Frontiers, Imaginary and Imperial
Cassie Hays
Heart of Darkness: Nature, Culture and the Social Life of the Safari Souvenir
In the practice of safari in northern Tanzania, nature and race are perceived through the lens of various mobile technologies that portray the natural world and local Maasai people through anachronism and representation. At the end of the safari and its technological loop is the made-in-Africa souvenir, imbued with memory and physical symbolism and embodying multiple phases of image-making. The transnationality of this souvenir, of memory, permits this packaged representation to journey home through the commodification of not only time but nature as well.
First, souvenirs de-center time and place and simultaneously fix both in a semi-imaginary, semi-historical, ‘old Africa’ that recalls the hunting trophy and the photograph. These souvenirs signify the safari as a whole because of this spatio-temporal historicizing and their transnationality as tourism objects. Second, `natural' rather than artificial materials are most prized by tourists. Souvenirs are sold as implicit representations of a romantic past before colonialism brought beads and wire to the Maasai. Products that include natural objects allow tourists to return home with a souvenir that simultaneously embodies ‘old Africa’ and ‘Nature’. The Maasai souvenir's embodiment of the ‘old’ and the ‘natural’ therefore represents the commodification of Tanzanians' and tourists' perceptions of the Maasai as unchanging and closer to nature.
Field work, conducted between 2003 and 2006, included semi-structured interviews and ethnographic research in English and Kiswahili. Data were collected through studies of tourists, tour companies and the inhabitants and workers along northern tour routes in Serengeti National Park, Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and Arusha, Tanzania.
Sam Nelson
Early Evangelicalism and Empire: Protestant Jesuits in Prussia and India
This presentation is part of a dissertation project that examines the emergence of a transnational missionary orientation in eighteenth century Protestantism. For nearly two centuries following the Reformation, protestant churches failed to develop a theologically coherent and organizationally viable missionary practice on par with post-Tridentine Catholicism. Yet by the late eighteenth century a distinctive protestant missionary tradition did emerge on an impressive scale. My research seeks to understand the causes behind this process best described as the /de-territorialization/ of evangelical incorporation. This was only possible following a /de-parochialization /of the politically legitimate bases of religious leadership and pastoral practice, which resulted in altered terms and boundaries of religious inclusion. Counter-intuitively, the successful institutionalization of modern Protestant missions was first accomplished in land-locked early eighteenth century Prussia, and not in the imperial domains of the Netherlands and Britain. By examining the Prussian case in a comparative framework, I show that a distinctive Pietist organizational culture in the context of the Prussian multi-religious and multi-ethnic territorial state led to the development of the first confidently extra-parochial and trans-cultural missionary model outfitted for imperial missionary engagement. Adopted first by Pietist missionaries in Eastern Europe and India, this model was diffused widely through Protestant churches thereafter through the integration of diverse national evangelical reform movements into international networks of missionary patronage, publicity and personnel first established by these Prussian Pietists, and decisively uncoupled, institutionally and symbolically, from the nation-framed and politically bounded reform programs of the so-called Confessional Age.
Liping Wang
Depoliticizing Frontiers: Functionalist Anthropology in China, 1930s-40s
The tradition of frontier studies was initiated in China since the late 19th century as the old empire was endangered by the European-dominated state-system from its peripheral frontier regions. It underwent significant phases of changes from then on as “modern”, “western”, “scientific” knowledge gradually participated in its production. In this paper, I will particularly focus on an important episode in the transformation of frontier knowledge in the 1930s and 1940s, as the British functionalist anthropology began to play an active role in the transition of colonial rule. I will argue that the “present” and “pragmatic” orientation embedded in the functionalist anthropology theoretically facilitated the “responsible native rule” in colonies, which encouraged the Chinese scholars to look at the frontier with a strong “present” interest by taking care of their current “social and economic situation”. Moreover, the moderate yet resolute modernization ideal which was reinforced by the functionalist anthropology and underlined the new direction of colonialism also caught the eyes of the Chinese scholars as they reflected upon the past errors of “frontier rule”. Finally, the Chinese scholars attempted to work out a type of “localized” frontier administration by learning from the institutional buildings of “native rule” that was theoretically supported by the functionalist anthropology. All these movements made path breaking changes with regard to the stereotypical “frontier rule” that was reproduced through dynasties and even persisted into the Republic era.
Commentator: Averil Clarke
