Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Prasenjit Duara, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Seeing like a company? Seeing like a tiger? The colonial British seeking Assam for tea plantations found also highlanders of Nepal, Northeast India, and Highland Burma, who historically saw lowlanders like tigers among kine. The eighteenth and nineteenth-century British could not make their own history just as they pleased. But many highland groups (in fact neither anarchist nor anti-colonial) enormously helped the British East India Company defeat the Burmans and destroy the Ahoms. Seeing like a state? Pace James Scott, the most disabling antinomy of postcoloniality is the common tendency to find imperialism in all law and order, in modernity, rationality and enlightenment. For scholars following Scott the synthesis of Foucaultian and Marxist theory lies in recognizing imperialism intrinsic to “the state” (and vice versa) and seeking alternatives to “seeing like a state,” perhaps a highland “art of not being governed” But we neglect at our peril the significance of the Whig Raj, the role of Whig ideas in developing the imperial state with the ways and means of companies. Did the British in Bengal and Assam think they were a “state”? An “empire”? First of all, they were a “company,” and one of the first “companies” on earth. How did “seeing like a company,” which in the hands of Burke, Macaulay and Maine metamorphosed into various species of “seeing like a Whig,” shape the British colonial enterprise? And what was the fate of those who saw like a tiger, and acted like tigers among kine? How can we reintegrate Edmund Leach’s gumsa and gumlao villages and their armies into the history of regional violence from the British East India Company days through world war and decolonization? Is there more than seeing like a state, and resisting states, in the history of Asian Highlands state encounters?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

John D. Kelly, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and Visiting Professor of Social Science at Yale-NUS, has written extensively about social theory, semiotic technologies, violence, and postcoloniality. He has pursued ethnographic research in the island Pacific, especially Fiji, and in South and Southeast Asia, especially India and Highland Asia, on capitalism, colonialism, diaspora, decolonization, and Pax Americana. His books on Fiji include A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism and Countercolonial Discourse (1991) and, with Martha Kaplan, Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization (2001). On Sanskrit and state formation, most recently “Writing and the State: China, India, and General Definitions” (2006). On Anthropology and its politics, he is editor or co-editor of Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency (2010), The Ontological Turn in French Philosophical Anthropology (2014), Corporate Social Responsibility: Human Rights in the New Global Economy(in press) and Reconsidering American Power (under review). In Singapore he is completing a book on self-determination in reality, with emphasis on Highland Asia, the actual politics of the Bandung Conference, and political struggles of the last fifty years.

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