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Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusions in Colonial Southeast Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Ann Stoler
Ann Stoler
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

This essay is concerned with the construction of colonial categories and national identities and with those people who ambiguously straddled, crossed, and threatened these imperial divides.1 It begins with a story about métissage (interracial unions) and the sorts of progeny to which it gave rise (referred to as métis, mixed bloods) in French Indochina at the turn of the century. It is a story with multiple versions about people whose cultural sensibilities, physical being, and political sentiments called into question the distinctions of difference which maintained the neat boundaries of colonial rule. Its plot and resolution defy the treatment of European nationalist impulses and colonial racist policies as discrete projects, since here it was in the conflation of racial category, sexual morality, cultural competence and national identity that the case was contested and politically charged. In a broader sense, it allows me to address one of the tensions of empire which this essay only begins to sketch: the relationship between the discourses of inclusion, humanitarianism, and equality which informed liberal policy at the turn of the century in colonial Southeast Asia and the exclusionary, discriminatory practices which were reactive to, coexistent with, and perhaps inherent in liberalism itself.2

Type
Constructing Local Boundaries
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , July 1992 , pp. 514 - 551
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1992

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References

1 Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the American Anthropological Association meetings, “Papers in Honor of Eric Wolf,” in New Orleans, December 1990, and at the TNI Conference, “The Decolonization of Imagination: The New Europe and Its Others,” Amsterdam, May 1991. I thank Talal Asad, Val Daniel, Geoff Eley, Lawrence Hirschfeld, Barbara Laslett, Jeffrey Weeks, Luise White, and fellows of the Histories of Sexuality Seminar at the Institute of the Humanities, the University of Michigan, for their comments.

2 Uday Mehta outlines some features of this relationship in “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” Politics and Society, 18:(4) (1990), 427–54.Google Scholar He cogently argues for the more radical claim that the theoretical underpinnings of liberalism are exclusionary and cannot be explained as “an episodic compromise with the practical constraints of implementation” (p. 429).

3 Cochinchine's European population only increased from 594 in 1864 to 3,000 by 1900 (Meyer, Charles, De Francois en Indochine, 1860–1910, 70 [Paris: Hachette, 1985]Google Scholar). By 1914 only 149 planters qualified as electors in the Chamber of Agriculture of Tonkin and Annam; on Java alone there were several thousand (Laffey, John, “Racism in Tonkin before 1914,” French Colonial Studies, no. 1 [1977], 65–81Google Scholar). In 1900 approximately 91,000 persons were classified as European in the Indies. As late as 1931 there were just under 10,500 French civilians in Indochina, when the Indies census counted 244,000 Europeans for the same year (see van Marie, A., “De groep der Europeanen in Nederlands-Indie, iets over ontstaan en groei,” Indonesie, 5:5 (1952), 490;Google Scholar and de Gante, Gilles, La population française au Tonkin entre 1931 et 1938, 23 [Mémoire de Maitrise, Université de Provence], 1981.Google Scholar

4 See Jean Taylor's subtle gendered analysis of the mestizo features of colonial culture in the Netherlands Indies (The Social World of Batavia [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983]Google Scholar). The term Indisch is difficult to translate. According to Taylor, it is a cultural marker of a person who “partook of Mestizo culture in marriage, practice, habit and loyalty” (p. xx). It is most often used in contrast to the life style and values of the Dutch totok population comprised of Hollanders bom and bred in Europe who refused such cultural accommodations and retained a distinct distance from inlander (native) customs and social practice. Thus, for example, the European blivjers (those who stayed in the Indies) were commonly referred to as Indisch as opposed to vertrekkers (those Europeans who treated their residence in the Indies as a temporary assignment away from their native metropolitan homes).

