SOVEREIGN SHAME The modern state, in its Weberian guise, must control its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. In its Foucauldian guise, the state must not invest too much time in the drawing, quartering, beheading, and delimbing of its subjects. Better to train docile bodies that do not need to be shocked into submission by violent displays of power. When combined, these analytical trends have troubling consequences: they cause us to look away from the extent to which the modern state is reliant on brute force; they predispose us to equate the premodern state with irrational, poorly managed violence; and they encourage us to overlook the centrality of shame in the practice of state sovereignty. Shaming is a kind of violence, insofar as it damages the standing of a person or group, and states everywhere (in contexts described as modern or premodern) are heavily invested in the politics of shame. As a logic of social control, shame can be intimate, addressed to the emotions and the physical body, or it can be a public sentiment felt by the nation. As foreign policy, shame can be felt in relation to other states, which are richer, stronger, more popular among tourists, or more convincingly modern. Two of our authors show how the management of shame is a preoccupation of state officials in markedly different settings. Read together, these essays suggest ways in which analytical attention to shame can dislodge commonplace notions of how modern states developed historically, and how they operate today.
Daniel Lord Smail takes us to the fourteenth-century Mediterranean cities of Lucca and Marseille, where government officials expended more energy in imposing fines and collecting debts than in preventing physical violence among civilians or unleashing it against them. The trend runs counter to standard accounts of medieval states caught up in theatrical violence, random or calculated. Smail argues that local courts operated as elaborate mechanisms for the retrieval of debts, which they accomplished through “predation,” or the confiscation and auctioning off of the debtor's goods. Judges sent criers to public squares and private homes to announce these acts of predation, which were humiliating for debtors and creditors alike. Humiliation was crucial to the enforcement of law in Marseille and Lucca, and even violent crimes became matters of debt payment when the accused failed to appear in court, a turn of events that usually ended in banishment and predation. This judicial infrastructure, Smail argues, provided the institutional muscle and enforcement capability that centralizing states would later coopt in their attempts to monopolize and rationalize violence. The latter goals were not the original intent of statecraft; rather, it was the just settlement of disputes through the public management of shame.
James Ellison explores the politics of shame in contemporary Ethiopia, where state officials subjected women to ridicule and highly coercive new dress codes in a successful campaign to ban the wearing of leather skirts. In the early 1960s, modernist bureaucrats (most belonging to northern, Amhara ethnic groups) undertook an extensive renovation of Haile Selassie's empire. In the south, this meant stamping out “backward” customs of all kinds, but especially those associated with immodest bodies. The handcrafted leather skirts worn by women in Konso district were outlawed; anyone caught wearing them was stripped and beaten. Ellison traces the effects of this intimate violence on individual women, the larger caste and ethnic groups to which they belonged, and the officials who carried out the campaign. The results were transformative on multiple fronts, as the shame of backwardness and the humiliation of those deemed backward combined to create new forms of citizenship and national identity. Ironically, the men who chastised women for wearing leather skirts were themselves denounced as “feudal” during the socialist revolution in 1974. They were removed from office, beaten, imprisoned, and their homes were looted. Again, this violence was programmatic and intimate. A cause and effect of national shame, it produced the traumas that now define modern political culture in Ethiopia.
THE ASIAN FRAME As any schoolchild will tell you, Asia is the largest continent. Indeed, bigness would appear to be its most distinctive feature, and any attempt to add nuance quickly reveals an embarrassing fact: Asia exists, as a place and an idea, in specific contrast to Europe, that little region on the extreme left of the continent. As any alert schoolchild will notice, Europe is part of Asia, but it is somehow so special, so distinctive, that we must pretend it is a continent to itself. The age of European dominance in Asia was simply the latest in a long series of political and economic systems that transected Eurasian societies, producing broad similarities in civilizational styles. Yet colonial knowledge insisted on the separation of things European and Asian. The “largest continent” became a scene of Otherness (for residents of the European metropoles) and a space of solidarity and resistance (for colonial subjects in the Asian peripheries). The arrangement was too simple, yet a certain political geography, still hegemonic, insists on this polarity. As three of our authors show, the analyst or activist who builds an Asian frame cannot keep Europe out of it, especially if he wants to, and this permeability has the unintended effect of enhancing multiple forms of Asian distinctiveness.
