This project discusses critical voices that have challenged the dominant colonial narrative in the context of the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia. The project combines journalistic and academic writing... Show moreThis project discusses critical voices that have challenged the dominant colonial narrative in the context of the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia. The project combines journalistic and academic writing with musical performance and film making to amplify these voices and to analyse why they have long been ignored in the public and academic debate. Show less
On China's web, networked actors ranging from state agencies to private Internet users engage in highly active online discourse. Yet as diverse as this discourse may be, political content remains... Show moreOn China's web, networked actors ranging from state agencies to private Internet users engage in highly active online discourse. Yet as diverse as this discourse may be, political content remains highly regulated, particularly on issues that affect the legitimacy of the ruling party. A prominent issue in this regard has been modern Chinese history, particularly the “national humiliation” that Japan inflicted on China's populace during events like the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. This article asks how the discourse on this particular event is structured on China's web, and what such practices of digital “remembering” can tell us about nationalism in the information age. Combining content analysis and digital tools, the article shows how the mass-media model that the Chinese authorities and various commercial actors apply to the web ultimately reproduces the very logic of “imagined communities” that makes reconciliation of historical disputes in East Asia so protracted. Show less
The rich corpus of material produced by anthropologists of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute (RLI) in Lusaka has come to dominate our understanding of Zambian societies and Zambia's past. The RLI... Show moreThe rich corpus of material produced by anthropologists of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute (RLI) in Lusaka has come to dominate our understanding of Zambian societies and Zambia's past. The RLI was primarily concerned with the sociocultural effects of migrant labour. This paper argues that the anthropologists of the RLI worked from within a paradigm that was dominated by the experience of colonial conquest in South Africa. RLI anthropologists transferred their understanding of colonial conquest in South Africa to the Northern Rhodesian situation, without ever truly analysing the manner in which colonial rule had come to be established in Northern Rhodesia. As such the RLI anthropologists operated within a flawed understanding of the past. The paper argues that a historical paradigm of colonial conquest that was applicable to the South African situation came to be unquestioningly applied to the Northern Rhodesian situation. It concludes that current historiography dealing with the colonization of Zambia between 1890 and 1920 is seriously flawed and needs to be revised. [ASC Leiden abstract] Show less
The author argues that Zambian rural anthropology is on the decline, and that this decline is related to the reliance, among anthropologists, on the tribe and ethnic group as the basic unit of... Show moreThe author argues that Zambian rural anthropology is on the decline, and that this decline is related to the reliance, among anthropologists, on the tribe and ethnic group as the basic unit of study in the past; that the one way to escape from the tribal model on the analytical plane without sacrificing the subjects' own organization of their experience, is to try to explain this experience as a form of consciousness emerging out of the dialectics of political incorporation and, even more fundamentally, the penetration of capitalism, in other words, the articulation of capitalism and a non-capitalist mode of production. The chapter is based on research among the Nkoya of western Zambia, an earlier version of it was published in 'Journal of Southern African Studies', vol. 8, no. 1, (1981/82), pages 51-81. Show less
The alternative proposed here for the tribal model as a unit of study is not another, better unit of study (e.g. a mode of production, an expanding social formation, or a well-defined spatio... Show moreThe alternative proposed here for the tribal model as a unit of study is not another, better unit of study (e.g. a mode of production, an expanding social formation, or a well-defined spatio-temporal portion of reality), but a growing awareness of possible problems and interrelations, informed by insights from history and political economy. Thus this paper is an exercise in the interaction of anthropology and history in the analysis of a specific set of data: Introduction - The end of rural anthropology in Zambia? - The unit of study - Studying the Nkoya - Ethnicity, history and the Nkoya experience - Nkoya ethnicity and the dialectics of consciousness - Conclusion: beyond the unit of study. Show less