5 See Lewis, Martin, “One Hundred Million Frenchmen: The ‘Assimilation’ Theory in French Colonial Policy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 3:4 (1961), 129–51.Google Scholar While the social positioning of Eurasians in India is often contrasted to that in the Indies, there are striking similarities in their changing and contradictory legal and social status in the late nineteenth century. See Naidis, Mark, “British Attitudes toward the Anglo-Indians,” South Atlantic Quarterly, LXII:3 (Summer 1963), 407–22;Google Scholar and Gist, Noel and Wright, Roy, Marginality and Identity: Anglo-Indians as a Racially-Mixed Minority in India, especially 7–20 (Leiden, 1973).Google Scholar

6 For an extended discussion of the politics of degeneracy and the eugenics of empire, see my “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in Colonial Asia,” in Gender at the Crossroads: Feminist Anthropology in the Post-Modern Era, 51–101, di Leonardo, Micaela, ed. (University of California Press, 1991).Google Scholar

7 In the following section I draw on Etienne Balibar's discussion of this concept in “Fichte et la Frontière Intérieure: A propos des Discours a la nation allemande,” Les Cahiers de Fontenay, 58/59 (06 1990).Google Scholar

8 Fichte quoted in Balibar, “Fichte et la Frontière Intérieure,” 4.

9 See my “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power” on métissage and contamination. Also see Andre-Pierre Taguieff's La Force du Préjugé (1987),Google Scholar in which he discusses “la hantisse du métissage” and argues that the métis problem is not a question of mixed-blood but a question of the indeterminate “social identity” which métissage implies (p. 345).

10 This is not to suggest that the French and Dutch rejection of métis as a legal category followed the same trajectory or occurred in the same way. As I later show, the legal status of métis children with unknown parents was still a subject of French juridical debate in the 1930s in a discourse in which race and upbringing were offered as two alternative criteria for judging whether a métis child should be granted the rights of a citoyen. See Mazet, Jacques, La condition juridique des métis dans les possession françaises (Paris: Domat-Montchresiten, 1932).Google Scholar

11 Rich, Paul, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986),Google Scholar argues that the anti-black riots in Liverpool and Cardiff in 1919 represented “the extension of rising colonial nationalism into the heart of the British metropolis itself at a time when nationalist ferment was being expressed in many parts of the empire” (p. 122).

12 The profusion of French juridical tracts in the 1930s debating whether métis should be made a separate legal category (distinct from European and indigene) and what were the political effects of doing so were forged in the tense environment in which Vietnamese nationalists were making their opposition most strongly felt. See David Marr's two important studies of the Vietnamese nationalist movements, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925 (Berkeley: California Press, 1971)Google Scholar and Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920–1945 (Berkeley: California Press, 1981).Google Scholar It is noteworthy that Marr makes no reference to the métis problem (generally or as it related to citizenship, immigration and education) in either text.

13 This is not to suggest, however, that the battles for legal reform regarding, for example, paternity suits, illegitimate children, and family law waged by jurists, feminists, and religious organizations in the Netherlands and the Indies at the turn of the century were animated by the same political projects or fears; on the contrary, in the colonies, the social menace of illegitimate children, as we shall see, was not only about future criminals and prostitutes but also about mixed-blood criminals and prostitutes, about European paternity, and native mothers—and thus about the moral landscape of race and the protection of European men by the Dutch colonial state. For contrasting discourses on paternity suits in the Indies and Holland, compare Selma Sevenhuijsen's comprehensive study of this political debate (De Orde van net Vaderschap: Politieke debatten over ongehuwd moederschap, afstamming en huwelijk in Nederland 1870–1900 [Amsterdam: Stichting Beheer IISG, 1987]Google Scholar) to Kleyn's, R. “Onderzoek naar het vaderschap” (Het Recht in Nederlandsch-lndie, 67 [1896], 130–50Google Scholar).

14 On the relationship between racial supremacy and new conceptions of British motherhood at the turn of the century, see Davin's, Anna “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop, no. 5 (1978), 9–57,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Bland's, Lucy “‘Guardians of the Race' or ‘Vampires upon the Nation's Health’?: Female Sexuality and Its Regulations in Early Twentieth-Century Britain,” in The Changing Experience of Women, 373–88Google Scholar, Whitelegg, Elizabeth, et al. , eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).Google Scholar On the European maternalist discourse of the emerging welfare states, see Koven, Seth and Michel's, Sonya “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of the Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920,” American Historical Review, 95 (10 1990), 1076–1108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 See Weber's, Eugene Peasants into Frenchmen, 114 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).Google Scholar Although Weber's argument that much of France's rural population neither considered itself French nor embraced a national identity has been refuted by some scholars, for my purposes his ancillary argument holds: Debates over the nature of French citizenship and identity were heavily contested at the time.

