Anthropology

Watching the Journals of Knud Rasmussen is a personal reflection of the violence of colonization and the resistance of the Mayan population to social and  economic control, cultural and spiritual imposition. And a reflection of how race, ethnicity, class and gender are interconnected social constructions that are produced and maintained in Guatemala's social relationships. Relationships that are characterize by differential power relations.

Improved infrastructures are increasingly promoted as a key to achieving development and overcoming political instability in the Global South. This paper interrogates that prescription by examining missionary involvement in infrastructure projects in Indonesia’s easternmost province of Papua. In response to the region’s persistent violent conflict, international agencies have sponsored Special Autonomy programs that focus on extending infrastructures. I contextualize Autonomy’s well-documented turbulent outcomes — such as localized conflicts over new state resources — by moving from an early moment in regional mission history to a contemporary case study. In the 1950s, Catholic and Protestant missions partitioned Papua’s Central Highlands region into zones of denominational influence. Processes of religious conversion re-organized labour, trade, and mobilities — territorializing new patterns of circulation, livelihood, belonging, and distinction. Missions thus laid the foundations for contemporary administrative partition (pemekaran) campaigns, which articulate local identities with aspirations to revive historical infrastructure nodes. Today, missionaries and frontier entrepreneurs collaborate to install new small-scale telecommunications projects. Local leaders, aspiring to convey the ‘voice of the region’, welcome new wireless networks. Missionary telecommunication projects gain legitimacy by seizing on partition’s valorization of infrastructure as a means to raise the status of peripheral places. Interpreting the current moment in historical context shows how an arc of mutual relays binds shifting modes of missionary development to transitions in regional politics. Intersecting religious and logistical projects generate ambiguous formations of futurism and memory, enabling the opening of new frontiers of extraction even as they promise to overcome historically produced disconnection.

In many Global South countries, new state distribution programs have been unveiled to address conflicts surrounding extractive frontiers. Such programs have been criticized for producing new, horizontal conflicts. These critiques often inadequately contextualize distribution programs within histories of displacement of regional production systems. This paper addresses the question of how new distribution programs in extractive peripheries intervene in trajectories of incorporation. In the Central Highlands of Indonesia’s Papua province, heartland of the West Papuan independence movement, the indigenous population has, since the mid-2000s, gained access to new programs of food aid and development funding. These programs are part of Special Autonomy, a decentralization reform supported by international agencies such as the World Bank, and intended to resolve the long-running conflict over Papua’s integration into Indonesia. The Papua conflict has high stakes for global resource capital: Papua hosts the world’s largest gold mine, and major gas and timber resources. Autonomy’s distribution is intended to return a portion of the wealth extracted by foreign resource companies. What kind of regional politics take shape among marginalized populations offered a share of extractive wealth? Autonomy intervenes in a regional context where the indigenous population has gradually been incorporated into Indonesia and the global economy, through commercial networks and informal labor. Autonomy’s distribution arrangements build on this history, demanding mobile labor while eclipsing regional food production. By considering distribution in relation to production, this paper argues that distribution programs in extractive peripheries may recycle extractive surpluses in ways that further incorporation into the global economy.

What kinds of governance agendas emerge at frontiers of commercial expansion, where routine economic relations traverse differences of ethnicity and degrees of formality? In the Balim Valley in the highlands of Indonesia's easternmost Papua province, mobilities and trade intersect at adjoining peri-urban markets and minivan terminals. The 'terminal economy' at the edges of Wamena, the region's bustling hub, is a threshold between rural and urban life, where indigenous livelihoods are subordinated to Indonesia's expanding commercial networks. Here, a cosmopolitan population-including indigenous Papuan highlanders and newcomer merchants from distant Indonesian regions-gathers to buy and sell local horticultural produce and imported commodities, transit between modes of transportation, and engage in a variety of formal and informal economic activities. This article traces the emergence of a multifaceted commercial regulation agenda, in the wake of demands for the recognition of indigenous contributions to the regional economy. It considers recent indigenous-formulated regulation policies in the context of the region's commercial history, one that is marked by a colonial devaluation of indigenous economic life and, more recently, by uprisings, inter-ethnic tensions, and government attempts to control and contain informal vending. The article conceptualizes commercial regulation as a convergence between efforts to contain disruption and demands for the revaluation of marginalized economic practices. It argues that commercial regulation is especially salient in regions that have been relegated to an end-point position in national and global commodity distribution paths.

