Andrew Zimmerman

What do you really want in German East Africa, Herr Professor? Counterinsurgency and the science effect in colonial Tanzania

‘What do you really want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?’ was a question asked of the anthropologist Karl Weule by more than a few of his fellow passengers on board a ship bound for the German colony that is today Tanzania, in 1906. At least this was what Weule himself recalled after he returned from a journey during which he was caught up, and participated in, the counterinsurgency operations that followed one of the greatest anti-colonial uprisings that Africa had ever seen, the Maji Maji uprising. One elegant woman, Weule wrote, demanded: ‘And what do you want, Herr Professor, from all these tribes? Simply to collect for your museum in Leipzig? Or does the anthropology of today also have other, higher goals?’ Anthropology did indeed, Weule explained, have ‘other, higher goals’: ‘The museum you speak of, my dearest, exists out in reality, as even the most hard-hearted Philistine would have to admit. ... But how will anthropology be able to assert its much-contested status as a science, when it knows nothing higher and better than simply to bring together bows, arrows, spears, and thousands of other things? This collecting and preserving is really just ... the elementary branch of our work. The other, higher part is the study [Aufnahme] of mental culture [geistige Kulturbesitzes].’

Africa in imperial and transnational history: multi-sited historiography and the necessity of theory

A multi-sited, but nonetheless locally grounded, transnational history breaks with older modes of imperial history that treated Africa as little more than a setting for the history of colonizers. More recently, critical approaches to imperial history have pointed to, but not adequately pursued, the treatment of colonizer and colonized as coeval subjects of history and objects of analysis. Historians of Africa and the diaspora, however, moved beyond imperial history decades ago, and these fields provide important resources and models for transnational historians. Transnational history, nonetheless, always risks reproducing the boundaries between colonizer and colonized that it seeks to overcome. The need to think outside of empire from within a world structured by empires requires that historians embrace critical theory, but in a manner consistent with the groundedness of multi-sited historiography.

Looking beyond history: the optics of German anthropology and the critique of humanism

Abstract Late nineteenth-century German anthropology had to compete for intellectual legitimacy with the established academic humanities ( Geisteswissenschaften ), above all history. Whereas humanists interpreted literary documents to create narratives about great civilizations, anthropologists represented and viewed objects, such as skulls or artifacts, to create what they regarded as natural scientific knowledge about so-called ‘natural peoples’—colonized societies of Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas. Anthropologists thus invoked a venerable tradition that presented looking at objects as a more certain source of knowledge than reading texts. Visual representations, especially of the colonized, not only allowed anthropologists allegedly objective insight into humanity but also put them in direct contact with popular audiences of ethnographic spectacles, exotic photography, and even pornographic images. Anthropologists thus sought to create a peculiar kind of anthropological vision that both differentiated them from humanists as ‘objective’ natural scientists but also distinguished them from the leering ‘ Schaulust ’ that they believed characterized popular consumption of exotic images. To do so they invented technologies of visual representation that eschewed the subject position figured by linear perspective. These novel optics dispensed with the leering subject posited by popular spectacles and the knowing subject posited by humanism and created an anti-humanist form of knowledge.

Africa and the American Civil War: The Geopolitics of Freedom and the Production of Commons

Scholars have long recognized that the histories of West Africa and North America are so fundamentally intertwined that it makes more sense to speak of the two regions as parts of a common Atlantic World than to describe discrete interactions between two autonomous geopolitical entities. This common Atlantic history is especially obvious in the period of the Atlantic slave trade, when enslaved Africans formed one of the largest, though involuntary, migrant groups to North America. The decline of the trade may have reduced the direct contacts between Africa and the Americas; however, these contacts continued and, more to the point, common political and intellectual traditions continued to inform histories around the Black Atlantic.1 Two of the most basic features of the American Civil War, the division of identifiably slave and free states and the creation of self-managing free agricultural enterprises, are, in fact, by no means unique to the USA but are rather key elements of the struggle over slavery in the African diaspora.2 While the flight of slaves and their subsequent, short-lived establishment of self-managed, economically autonomous agriculture might appear to be spontaneous, natural reactions to slavery, we should resist the temptation of regarding them as such. Rather, as E.P. Thompson taught with his study of the food riot, we should understand these actions as based in traditions of political and moral thought.3 If the reactions seem natural to us, it is because we have learned from, and perhaps even participate in, these traditions.