16 Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 110.

17 Girardet, Raoul, Le nationalisme français, 30–31 (Paris: Seuil, 1983);Google Scholar and Nye, Robert, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline, 140 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

18 See Nora, Pierre, Les Français d'Algerie (Paris: R. Julliard, 1961).Google Scholar

19 French fertility rates began to decline in the late eighteenth century, much earlier than in other European countries, but then they decreased most sharply after 1881 (see Goldberg Moses, Claire, French Feminism in the 19th Century, 20–24 [Binghamton: SUNY, 1984]Google Scholar).

20 Thus, of the 200,000 “Française d'Algerie,” more than half were of non-French origin. Coupled with the 20,000 Parisian political undesirables deported there by the Second Republic in 1851 (commonly referred to as “les sans-travail,” “les révolkes,” “les déracinés”), the equivocal national loyalties of Algeria's French colonial population were reopened to question. See Nora's, Pierre Les Français d'Algerie (Paris: René Julliard, 1961).Google Scholar Also see Stephen Wilson's comprehensive study of French antisemitism at the turn of the century, in which he suggests that violent cultural racism in the colonies against Jews provided a “model” for antisemitism at home (in Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair, especially 230–42 [Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982]CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

21 See de Regt's, Ali “De vorming van een opvoedings-traditie: arbiederskinderen rond 1900” in Geschiedenis van opvoeding en onderwijs, Kruithof, B., Nordman, J., de Rooy, Piet, eds. (Nijmegen: Sun, 1982).Google Scholar On the relationship between the development of the modern Dutch state and the new focus on family morality and motherhood at the turn of the century, see Stuurman's, Siep Verzuiling, Kapitalisme en Patriarchaat: aspecten van de ontwiddeling van de moderne stoat in Nederland (1987).Google Scholar For France, see Donzelot's, Jacques The Policing of Families (New York: Pantheon, 1979)Google Scholar which traces state interventions in family life and childrearing practices to a half-century earlier.

22 See Schoffer's, I. “Dutch ‘Expansion’ and Indonesian Reactions: Some Dilemmas of Modern Colonial Rule (1900–1942),” in Expansion and Reaction, Wesseling, H., ed., 80 (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1978);Google Scholar and Kuitenbrouwer's, Maarten The Netherlands and the Rise of Modern Imperialism: Colonies and Foreign Policy, 1870–1902, 220 (New York: Berg, 1991).Google Scholar

23 See Bundy's, Colin “Vagabond Hollanders and Runaway Englishmen: White Poverty in the Cape before Poor Whiteism,” in Putting a Plough to the Ground: Accumulation and Dispossession in Rural South Africa, 1850–1930, 101–28.Google Scholar William Beinart, Peter Delius, and Stanley Trapido, eds. (Johannesburg: Raven Press, 1987). On the colonial state's concern about Dutch paupers in the Indies, see Rapport der Pauperisme-Commissie (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1902). 1Google Scholar discuss these issues at more length in “Children on the Imperial Divide: Sentiments and Citizenship in Colonial Southeast Asia” (Paper prepared for the conference on “Power: Working Through the Disciplines” held by Comparative Study of Social Transformations at the University of Michigan in January 1992).

24 See Kuitenbrouwer, The Netherlands, 223.

25 For the Netherlands, compulsory education was only instituted in 1900, about the same time it was introduced to the Indies (see Romein, Jan, The Watershed of Two Eras: Europe in 1900, 278 [Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1978]Google Scholar).

26 See Marshall, T.H., Class, Citizenship and Social Development, 81 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1963,Google Scholar reprint 1973).

27 See Sider, Gerard, “When Parrots Learn to Talk, and Why They Can't: Domination, Deception, and Self-Deception in Indian-White Relations,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 27:1 (1987), 3–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 See Poovey's, Mary Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, 136 (London: Verso, 1983).Google Scholar

30 Archives d'Outre-Mer, Protectorat de l'Annam et du Tonkin, no. 1506, 17 December 1898.

31 See Archives d'Outre Mer, December 1898, No. 39127, Report from Monsieur E. Issaud, Procureur-Général to the Résident Superieure in Tonkon at Hanoi.

