Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat

Abstract

There is something very characteristic of the indifference which we show towards this mighty phenomenon of the diffusion of our race and the expansion of our state. We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. . . . We constantly betray by our modes of speech that we do not reckon our colonies as really belonging to us.---J. R. Seeley (1883:8) And finally, be straight with the American people. Tell them the truth-and when you cannot tell them something, tell them you cannot tell them.---Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense (2002:32) cy of a clash of civilizations (Huntington 1993) in popular discourse and political decision-making, a phenomenon on this horrendous scale remains within the purview of anthropologists if one sees it as an instance of culture contact under conditions of global imperialism, unmitigated by colonial administration. 3 The distinction between imperialism and colonialism is critical. Talal Asad's Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973) launched anthropology on an auto-critique by noting that its quiet field sites were fields of colonial power, and its practitioners members of colonizing societies. 4 Colonialism refers to foreign presence in, possession of, and domination over bounded, local places. Today, the multi-sited ethnographies we increasingly pursue need to be analytically framed within a field of power which is transnational. The term imperialism refers to foreign domination, without the necessity of presence or possession, over expansive, transnational spaces-and many places. 5 Within the purview of U.S. power, then, the appropriate term for this frame is not postcolonialism, but ongoing imperialism. The time may soon be upon us for a sequel to Asad's volume, now trained on American anthropology and the imperial encounter. While the terms globalization, neo-liberalism, and late-liberalism may have been productive in probing the complexities of consent to contemporary transnational hegemony, they have been less attentive to its classical twin, coercion. While colonialism may be the past of British and French anthropology, imperialism is the long present of the American one. Thus the sense of urgency, again (Hymes 1999(Hymes [1969).In what follows, I look at a series of contacts between Western empires and Muslim societies through the eyes of a Muslim diaspora, as it were, a mobile people with a written history. The review suggests that what is new to this history is the unique nature of American power worldwide. In its global reach it is imperial, but in its disavowal of administration on the ground, it is anti-colonial. Decoupling the concept of colonialism from that of imperialism is a necessary step in thinking about this new mode of domination, and it is a task this essay sets for itself. empire through diasporic eyes 211 3 In his book which elaborated on the provocative thesis of his original 1993 essay, Huntington noted that the question mark in the essay title had been generally ignored (1997:13). 4 Some o...

New formations of power, the oligarchic-corporate state, and anthropological ideological discourse

“…The mining companies of southern Africa operated in a socially constitutive way, creating a society within the society of the encompassing colonial state. 5 Contemporary corporate/oligarchic activity continues patterns that were evident in the colonial era (as Ho, 2004, stresses in the context of the World Trade Center attacks). They are involved in the creation of mobile global elites and simultaneously what could be called a global working class.…”

From 'Stone-Age' to 'Real-Time': Exploring Papuan Temporalities, Mobilities and Religiosities

“…This chapter engages with these approaches by understanding Papua not only as a frontier in the sense that has been discussed in the literature so far, but also by exploring decentred, non-Western perspectives. Whereas Engseng Ho (2004) in a seminal piece investigated 'empire through diasporic eyes' and revealed fascinating historic parallels between European colonial empires in the Indian Ocean and the current global empire of the United States, this chapter takes a diasporic perspective on the Papuan frontier -the diasporic eyes belonging to Muslims with a particular trans-regional history. Such as in the case described by Ho (2004), the diaspora in question is formed by Muslims of Arab descent originating from the Hadhramaut, a south-eastern territory of today's Republic of Yemen, who have crossed the waters of the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian archipelago since medieval times (Freitag and Clarence-Smith 1997;Jonge and Kaptain 2002;Ho 2006).…”

Reaping What You Sow

“…This network depends on the invention of "extraterritoriality," or the formalization of the notion that Americans are not actually present (Ho, 2004) yet subject to American public administration. This concept demands that U.S. service personnel abroad should not be subject to the laws of any other country or legal compact.…”

“…4 reAPing WhAT you soW a gap in U.S. public administration practice and scholarship due to the selfserving projection that there is no need to consider U.S. public administration in a colonial or imperial context. In Engseng Ho's (2004) view, American power presents a unique situation in which its global reach is imperial domination, yet it disavows imperial administration because such administration is colonial and the republic was founded on the sovereignty of the people and rejection of colonialism. The only possibility of territorial expansion in the U.S. Constitution is total incorporation or total separation.…”