Christine J Helliwell

The Empire of Uniformity and the Government of Subject Peoples

James Tullys Strange Multiplicity uses the example of indigenous minorities in the white settler colonies of North America to develop a remarkably powerful critique of liberal constitutionalisms rule of uniformity. In proclaiming the identity of all persons before the law, he insists, liberal constitutional arrangements commonly discriminate against indigenous and other minorities. While the force of this critique is undeniable, it nevertheless takes at face value one of the central claims of liberal consitutionalism, namely, its claim to be based on the rule of uniformity. Examination of liberal reflections on the government of subject peoples, most of whom were regarded as being, in Mills words, “not sufficiently advanced for representative government“, suggests a rather different picture. In place of the rule of uniformity we find a variety of alternatives but, most commonly, an insistence, first, that the government of such peoples should focus on their welfare and eventual improvement rather than on their liberty and, second, that they should be governed as far as possible through their own institutions and structures of authority. The result was a highly differentiated form of rule in which what were believed to be indigenous arrangements were adapted to the joint requirements of improvement and administrative convenience. Thus, what seems to be a powerful commitment to individual liberty on the part of liberal political reason should be seen as simply one element in a broader liberal perspective on the government of populations. At least as important in this perspective as the rule of uniformity is the presumption that some cultures are more advanced than others and a corresponding view of many cultural differences in historical and developmental terms.

'Culture', 'society'and the figure of man

The invocation of large-scale social unities - states, societies, empires, cultures, civilizations - is a long-established and pervasive practice among sociologists, anthropologists, historians, political scientists and so on. This article examines the treatment of such unities as defined or held together by shared understandings and values, and as independent, boundary-maintaining social systems. We argue that both the ideational and the systemic presumptions at work here are dependent on what Foucault calls the figure of man: the first as an inescapable consequence of that figure, the second as a tempting, but by no means necessary, one. Our first major argument concerns the remarkable persistence of concepts, such as ‘culture’, which designate unities that are ideational in character. We use the case study of anthropology to suggest that this is a consequence of the constitutive role of the figure of man within the human sciences. Human scientists and others critical of the stress on sameness resulting from the concern with ideational unities - cultures, ideologies, discourses and so on - as shared across a population, will find it well-nigh impossible either to modify significantly or to jettison altogether such concepts; as long as they rely on some version of the figure of man, scholars are committed irrevocably to the use of these concepts. Our second major argument concerns the conception of society as a systemic unity, a conception which we see as reflecting the influence of the figure of man in the field of governmental reason. In this part of the article we follow Foucault’s argument that the liberal rationality of government leads to a view of social life as traversed by numerous self-regulating spheres of social interaction. However, we dispute his further suggestion that the concept of society itself, as designating a self-regulating sphere of this kind, can be seen as a product of the liberal critique of police.

The temporalizing of difference

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Kantian cosmopolitanism and its limits

The cosmopolitanism of the European Enlightenment was mostly a limited matter of a Eurocentric anti-nationalism promoting the ideal of Europe as an harmonious system of balancing states. Against this background, Kant’s cosmopolitan vision stands out as more inclusive because, far from restricting its concerns to Europe, it proposes to bring all of humanity together by locating its different sections in a developmental framework that runs from the most primitive of human conditions to the fullest development of Man’s moral and intellectual capacities. Like the developmental schema posited by Voltaire and the Scottish Enlightenment, this vision locates most of humanity at some distance behind Western Europe. It produces the appearance of a cosmopolitan inclusiveness by means of an equally cosmopolitan differentiation.

Restoring the balance: Marriage exchange in a Borneo community

1This paper is written to mark a long acquaintance with Paul Alexander which began when I arrived to stay at his home in Sydney in February 1983 en route from Auckland to begin a PhD at The Australian National University in Canberra. At the time I knew noone in Australia, and Paul and Jenny demonstrated extraordinary generosity in providing hospitality on that and subsequent visits to Sydney. I owe Paul a further great debt for his enthusiastic support of my research, both during that first visit — when I was still struggling to visualise an unknown place called Indonesia — and since. Pauls work is marked by his suspicion of grand theory and his concern that explanation arise from ethnographic detail. This paper shares those features, although that will probably not stop Paul from disagreeing with some of its conclusions! I am grateful to Barry Hindess for his thoughtful comments on successive drafts of the paper.

The Japanese Malay: Ethnic Categorisation in Southwest Borneo

The distinction found throughout Borneo between those peoples locally termed Dayak (Dayaks) and those locally termed Melayu (Malays) is most commonly understood as one between non-Islamic indigenous peoples (Dayaks) and Islamic indigenous peoples (Malays). While Borneo peoples recognize that not all Muslims are Malays, they nevertheless often appear to make a correlation between Muslim and Malay. This article argues that in parts of the island the distinction is more complex than such an easy elision between identity and religion can allow for; in particular, the category Melayu, as used among Dayak people, can only be understood in terms of local histories of domination, marginalization, and exclusion. In south-west Borneo, where Dayaks have long been subject to would-be domination by Malays, the category Melayu, as used by Dayaks, is one of alterity, indexing a range of characteristics seen as opposed to those found in their own societies. While adherence to Islam is one of these characteristics, it is not the only—nor even the most important—of them. The article elaborates this argument with respect to the ethnicizing of Japanese occupiers by local Dayaks during World War II.