Carolien Stolte and Harald Fischer-Tiné consider the impact of Asianism among the Indian political and intellectual classes in the decades prior to independence. The idea that Asia was a place different from, and in some ways superior to, Europe was appealing to anti-colonial nationalists in India. Stolte and Fischer-Tiné draw out the major trends in Asianist thought, ranging from Tagore's claims for a uniquely spiritual East, to nostalgic yearnings for an Asia unified by a strong, expansive, Hindu civilization, to pragmatic calls for pan-Asian solidarity based not on shared cultures or histories, but on the shared predicament of European colonialism and resistance to it. Each of these tendencies, Stolte and Fischer-Tiné argue, was shaped in reaction to a globally dominant Europe, a political backdrop that reveals more about Asianism than any particular set of beliefs about Asia itself. As Indian elites soon discovered, their models of Asia were not always popular in China and Japan, where strong nationalist movements and a rapid, unapologetic embrace of things Western led many to dismiss Indian aspirations for Asia as weak, parochial, and a recipe for continued political subordination. The role played by self-Orientalization is obvious, and the brands of Asianism least subject to it were, ironically, the ones most willing to acknowledge European dominance and Indian weakness as real, historically contingent, and ultimately changeable conditions.
Warwick Anderson and Hans Pols invite us to reconsider the character of anti-colonial nationalism in Asia—specifically, in Southeast Asia—by looking at the prominent role scientists and physicians played in the region's nationalist movements. Although lawyers, literary types, religious leaders, and professionalized activists receive more attention in recent scholarship on post/colonial politics, Anderson and Pols remind us that science, biomedicine, and a confident modernism were once the motivating force of Third World nationalism. Analyzing the careers and influence of doctors in the Spanish Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, the authors lead us through a world that seems remarkably at odds with the South Asian activists who stressed the spiritual superiority of the East and the depravity of Western materialism. Indeed, India itself was home to an elite class greatly enamored of Western science and committed to scientific routes to modernization. In the massive shift to postcolonial biopolitics, the centrality of biomedicine and its practitioners was no coincidence. The progressive, universalizing ideologies associated with medical science, Anderson and Pols argue, were essential to early phases of decolonization, and recent fixations on “nostalgic and atavistic” visions of national culture, as seen through the lens of historicism and literary theory, obscure this earlier sensibility.
John T. Sidel strikes a delicate balance between political and cultural forces that originate in conditions local to Asian societies and trends that are more effectively explained by placing Asian societies in global frames of analysis. Working across the postcolonial Southeast Asian nation-states, Sidel assesses the historical development of nationalism in the mainland countries, which exhibit more primordialist models of nation, and in the island states, where national identity is more commonly understood to be an aspiration, a work in progress. This set of local contrasts is then analyzed in relation to what Sidel considers the principal factor deciding the fate of the “new nations” of Southeast Asia: namely, their various attempts to reintegrate local economies into global markets and Cold War political alignments. Unlike Geertz, who thought the central challenge of the new nations was to create a unified civil society out of a fragmented citizenry defined by competitive primordial ties, Sidel argues that the Asian frame that contains Laos, Vietnam, Burma, Indonesia, Singapore, and neighboring states is made of international materials and relationships. The complexity that results shows how far comparative analysis has moved from the culture-heavy models of Cold War American anthropology; and with benefit of hindsight, it shows how important cultural investments are to the development of regional and global political systems.
ANCIENTS AMONG US If you call an idea or a problem “ancient history,” you have dismissed it as unimportant. All evidence, including submission rates to this journal, suggests that most academic historians think ancient history is, to put it bluntly, “ancient history.” Despite repeated calls for papers on premodern topics, CSSH remains a journal dominated by comparative studies of modern society and history. Yet outside the academy, ancient history is, for most people, history of the most interesting kind. In the West, popular literature and film still draw heavily from the storehouse of Greek, Roman, and Abrahamic antiquity. In other regions, the storehouse is filled with materials from ancient India, Persia, China, and Japan. Modern historiography took shape in its engagement with these time-worn traditions, and the study of antiquity has proven as susceptible to intellectual fads as any other field of research. Indeed, the decades-long backlash against Orientalism has had a tremendous impact on the theory and practice of ancient history. Two of our authors urge us to return our attention to the study of the deep past, an endeavor that speaks directly to the mythopoetics of current political struggles (between, say, the West and the Rest) and has the potential to reveal linkages (between, say, ancient Indian and Babylonian societies) across what are presumed to be centuries of cultural difference. Ancient history, our authors contend, remains influential and politically formative; contemporary scholars should be able to explain why.