32 “Relations immorales qui ont pu exister entre le détenue et celui qui s'est declaré son père” Archives d'Outre Mer [hereafter, AOM], Fonds Amiraux, No. 1792, 12 December 1898).

33 AOM, Aix-en Provence, No. 1792, 12 December 1898. Report of M. Villemont, Procureur in Haiphong, to the Procureur-Général, Head of the Judicial Service in Hanoi.

34 According to the procureur-general, Raoul Abor, these fraudulent acknowledgments were threatening to submerge the French element by a deluge of naturalized natives (see Abor, Raoul, Des Reconnaisances Frauduleuses d'Enfants Naturels en Indochine, 25 [Hanoi: Imprimerie Tonkinoise, 1917]Google Scholar).

35 Mosse, George, Nationalism and Sexuality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).Google Scholar

36 Boswell's, John The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon, 1988).Google Scholar According to Boswell, this relinquishment might occur by “leaving them somewhere, selling them, or legally consigning authority to some other person or institution” (p. 24). As we shall see, abandonment in colonial practice did not fit this definition at all.

37 See Jacques Donzelot's The Policing of Families, 29.

38 I do not use this term in the sense employed by Orlando Patterson with regard to slavery but to suggest the definitive exile from European society which abandonment implied.

39 AOM, Amiraux7701, 1899, Statute of the “Société de protection et d'education des Jeunes Métis Français de la Cohcinchine et du Cambodge.”

40 AOM, No. 164, 11 May 1904 (my emphasis).

41 AOM, 13 November 1903.

42 Letter from the Administrative Resident in Bac-giang to the Résident Superieure in Hanoi.

43 AOM, Letter (No. 151) to the Governor-General in Hanoi from Monsieur Paris, the President of the Société de Protection et d'Education des Jeunes Métis Français abandonnés, 29 February 1904. This concern over the entrapment of European young women in the colonies coincides with the concurrent campaigns against the white slave trade in Europe (see Mort, Frank, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England Since 1830, 126–7 [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987]).Google Scholar

44 For such recommendations, see Brou, A., “Le métis franco annamite,” Revue Indochinois 07 1907), 897–908;Google Scholar Douchet, , Métis et congaies d'Indochine (Hanoi, 1928);Google Scholar Mazet, Jacques, La conditions juridique des métis (Paris: Domat-Montchrestien, 1932);Google Scholar Gossard, Philippe, Études sur le métissage principalement en A.O.F. (Paris: Les Presses Modernes, 1934).Google Scholar

45 du Feminisme, Etats-Generaux, Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris 1931, rapport général présenté par le Gouverneur Général Olivier, 139 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1931).Google Scholar

46 AOM, Amiraux 7701, Report on Métis in the Dutch East Indies (1901).

47 “Courte notice sur les métis d'Extreme Orient et an particulier sur ceux de l'lndochine,” Firmin Jacques Montagne, AOM, Amiraux 1669 (1903), 1896–1909.

48 The fact that the issue of poor whites loomed large on a diverse number of colonial landscapes at this time, in part, may derive from the fact that white poverty itself was coming to be perceived in metropole and colony in new ways. In Calcutta nearly one-fourth of the Anglo-Indian community in the late nineteenth century was on poor relief (Gist, N. and Wright, R., Marginality and Identity: Anglo-Indians as a Racially Mixed Minority in India, 16 [Leiden: Brill, 1973]).Google Scholar Colin Bundy argues for South Africa that white poverty was redefined “as a social problem to be tackled by state action rather than as a phenomenon of individual failure to be assuaged by charity” (p. 104). In the Indies, this reassignment of poor relief from civic to state responsibility was hotly contested and never really made.

49 Rapport der Pauperisme-Commissie (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1902);Google Scholar Uitkomsten der Pauperisme-Enquete: Algemeen Verslag (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1902);Google Scholar Het Pauperisme onder de Europeanen in Nederlandsch-Indie, Parts 3, 5 (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1901);Google Scholar Uitkomsten der Pauperisme-Enquete: Gewestelijke Verslagen (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1901);Google Scholar De Staatsarmenzorg voor Europeanen in Nederlandsch-Indie (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1901).Google Scholar

50 See Blumberger's, Petrus De Indo-Europeesche Beweging in Nederlandsch-lndie, 26 (Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1939).Google Scholar

51 See Coetzee, J.M., White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988),Google Scholar in which he argues that the British railed against Boer idlenessprecisely because they refused the possibility that an alternative, native milieu may have beenpreferred by some European men and have held a real attraction.