Race against Revolution in Central and Eastern Europe: From Hegel to Weber, from Rural Insurgency to “Polonization”

Racism and racial “science” emerged in Europe as an elite response to a worldwide wave of rural insurgencies that began in the era of the French and Haitian Revolutions and continues, in its own way, to this day. In his dialectic of lord and bondsman, G.W.F. Hegel formulated political, economic, and biopolitical ideas from the uprisings occurring in his world, creating a now long-standing dialogue between dialectical theory, including Marxism, and rural insurgency. Racism was part of a biopolitical counterrevolution that sought to maintain the power of elites over insurgent populations. Here Prussia played a central role, as its struggle against the autonomy of migrant agricultural labors took the form of campaigns against the “Polonization” of Prussia. The social scientist Max Weber theorized this struggle in a series of essays on race and rural labor that produced a racism based on culture rather than biology. This cultural racism, like the insurgent discourses it opposes, persists in many forms in Central Europe and around the world.

Marxism, Modernity and MarginalityAndersonKevin B., Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies. University Of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, 2010; 336 pp.: 9780226019833,

Since the October Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent century of revolutions in the global South, Marxism has been more at home in the margins – in what Immanuel Wallerstein described as the periphery and semi-periphery – than anywhere else. In the core capitalist countries, Marxism continues to have a great impact among intellectuals, but also often finds itself challenged by social and cultural theory grounded in a rhetoric of marginality, usually identifiable by the prefix post – poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, and that bogeyman ‘postmodernism’ (see Chari and Verdery, 2009). One of the more unfortunate situations of left theory today is the mutual suspicion and even hostility sometimes found between the ‘posts’ and Marxists. Some have read poststructuralism – apparently ignorant of its political provenance – as inherently hostile to Marxism and some Marxists have mirrored this incorrect understanding, returning the unwarranted and unproductive enmity.1 In Marx at the Margins Kevin B. Anderson makes it clear that Marx himself was a theorist of the margins and that his work on the margins fundamentally shaped his theoretical masterpiece, the three volumes of Capital. One of the important achievements of Marx at the Margins is to help connect Marxist theory with the poststructuralist, deconstructionist, subaltern-studies, and postcolonial approaches with which Marxism sometimes, incorrectly, appears at odds. Anderson treats at least two types of margins. The first margin is the one indicated in the subtitle of the book, regions outside of England and north-west Europe, outside, that is, of those areas thought in modernization theory to represent the most advanced cases along a single track of development. Marx’s occasional and ephemeral writing – newspaper articles, notes, letters, and unpublished drafts – make up the second margin. The two margins are interrelated empirically, since many of Marx’s most extensive writings on the margins of capitalism occur in his marginal writings. Both of these margins can be studied now better than ever before because of the excellent work proceeding on the new Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (1972–). Anderson’s book is especially important because it not only analyzes these two marginal aspects of Marx, but because it also relates these two margins to the core of Marx’s achievement: a dialectical approach to history, and

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thereby doing his own work in reconnecting Havana, Harlem, London and elsewhere in order to detail for readers the shared destiny created by these diasporic actors. Significantly, Guridy is attuned to the conflicts that arise even in the midst of ‘forging diaspora’, such as the conflict of vision which led middle-class Afro-Cubans of the Club Atenas to scoff (at least initially) at some of the key figures of afrocubanismo like Guillén, or at some of the writings of Gustavo Urrutia. The end product is an important study that gazes from the United States to Cuba just as it looks from Cuba to the United States in order to show that the diasporic world view formed by these Afro-Cubans and African Americans was rooted in much more than a simplistic notion of shared blackness. Indeed, it was forged in seeking to address the contemporary social circumstances and economic needs of African people in the US–Caribbean world, and it was formed by both the substantive meaning that both groups attached to being people of the (same) diaspora and the mutual responsibility that they felt for building a better future for African people in whichever country they might reside as citizen, migrant or immigrant.

Max Weber in America

LDS, the author assumes too much on the part of his readers. In several places he makes a distinction between “mainstream Christians” and “Mormons,” but does not explain clearly what distinguishes the different expressions of Christianity. Most readers will probably be familiar with the early Mormon practice of polygamy, which was officially abolished in 1890 (though it continues in some smaller sects), but there are other distinctive teachings and practices based on additional “revelation” and an expanded canon that is probably unfamiliar to most outsiders. Unfortunately, the explanations about these Mormon teachings are scattered throughout the various chapters or buried in endnotes. Finally, there are some errors in the Japanese terms used in the text. For example, “oban” (p. 149) should be “obon” and “shûken” (p. 189) should be “shûkan.” In spite of these criticisms, this is a worthwhile study that clearly reveals the difficulties faced by a foreign-born missionary religion in the Japanese context. Future studies will need to address the issue of indigenization and whether new Japanese cultural forms of Mormonism eventually appear and are more viable than the transplanted American traditions.