Colonial Units and Ritual Units: Historical Transformations of Persons and Horizons in Highland Papua

Abstract

In an intriguing essay on colonialism in India, Appadurai (1993:316) draws attention to the importance of “number in the colonial imagination.” He argues that previous work on the colonial history of India has focused on modes of bureaucratic classification but has paid less attention to issues “of numbers, measurement, and of quantification in this enterprise” (Appadurai 1993:316). His argument suggests that the capacity to count, whether bodies or resources, was intrinsically connected with particular classificatory schemes such as castes or races. In their related ways each engendered an “illusion of bureaucratic control and a key to a colonial imaginaire in which countable abstractions . . . at every imaginable level and for every conceivable purpose, created sense of a controllable indigenous reality” (Appadurai 1993:317; cf. Anderson 1991:163–78; Gellner 1983:139–40; Kula 1986:120–22). Together these colonial procedures “had the effect of redirecting important indigenous practices in new directions” (Appadurai 1993:316). Subsequent (often violent) events in Indian colonial and postcolonial history, Appadurai argues, attest to this illusion, and the disjunction between the imagination of the governed and the governing.