52 AOM, Archives Centrales de l'lndochine, nos. 9147, 9273, 7770, 4680.

53 Encyclopedie van Nederlandsch-lndie (1919), 367.

54 In 1900, an educational survey carried out in Dutch elementary schools in the Indies among 1,500 students found that only 29 percent of those with European legal standing knew some Dutch and more than 40 percent did not know any (Paul van der Veur, “Cultural Aspects of the Eurasian Community in Indonesian Colonial Society,” Indonesia, no. 6 (1968), 45.Google Scholar

55 See DrBrugmans, I.J., Geschiedenis van het onderwijs in Nederlandsch-lndie (Batavia: Wolters, 1938).Google Scholar

56 See Kohlbrugge, J.F., “Prostitutie in Nederlandsch-Indie,” Indisch Genootschap, 19 02 1901, 26–28.Google Scholar

57 See n.a., “Ons Pauperisme,” Mededeelingen der Vereeniging “Soeria Soemirat,” no. 2 (1892), 8.Google Scholar One proof of the falsity of the claim was that these fathers often conferred upon these children “repulsive and obscene” names frequently enough that a government ruling stipulated that no family name could be given that “could humiliate the child” (Koster, G.H., “Aangenomen Kinderen en Staatsblad Europeanen,” De Amsterdammer, 15 07 1922).Google Scholar

58 Letter from the Administrative Resident in Bac-giang to the Resident Superieure, Hanoi, AOM, No. 164, II May 1904.

59 See Mazet, Jacques, La Condition Juridique de Métis (Paris: Domat-Montchrestien, 1932)Google Scholar and Douchet Métis et congaies d'lndochine.

60 Kohlbrugge, “Prostitutie in Nederlandsch-Indie,” 23.

61 See Linda Gordon's discussion of this issue for early twentieth-century America in Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Vintage, 1988).Google Scholar

62 See Mazet, La Condition Juridique de Métis, 37, 42.

63 Questions about the legal status of mátis and the political consequences of that decision were not confined to the French alone. The International Colonial Institute in Brussels created by Joseph Chailley-Bert in 1893 engaged this question in at least three of its international meetings in 1911, 1920, and 1924. See Comptes Rendus de ilnstitut Colonial International (Bruxelles: Bibliotheque Coloniale Internationale, 1911,Google Scholar 1920, 1924).

64 Mazet, La Condition Jurdique de Métis, 114.

65 Ibid., 80.

66 Ibid., 90.

67 Statute of the “Societé de protection des enfants métis,” 18 May 1904, Article 37.

68 Similar debates occurred at the International Colonial Congress of 1889, in which scholars and administrators compared and contrasted pedagogic strategies for natives in the colonies to those for the peasants of France. See Lewis, Martin, “One Hundred Million Frenchmen: The ‘Assimilation’ Theory in French Colonial Policy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 3:4, 140.Google Scholar

69 Kohlbrugge, J., “Het Indische kind en zijne karaktervorming,” in Blikken in het zielenleven van den Javaan en zijner overheerschers (Leiden: Brill, 1907).Google Scholar

70 Michel Foucault's discussion of the historical shift from a “symbolics of blood” to an “analytics of sexuality” in the mid- and late-nineteenth century would be interesting to explore inthis colonial context, where the mixed-blood problem invoked both of these principles in resolving issues of paternity and citizenship rights (An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, especially 147–50 [New York: Pantheon Books, 1978]Google Scholar). Although a discussion of race and sexuality is notably absent from all but the very end of The History of Sexuality, Foucault once remarked that it was “the fundamental part of the book” (Power I Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, 222 (New York: Pantheon, 1980).Google Scholar

71 See, for example, the contributions of those in British cultural studies, such as by Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy; also compare the discussion of nationalism and racism in France by Etienne Balibar, who does not mark cultural racism as a recent phenomenon but does argue for a new intensification of the force of cultural difference in marking the interior frontiers of the modern nation-state. See Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, Balibar, Etienne and Wallerstein, Immanuel (New York: Verso, 1991).Google Scholar