While governing the New Hebrides from 1906 to1980, a British-French Condominium hired Pacific Islanders who had been trained in Fiji as Native Medical Practitioners (NMPs), to deliver primary health care and to offer public health education to the declining indigenous population. The NMPs’ medical work was also expected to expand colonial governance in a culturally diverse archipelago with no prior centralized state. Focusing on the 1920s through the1940s, I suggest that the NMPs’ attempts to inculcate a sense of responsibility for individual health and civic involvement in their patients, as well as demands made by the NMPs themselves for civic entitlements, were forms of nascent biomedical citizenship. I propose that the practices of nascent biomedical citizenship, significant as they were, also had the potential to be exclusionary because they presumed the creation of a civic subject oriented toward a particular kind of future and a selective recuperation of the past.

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In this article, I trace the significance of Melanesians’ psychological and intellectual
capacities for the making and meaning of racial and demographic knowledge from 1900 to 1935. I
begin with descriptions of field encounters in the New Hebrides to discuss how knowledge about
race and depopulation was collected, and then move to the meanings of the Melanesian race in
researchers’ reports of depopulation in the New Hebrides. I conclude with a discussion of how
knowledge of Melanesians figured in metropolitan debates on race and demographic decline.
For the historiography of ‘race’ or ‘human variation’, depopulation offers an interesting context
in which to explore notions of ‘race’ because population decline was recognised to be such a
complex issue. Depopulation provided a context in which to debate ‘hybridity’, ‘racial mixing’
and concomitant concepts like heredity, the environment and cultural adaptation. Through an
understanding of what Melanesians meant to these researchers in both field encounters and
demographic debates, I argue, we can see both the malleability of racial thinking and the
intransigence of racial categorisation at that time.

This paper deals with the simultaneous mainstreaming and diversification of ni-Vanuatu social categories associated with the ways in which population growth is understood as a possible crisis in both demographic knowledge and everyday ni-Vanuatu knowledge. The author is interested in understanding the downplaying but primarily the amplification of difference with respect to place, generation and gender identities. The relationship between reproduction, social reproduction and the multiple meanings of modernity is at issue. In the expert knowledge of demography that proffers advice for the ni-Vanuatu state, it is the lack of modern development – in the form of adequate biomedical birth control, western education, and the equality of women – that is the implicit cause of population growth. Yet, many ni-Vanuatu see population growth as tied to the troubles that arise from the dilution of traditional social forms: there is too much modernity. In both demographic and ni-Vanuatu everyday narrations of the potential population crisis, diversification and mainstreaming take place and vulnerabilities are produced.

This article examines changes and continuities in the epistemic and methodological presence of “race” in British imperial demography from 1920 to 1960. It does so in relation to population-level interventions aimed at improving reproduction in the New Hebrides. Through an examination of the sex ratio in relation to debates about demographic decline, the article describes aspects of how sexual selection was connected to race thinking. Taking a balanced sex ratio as a marker of well-adapted, healthy populations—biologically and culturally—the British authorities in the New Hebrides attempted to regulate the bride price in an attempt to level the imbalanced sex ratio. They believed that this intervention would reduce the marriage age of men while also appeasing missionary agendas of changing marriage and kinship practices. I use the metaphor of a “watermark” to think through the conceptual and methodological absent/presence of race in colonial demography and colonial administrators’ attitudes toward and interventions in local reproductive practices.