide any guide here? Arnold tells us that ethnography is not about giving voice to the Manichean struggle of the authentic subaltern against its oppressor. Rather, by delving into non-confrontational struggles, we highlight the omnipresent tension and contradictions between hegemony and autonomy in consciousness, between submission and resistance in practice. To Arnold, this allows us to theorize more richly the conditions of subjection in the postcolonial context. Or, we could ask, is giving voice, as a means to make truth claims for culture and authenticity in ethnographic terms, ever isolable from the social and institutional conditions of enunciation and iterability? For Duara, the written record is enormous: Japanese ethnological literature on China is voluminous, but how is it to be interpreted? How should it be read? And for Tagliacozzo, the vestigial remains are not texts, but objects themselves—traditionally the domain of ethno-archaeologists to explain. Yet how can history and anthropology be married in this case to say something meaningful about the social lives of these things, as Arjun Appadurai (1986) has elegantly written? Can we trace objects—and with them the culture of human beings—through historical time and into an ethnographic present? In all of these cases, the volume’s historians have been asking how anthropology destabilizes normative historiographical ways of knowing, in a variety of contexts and in a broad spectrum of places.

Can history still be written without recourse to anthropological thinking and the questions anthropology asks in its treatment of everyday living subjects? It certainly can; historians traffic with the dead, usually, and as such the nature of excavating life histories and life experiences of those already departed is at base a different endeavor from ethnography. There is no talking back in history—or very little of it until we get to the past several decades, at any rate. Yet it has become clear that much of the richest and newest history writing has seen fit to select and adapt anthropological methodologies, despite these disjunctures in access to the subjects of study. This volume argues that this willingness stems from a fundamental recognition by historians of the efficacy of anthropological lines of inquiry. A newfound reflection on the self as author has permeated Clio’s disciples, for example, and there are good reasons to believe that that this shift in vantage point is at least partially based on a sideways glance at the evolution of the so-called reflexive turn in anthropology. Similarly, a rigorous reinterpretation of classifying rubrics, mechanisms, and categories in writing history is also (arguably) attributable to historians reading anthropologists, as these epistemologies underwent such serious self-scrutiny among ethnographers that historians could hardly fail to notice.

Turning now to the anthropologists in this volume, Viranjini Munasinghe, a specialist on ethnicity and nationalism in the Caribbean, traces the antecedents for contemporary Trinidadian ethnic discourses to the discourses of metropolitan agents and planters who desired cheap and bonded labor to replace the labor of ex-slaves after emancipation. Focusing primarily upon the period prior to the arrival of Indians in Trinidad, Munasinghe argues in Chapter 6 that the production of cultural difference was independent of direct social contact and, as such, anticipated future relations between Indo and Agro-Trinidadians. A template, in other words, for what was to follow, traces of which are still felt contemporaneously, was forged in the crucible of colonial discourse, policy, and power. In making a case for indentured labor, they created a discourse about cultural difference that demarcated the Negro from the Coolie. These same characteristics, now naturalized, are used by Trinidadians to draw distinctions between those of African descent and Indian descent, but the role of the producers of this cultural difference remains opaque. By foregrounding the productive context of this cultural difference—the alleged post-emancipation labor problem in Trinidad—Munasinghe historicizes today’s ethnic stereotypes by anchoring them in a specific political economy, while also offering, more broadly, a trenchant critique of cultural essentialism. She also presents a general argument about ethnicity that forces a reconceptualization of the relation between space and the production of cultural difference. Munasinghe argues that the production of cultural difference in the form of an ethnic boundary is not necessarily contingent upon a shared physical space or face-to-face interaction, or organized interactions, between the groups in question, a common assumption in theorizing ethnicity.

Claudio Lomnitz, like Cohen a professional anthropologist and a professional historian, offers a useful bridge between these two disciplines. Writing in Chapter 5 on Mexican history, culture, and nationalism, Lomnitz employs the concept of the chronotope from Bakthin to demonstrate how spatiotemporal frameworks were deployed as narrative tools in creating a historical consciousness of dependency with regard to Mexico’s relationships with the United States during the era of the Porfirio Diaz presidency. Through chronotopes, Lomnitz argues, movement in space can be figured as movement in time, and vice versa . . . political change is guided by or leads to the invention of new chronotopes. As key elements of political ideology and statecraft, chronotopes also prove felicitous to the discussion of history and ethnography. Through that which went untranslated, unheard, or misconstrued, Lomnitz demonstrates how the chronotope established a pernicious logic of dependency that silenced the experiences of everyday subjects. Specifically, the contours of the image that took shape during Diaz’s dictatorship were shaped by regimes of value, which included how Mexico was represented on Wall Street and in the increasingly dialogic space of the transnational zone along the borderlands.

Lomnitz describes subtle and not so subtle forms of racialization that emerged through photographic representations of Mexico. The chronotope of the past as present, situating Mexico vis-à-vis the United States, was figured with images by American photographers, acting as ethnographic archivists. The centerpiece of the essay is an extended analysis of James Creelman’s interview of President Diaz. Creelman, known for his work in the dubious racialized science of physiognomy, described Diaz as the natural leader of an inferior people. Lomnitz explains why Diaz allowed himself to be interviewed by Creelman, suggesting that the chronotope of dependency made him dependent upon a racist narrative in order to justify a political discourse of transitional rule. Finally, Lomnitz asks why alternative representations of Mexico, particularly muckraking and other de-essentializing narratives proved nontranslatable and mute during the chronotope of dependency period.

Andrew Willford (Chapter 8), writing on Malaysia and specifically the Tamil-speaking diaspora in this nation-state, traces the ethnic political divides of colonial to contemporary labor discourses. Through analysis of the Tamils’ socioeconomic history, Willford addresses the following questions: Why, in the midst of economic expansion, have the Tamils languished behind other ethnic groups in Malaysia? Why, given their political weakness, are Tamils in Malaysia plagued by internal divisions? Last, why do many Tamils express their collective identity and search for individual empowerment through religion? Willford argues that while historical political economic analysis sheds necessary light upon the contours of ethnic politics in Malaysia, the ostensible obsession with ethnic identity in Malaysia reveals, paradoxically, the unstable, contingent, and indeed empty reality of the ethnic signifier in nationalist ideology. Willford shows how the archiving of ethnic stereotypes in Malaysia was built upon techniques of repetition, acting against memories and experiences that were often more ethnically or culturally fluid or permeable. In this sense, his chapter shares with Lomnitz, Duara, Rutherford, and Munasinghe a concern with the phantasmic and racialized force behind national imaginaries, particularly as they take ethnic and religious form. The impossibility of naturalization or symbolic closure in ethnonationalist discourse, it is argued, fuels a fetishistic attachment to cultural and religious identity as an aspiration to authenticity. Willford concludes with a discussion of how Tamil Hindu revivalism is situated within the larger domain of Malaysian nationalism. In conclusion, the tension between the historiographic naturalization of difference and the apparently compelled ethnographic reiteration of Tamil or Indian difference is brought into sharp relief. This is done not to suggest that the present is the natural outcome of the past, but rather, to demonstrate a spectral presence in the archive that still haunts the living.

The theme of impossible naturalization, or the anxieties of authenticity and legitimacy in colonial and postcolonial rule, is addressed forcefully by Danilyn Rutherford (Chapter 3), whose familiarity with Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Papuan societies allows her to draw into sharp analysis the antecedents of separatism and tensions between the Indonesian state, its nation-making projects, and the anxious legacies of colonial rule. Rutherford’s essay engages a seemingly