Forests in India are at the center of highly charged conflicts. Use of the past by the different historical subjects engaged in these contests over forest lands in India results in several threads intertwined across a shared frame. I shall try to unravel only one strand in this essay, namely, the official ideologies implicated in colonial forestry and the technologies of power that it spawned. I will show how the colonial state, drawing on several pasts, constructed the question of forests in India.

In the century since Franz Boas began his field work on the Northwest Coast, the Kwakwaka'wakw1 potlatch has proved irresistible to the anthropological imagination. It has been variously interpreted as an interest-bearing investment of property (Boas 1897), as a demonstration of a paranoid, megalomaniacal personality (Benedict 1934), as a substitution for warfare (Codere 1950), as a means of distributing food (Piddcocke 1965; Vayda 1961), as a phenomenon of social morphology (Levi-Strauss 1969; Rosman and Rubel 1971), and as a religious event (Goldman 1975; Walens 1981). Indeed, an intellectual history of anthropology can now be written simply by examining how the Kwakwaka'wakw potlatch has served the various theoretical schools (see Michaelson 1979). If anything unites such disparate accounts, however, I suggest it is an underestimation of the impact of European colonization on Kwakwaka'wakw society.2 Our understanding of the nineteenth-century potlatch has been limited by a tendency to exclude Kwakwaka'wakw cosmology from the colonial power dynamic. This study contributes, then, to the longrunning, and at times vociferous, scholarly discourse on the potlatch by focusing directly on the cultural repercussions of the colonial experience. Consequently, it is not an analysis simply of the funding or logistics of exchange: This essay attempts to situate the cosmologies behind the gift in their changing historical context in order to assess the socio-cultural impact of the colonial encounter on native systems of belief.

Many of the blood dyscrasias show more or less distinct inheritability and the familial character offers no new problem. But the racial specificity [of sickle cell anemia] is unique. If found to hold true, this would indicate that the primary basis for the disease must be laid in conditions far removed from any possible accident of the environment…. [W]e must assume that "the disease depends primarily on some fundamental racial peculiarity of the blood forming tissues.

—G. S. Graham (1924)

Duncan Salkeld's study of madness in the age of Shakespeare is conceived of as being against the grain of both traditional literary criticism and historiography. Noting that the critical contemplation of the inner life of Shakespearean character has been central (as far back as Coleridge) to previous approaches to the study of madness in Shakespeare, Salkeld argues instead that the “inner worlds of the mind of Shakespearean characterization are largely represented by external appearance, in language describing corporeal states.” Thus, the towering constructs of personality in Lear and Hamlet, for example, are turned inside out when critical attention is focused on the “materiality” of madness and its forms. This privileging of “external appearance” and “corporeality” over the imagined inner life of character is licensed by Salkeld's thesis that personal crises in the dramatic lives of Shakespeare's tragic heroes and heroines must invariably be read qua political crisis. The author writes that any “discussion of the internal life of a character then becomes a second order issue, and considerably more problematic when the historical specificity of these conditions is addressed” (p. 2).

Economically the contradiction between town and country is an extremely antagonistic one both in capitalist society, where under the rule of the bourgeoisie the towns ruthlessly plunder the countryside, and in the Kuomingtang areas in China, where under the rule of foreign imperialism and the Chinese big compradore bourgeoisie the towns most rapaciously plunder the countryside. But in a socialist country and in our own revolutionary base areas, this antagonistic contraction has changed into one that is non-antagonistic; and when communist society is reached it will be abolished.

[Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) 1937:345]

People are eating each other, came the message from southern Guangxi to Peking in the early summer of 1968, as the violent phase of the Cultural Revolution was drawing to a close. When militia reinforcements arrived in Wuxuan, parts of decomposing corpses still festooned the town center (Zheng 1993:2–3). No proper investigation was conducted, however, for this was a county in which order had already been imposed and the rebels had been crushed. Only in 1981–83, long after the Gang of Four had collapsed, was an investigation team sent into the county. It compiled a list of those eaten and a number of the ringleaders in cannibalism. Fifteen were jailed, and 130 Party members and cadres were disciplined. The Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region announced the expulsion from the Party of all who had eaten human flesh.1 But the regulations were withdrawn quickly for fear that the document would be slipped out to Hong Kong and reveal this episode of cannibalism to the world (Zheng 1993:52).