72 Gilroy, Thus Paul (There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, 43 (London: Hutchinson, 1987),Google Scholar for example, argues that the “novelty” of the new racism

lies in the capacity to link discourses of patriotism, nationalism, xenophobia, Englishness, Britishness, militarism, and gender differences into a complex system which gives ‘race’ its contemporary meaning. These themes combine to provide a definition of ‘race’ in terms of culture and identity … ‘Race; differences are displayed in culture which is reproduced in educational institutions and, above all, in family life. Families are therefore not only the nation in microcosm, its key components, but act as the means to turn social processes into natural, instinctive ones.

73 It is not coincidental that this is precisely the period in which George Stocking identifies a shift in the meaning of culture in the social sciences from its singular humanistic sense of refinement to the plural anthropological notion of cultures as shared values of specific humangroups. Although Stocking argues that Franz Boas made the analytic leap from culture to cultures as an anti-racist response, it is clear that these two connotations joined to shape the exclusionary tenets of nationalist and racist projects (Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology, especially 200–04 [New York: Free Press, 1968]Google Scholar).

74 See Rabinow's, Paul French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, especially 126–67 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989),Google Scholar where he traces the effects of neo-Lamarckian thinking on colonial pacification policies. I am more concerned here with how this attention to milieu fixed the boundaries of the European community and identified threats to it. On the contaminating influences of milieu, see my “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power,” 51–101.

75 The similarity to Pierre Bourdieu's notion of “habitus” as a stylization of life, an unconsiously embodied set of rules of behavior that engenders durable schemes of thought and perception, is striking. These colonial discussions of milieu denote not only a social ecology of acquired competencies but a psychological environment in which certain dispositions are promoted and affective sensibilities are shaped (Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1977), 82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

76 “In de beschaafd wereld, niemand zonder staatsverband mag zijn” (Beyen, K.H., Het Nederlanderschap in verband met het international recht [Utrecht, 1890]Google Scholar), quoted in Nederburgh, J.A., Wet en Adat, 83 [Batavia: Kolff and Co., 1898])Google Scholar. The word staatsverband literally means “relationship to the state.” Nederburgh distinguishes it from nationality and defines it as “the tie that exists between the state and each of its members, the membership of the state” (p. 91). Dutch scholars of colonial history say the term is rarely used but connotes citizenship.

77 Ibid., 87–88.

78 Ibid., 87.

79 See Willem Wertheim's incisive review of Prof. Kollewijn's, R.D. lntergentiel Recht, Indonesie, 19 (1956), 169–73.Google Scholar Nederburgh's name comes up in this critique of Kollewijn, whose liberal rhetoric and opposition to such conservatives as Nederburgh belied that fact that he praised the virtues of the Indies mixed-marriage legislation of 1898, despite the racist principles that underwrote it.

80 Nederburgh, Wet en Adat, 88.

81 Ibid., 90.

82 Kooreman 1906.

83 Ibid.

84 See my “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31:1 (1989), 134–61;Google Scholar and “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power.”

85 van Mastenbroek, W.E., De Historische Ontwikkeling van de Staatsrechtelijke Indeeling der Bevolking van Nederlandsch-Indie, 70 (Wageningen: Veenam, 1934).Google Scholar

86 See Prins, W.F., “De Bevolkingsgroepen in het Nederlandsch-Indische Recht,” Koloniale Studien, 17 (1933), 652–88,Google Scholar especially 677.

87 Ibid., 677; Marie, Van, “De groep der Europeanen in Nederlands,” Indonesie, 5:2 (1951), 110.Google Scholar

88 See William Mastenbroek, De Historische Ontwikkeling van de Staatsrechtelijke Indeeling der Bevolking van Nederlandsch-lndie, 87.