T. C. McCaskie steps out of his academic specialization in African history to examine developments in the “new Achaemenid historiography,” or the study of ancient Persia. In doing so, he reclaims the open relationship between ancient history and larger fields of intellectual discourse that prevailed well into the nineteenth century, when politicians, clergy, educated laypeople, and scholars were expected to know much about topics now considered “antiquarian.” McCaskie also positions himself to comment on the cohesive, thoroughly politicized links between antiquarian scholars, new media, and propagandist agendas. Because knowledge of ancient Persia is filtered almost entirely through Greek sources (that is, through accounts written by their enemies), the project of representing Persia resembles colonialist history; as Said famously argued, it is the point of origin for all Orientalist knowledge production. McCaskie considers various ways in which recent Achaemenid scholarship has tried to work around this situation, and how scholars comfortable with Hellenic sources have resisted these maneuvers. Debates of this sort are a sport ideally suited to the ivory tower, but McCaskie shows how the entire discourse is animated by popular accounts of the essential struggle between East and West. These accounts have proliferated during the War on Terror, but they are enduring intellectual contests. As the work of scholars and propagandists merges in new publics that contain both, McCaskie suggests that scholars will be unable to pretend that they have no stake in these contests, and non-participation will be read as a political choice.
Thomas R. Trautmann shifts our focus eastward, toward ancient India. Does ancient India have a history, he asks, and are contemporary historians interested to know it? The questions seem simple, but the answers are not what most contemporary readers would expect. As Trautmann points out, interest in ancient Indian civilization among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans was deep. Study of Indian languages, religions, and kinship systems was essential to the development of historical linguistics, anthropology, and race theory in Europe. Much of this story is now forgotten, as is the link between study of the Great Flood (an interest of Sir William Jones), Sanskrit texts, and concepts underlying modern philology. European scholars thought Indian historical knowledge was flawed because it was based on a much deeper chronology than that accepted in the Christian West, but even after the Genesis cosmology was rejected by Western historians in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the rejection of Indian historical sources held fast, and study of India's ancient past was eventually marginalized by study of its colonial and postcolonial history. For Trautmann, this turn away from ancient India prevents us from asking more profound questions about the origins of the calendrical systems that came to symbolize India's ahistoricism. Such study might provide new links between ancient India and Mesopotamia. The chronologies of these two societies show signs of mutual borrowing, and Trautmann ends his grand tour of the Indian past by suggesting that Sir William Jones was right all along. The Old World civilizations did share stories of the Great Flood, and much else. This sharing means that ancient history is the time/space in which the great opposites of Orientalism, East and West, eventually merge, making new politics and new histories possible.
CSSH DISCUSSION New kinship studies are closely identified with modifications and disruptions. Their subject matter falls, rather predictably, into a range that includes in/fertility, assisted reproduction, gamete donation, surrogate mothers, families made and chosen by gay, lesbian, and transgendered partners, and, newer still, accounts of human kinship with animals and, at the outer reaches of the genre, kin-like relations to things. Despite pretensions to novelty, anthropologists (and historians) have always used the study of kinship as a great unsettler of moral systems; much of the new kinship is conventional in exactly that sense, and its edginess quickly wears off. The demand for alternative material is now being met in fascinating studies of international adoption, and Jessaca Leinaweaver offers an insightful review of three new works in this vein. Because international adoption disrupts so many categories that are important to modern sensibilities—race, class, nationality, culture, identity—authors who study it are ideally situated to say important things about how each category is related to kinship, and challenged by adoptive kinship. Leinaweaver takes stock of the advances and silences that fill these books; she concludes, along with her authors, that “transnational adoption is actually a surprisingly conventional approach to family-making.” And so begins the search for the next new thing in new kinship studies.
