Notes for Session 2

Notes for Session 2:

The first class addressed the questions ‘What is the State?’ or rather ‘Is there a State’?’ and consequently whether there could even be an Anthropology of the State. The current session continues with a genealogy of the State with a set of readings that trace the ‘Colonial State’ particularly with respect to India, centered on knowledge production.

Smith’s piece focuses on the link between knowledge and administrative control through a review of Village Records and District Reports in British Punjab. He considers both instruments of British rule - records were meant to provide specific knowledge i.e. ‘statistics’ at the level of a village but Smith shows there was substantial differences between actual village papers and what was published or made official. And reports were meant to provide generalized knowledge about Indian society and became the "authorized versions" of such knowledge.

Rather than have villages (in their avatar of ‘mini republics’) form the base unit of such knowledge production the British introduced the category of ‘district’, loosely based on their understanding of Mughal admin systems. The post of Collector was created to mediate between specific ‘native knowledge’ at lower levels and the more ‘generalised knowledge’ that would serve the upper levels of administration. Smith then argues that Manuals were created to mediate between the two as a way of straitjacketing native knowledge to fit into more generalized forms that would be ‘useful’ to the British Administration. Referencing Foucalt the author argues that these “new technologies of government” worked on the underlying assumption that Indian society could be represented as a collection of facts, which would make it “knowable and hence governable”. As he argues, census and surveys were ways of breaking down society into discrete units and statistics was a way of reassembling it. Smith critiques colonial construction of knowledge about Indian society as selective, related to power and control.

He also address the question of caste stating that though we are now inured to it, it was not always central to social activity, including the government (admin). His viewpoint ties in well with Dirks’s chapter on the enumeration of caste during the colonial period and his argument that the Census played an extremely significant role in defining modern caste identities in India. Cohn’s chapter on law and the colonial state in India, supplement Smith and Dirk’s articles. Cohn argues that the attempt to create a system of laws for the Indian state ended up mirroring the English system, as it was based on a British interpretation of the Mughal political system. 

Sivaramakrishnan approaches the same topic i.e. colonial ideologies and ‘technologies of power’ but pertinent to forest policies in India. The starting point for his work is the realm of practice, where forests are centres of conflict and he seeks to theorise such conflicts. He argues for a need to trace the historical development of such policies and to take into account ‘cultural contexts’ (referencing Dirks and Cohn) in order to interpret them. He argues that Orientalist ideas about pre-capitalist, primordial and ecologically sustainable ways of living informed 19C forest policy. He links his work to the "larger colonial project of constructing India as knowable by representation” and ties it with the Foucaldian framework that the “classic episteme” of the modern state was an “exhaustive ordering of the world”. The author centers such an ordering on the notion of ‘scientific forestry’. He draws on Said and Nigam to argue that colonial knowledge typically used circular reasoning, i.e. using a priori assumptions to prove their original belief (ties in with Smith's article). His work suggests that there is a dialectical relationship between discourses of rule and of protest. I.e. it is not a simple impact – response model. Based on this viewpoint he presents a critique of subaltern studies with its focus on resisting a “monolithically conceived state”.

Stoller’s essay on Affective States complements the other articles as it challenges the “Weberian” notion that rationality, reason and stable bureacracy were the foundation stones of colonial states. Based on an analysis of a demonstration in Batavia, Java (Dutch East Indies) she shows that it was not rule by reason but sentiment – either excess or absence of it. She questions the side stepping of sentiment in colonial studies and referring to Foucalt argues that, ‘feelings’ or ‘sentiments’  were not metaphors for something else but were instrumental as “transfer points of power”.  Contrary to Bayly she argues that ‘affective knowledge’ was at the core of political rationality in the late colonial period.  Bayly considered that ‘mastering affect’ was a concern of early colonial period which faded away during its later stages.

While the authors try and present a balanced picture, I am unclear as to how the colonialist arrived at these different ‘technologies of power’? Are we missing out pieces of the puzzle by focusing on critiques of colonialism, surely there was some social and / or cultural system already in place which similarly used certain ‘technologies of power’? What makes the colonial and / or imperialist system a key moment?

All the articles refer Foucaldian frameworks in some way or the other. In ‘Governmentality’ Foucalt analyses the origin of the ‘modern’ state building his argument from political treatises 16C onwards.  He considers the modern state to be an “ensemble” of population, government and political economy, a complex form of power he calls ‘governmentality’. Population becomes the target of such power, political economy the essential form of its knowledge and government or its apparatus namely the  institutions of police and judiciary, the technical means to secure this power.