89 See Offen's, Karen “Depopulation, Nationalism and Feminism in Fin-de-Siécle France,” American Historical Review, 89:3 (1984), 648–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

90 The following discussion is based on several documents that I will abbreviate in referring to in the section below as follows: Verslag van het Verhandelde in de Bijeenkomsten der Nederlandsch-Indische Juristen-Vereeniging on 25, 27, and 29 June 1887 in Batavia [hereafter, JV]; “Voldoet de wetgeving betreffende huwelijken tusschen personen behoorende tot de beide staatkundige categorien der Nederlandsch Indische bevolking (die der Europeanen en met hen, en die der Inlanders en met hen gelijkgestelden) aan de maatschappelijke behoefte? Zoo neen, welke wijzigingen zijn noodig? (1887) [hereafter, VW]; J. A. Nederburgh, Gemengde Huwelijken, Staatsblad 1898, No. 158: Officiele Bescheiden met Eenige Aanteekeningen [hereafter, GH].

91 Werthein, lntergentiel Recht.

92 The term mixed marriages (gemengde huwelijken) had two distinct but overlapping meanings in the Indies at the turn of the century. Common usage defined it as referring to contracts between a man and a woman of different racial origin; the state defined it as “a marriage between persons who were subject to different laws in the Netherlands Indies” with no reference to race. The distinction is significant for at least two reasons: (1) because the designations of legal standing as inlander versus European cut across the racial spectrum, with generations of mixed bloods falling on different sides of this divide and (2) because adat (customary) and Dutch law followed different rulings with respect to the marriage contract, divorce, inheritance, and child custody.

93 Although the hierarchies of gender and race of Indies colonial society in part account for the fact that in 1895 more than half of the European men in the Indies still lived with native women outside of marriage, this may only tell one part of the story. The juridical debates on legal reform of mixed marriages suggest that there were women who chose cohabitation over legal marriage. At the very least, this suggests that concubinage may not have been an appropriate term for some of these arrangements, nor does it necessarily reflect what options women may have perceived in these arrangements.

94 Prins, W.F., “De bevolkingsgroepen in het Nederlandsch-Indische recht,” Koloniale Studien, 17, 665.Google Scholar That some women chose cohabitation over legal mixed marriages is rarely addressed in the colonial or secondary literature on the assumption that all forms of cohabitation could be subsumed by the term concubinage, signaling the moral degradation of a “kept woman” that the later term implies. References in these legal debates to the fact that some women chose not to marry suggests that this issue needs further investigation.

95 Nederburgh, GH, 17.

96 As the chairman of the commission poignantly illustrated, a woman with native legal standing could be arrested for wearing European attire at the very moment she emerged from the building in which she had just married a European. Nor could a European man and his wife of native standing take the short boat trip from Soerabaya to Madura without prior permission of the authorities since sea passage for natives was forbidden by law (JV, 29–30).

97 Nederburgh, GH, 20.

98 Ibid., 13.

99 Ibid., 13.

100 JV, 39.

101 Ibem.

102 Ibid., 51.

103 Ibid., 40. The arguments presented over the mixed-marriage ruling are much more numerous and elaborate than this short account suggests. There were indeed those such as Abendanon the lawyer friend of Kartini), whose proposals raised yet a whole different set of options than those offered in these accounts. He argued that both man and woman should be given European status, except in those cases in which a native man preferred to retain his rights under adat law. Abendanon also singlehandedly countered the claim that any European woman who chose to marry a native man was already debased, arguing that there were many Dutch girls in the Netherlands for whom this was not the case. But these arguments were incidental to the main thrust of the debate and had little sway in the final analysis.

104 Nederburgh, GM, 64.

105 See van Marie's, A. “De Groep der Europeanen in Nederlands-Indie, iets over ontstaan en groei,” Indonesie, 5:3 (1952), 322,Google Scholar 328. Van Marie suggests that the much larger number of illiterate women of European standing in central Java and the Moluccas compared to the rest of the Indies indicates that the number of mixed marriages in these regions was particularly high (p. 330). But this was not the case everywhere. In East Java, European men acknowledged more of their metis children but continued to cohabit with the native mothers of their children outside of marriage (p. 495).

106 Klerck, Mevrouw Douaire, Eenige Beschouwingen over Oosl-lndische Toestanden, 3–19 (Amsterdam: Versluys, 1898).Google Scholar

107 Ratu-Langie, S.S.J., Sarekat Islam, 21 (Baarn: Hollandia Drukkerij, 1913).Google Scholar

108 A woman who had contracted a mixed marriage could, upon divorce or death of her husband, declare her desire to reinstate her original nationality as long as she did so within a certain time. However, a native woman who married a European man and subsequently married and divorced a man of non-European status could not recoup her European status.

