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Colonial Project (colonial + project)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

GETTING BY THE OCCUPATION: How Violence Became Normal during the Second Palestinian Intifada

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2008
LORI ALLEN
ABSTRACT The second Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation, which began in September 2000, saw Palestinian areas repeatedly invaded and shelled by Israeli forces. A long history of war and targeted cities is told along the thoroughfares of Palestinian towns; memories of past battles and defeats inscribed in street signs recall massacres in places like Tel Al-Za'atar and Deir Yasin. But recent events were more important than any official marker and formed the most relevant base by which Palestinians organized their lives. Commemorative cultural production and basic acts of physically getting around that became central to the spatial and social practices by which reorientation and adaptation to violence occurred in the occupied Palestinian territories. This article analyzes the spaciotemporal, embodied, and symbolic aspects of the experience of violence, and the political significance of cultural practices whereby violence is routinized. Such an approach provides a lens onto the power of violence in Israel's colonial project in the occupied territories that neither necessitates an assumption that violence is all determining of Palestinian experience, nor a championing of every act of Palestinian survival as heroic resistance. Memorialization that occurs in storytelling, in visual culture, in the naming of places and moving through spaces is one way in which this happens. The concept of "getting by" captures the many spatial and commemorative forms by which Palestinians manage everyday survival. The kind of agency that is entailed in practices whereby people manage, get by, adapt, and the social significance of getting used to it may be somewhat nebulous and unobtrusive as it develops in the shadow of spectacular battles and bloodshed. I demonstrate that this routinization of violence in and of itself, the fact of getting by, just existing in an everyday way, is socially and politically significant in Palestine. [source]

Understanding Sierra Leone in Colonial West Africa: A Synoptic Socio-Political History

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 3 2009
Joseph Bangura
Sierra Leone played a pivotal role in the success of the British colonial project in West Africa in the 19th century. In 1866, it served as the administrative headquarters for the colonies of Lagos, the Gold Coast now Ghana and Bathurst Gambia. Professionals, clergymen, and intellectuals from Sierra Leone, particularly Creoles, served as civil servants, engineers, and medical doctors in Nigeria, Ghana, and the Gambia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Sierra Leone also educated one of the first crops of Western-educated elites in West Africa. In short, despite experiencing a devastating civil war, evidently Sierra Leone is gradually regaining its quintessential role as one of the oldest, peaceful, and democratic states in West Africa. [source]

An anti-history of a non-people: Kurds, colonialism, and nationalism in the history of anthropology

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 1 2009
Christopher Houston
In this article I seek to contest certain aspects of the 1960s revisionist history of the discipline of anthropology, narratives that can be accused ironically of an autocentric overestimation of the power of the imperial West in their very uncovering of its more or less hidden influence over the genre of ethnography and anthropological practice. Taking as my focus in this regard the case of the anthropology of the Kurds, I suggest that not only have Western ethnographic texts been relatively un-influential in the wider scheme of discourse about Kurds, but also that the recent decision of Kurdish publishing houses in Istanbul to translate and re-publish them indicates where in the present many Kurds feel an active ,colonial project' is continuing. The role and development of anthropology in Turkey, then, complicate this by now decades-old examination of the embeddedness of ethnographic discourse in Western modernist projects of political transformation. Résumé L'auteur de cet article cherche à contester certains aspects de l'histoire révisionniste de la discipline anthropologique qui avait cours dans les années 1960 et que l'on peut accuser, avec ironie, d'une surestimation autocentrée de la puissance de l'Occident impérial alors même qu'elle démasquait l'influence plus ou moins voilée de celui-ci sur l'ethnographie et la pratique anthropologique. Centrant son approche sur le cas de l'anthropologie des Kurdes, l'auteur suggère que non seulement les textes ethnographiques occidentaux ont eu relativement peu d'influence sur le discours général concernant les Kurdes, mais que la récente décision des maisons d'éditions kurdes d'Istanbul de traduire et de republier ces ouvrages indique dans quel domaine beaucoup de Kurdes sentent aujourd'hui encore un «projet colonial»à l',uvre. Le rôle et le développement de l'anthropologie en Turquie vient encore compliquer le problème, avec des dizaines d'années d'étude de l'inclusion du discours ethnographique dans les projets modernistes occidentaux de transformation politique. [source]

Searching for Sacajawea: Whitened Reproductions and Endarkened Representations

HYPATIA, Issue 2 2007
Wanda Pillow
Pillow's aim is to demonstrate how representations of Sacajawea have shifted in writings about the Lewis and Clark expedition in ways that support manifest destiny and white colonial projects. This essay begins with a general account of Sacajawea. The next section uses two novels (one hundred years apart) to make the case that shifts in the representation of this important historical figure serve similar purposes. There is some attention to white suffragist representations, but the central contrast is between manifest destiny and multiculturalism. The final section addresses the important question of whether it is possible for feminists to theorize Sacajawea in ways that are not co-opted by colonial projects. [source]