109 Rodenwalt, Ernest, “Eugenetische Problemen in Nederlandsch-Indie,” Ons Nageslacht, 1–8 (1928).Google Scholar

110 Winsemius, Johan, Nieuw-Guinee als kolonisatie-gebied voor Europeanen en van Indo-Europeanen, 227 (Ph.D. Disser., Faculty of Medicine, University of Amsterdam, 1936).Google Scholar

111 Jacques van Doom emphasizes the dualistic policy on poverty in the 1930s in “Armoede en Dualistisch Beleid” (unpublished); I would refer to it as a three-tiered policy, not a dualistic one.

112 Blumberger, J. Th. Petrus, De lndo-Europeesche Beweging in Nederlandsch-Indie, 5 (Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1939).Google Scholar

113 See der Veur's, Paul van “The Eurasians of Indonesia: A Problem and Challenge in Colonial History.” Journal of Southeast Asian History, 9:2 (09 1966), 191–207,Google Scholar and his “Cultural Aspects of the Eurasian Community in Indonesian Colonial Society,” Indonesia, 6(10 1968), 38–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

114 On the various currents of Eurasian political activity, see Paul W. van der Veur's “The Eurasians of Indonesia: A Problem and Challenge in Colonial History.” On the importance of Indo individuals in the early Malay press and nationalist movement, see Shiraishi's, Takashi An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912–1926, especially 37, 58–59 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).Google Scholar Neither account addresses the class differences within Eurasian groups and where their distinct allegiances lay.

115 Blumberger, De Indo-Europeesche Beweging, 50.

116 According to the historian, Rudolph Mrazek, the early silent rejection of the Indo-European community from the Indonesian nationalist project turned explicit under Soekarno in the mid-1920s, when Indo-Europeans were categorically barred from membership in nationalist political organizations. Mrazek suggests that this silence among Dutch-educated nationalist leaders on the Indo question should be understood as a response from their own cultural formation and identification as cultural hybrids themselves (personal communication).

117 See Drooglever's, P.J. discussion of this failed effort in De Vaderlandse Club, 193–208 (Franeker: T. Wever, 1980).Google Scholar

118 Drooglever, P.J., De Vaderlandse Club, 1929–1942: Totoks en de Indische Politiek, 285 (Franeker: T. Wever, 1980).Google Scholar

119 Verbond Nederland en Indie, no. 3, September 1926, 3. In the late 1920s, this publication appended the subtitle to the name above of “A Fascist Monthly.”

120 This issue of rootlessness is most subtly analyzed in contemporary contexts. Liisa Malkki explores the meanings attached to displacement and uprootedness in the national order of things (“National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology (1992). André-Pierre Taguieff examines LePen's nationalist rhetoric on the dangers of the rootlessness of immigrant workers in France. See Pierre-André Taguieffs excellent analysis of LePen's rhetoric in “The Doctrine of the National Front in France (1972–1989),” in New Political Science, no. 16/17, 29–70.

121 See Braconier, A., “Het Pauperisme onder de in Ned. Oost-Indie levende Europeanen,” Nederlandsch-Indie, no. 1 (1917), 291–300,Google Scholar at 293.

122 Enquete sur Métissage, AOM, Amiraux 53.50.6.

123 Martial, René, Les Métis. 58 (Paris: Flammarion, 1942).Google Scholar

124 See Taguieff, “The Doctrine of the National Front.”

125 On the recent British discourse on Britishness and the cultural threat of Islam to that identity, see Talal Asad's rich analysis in “Multiculturalism and British Identity in the Wake of the Rushdie Affair,” Politics and Society, 18:4 (12 1990), 455–80.Google Scholar

126 Carby, Hazel (“Lynching, Empire and Sexuality,” Critical Enquiry, 12:1 (1985), 262–77)CrossRefGoogle Scholar argues that Afro-American women intellectuals at the turn of the century focused on the métis figure because it both enabled an exploration and expressed the relations between the races, because it demythologized concepts of pure blood and pure race while debunking any proposition of degeneracy through amalgamation. Such black women writers as Pauline Hopkins embraced the mulatto to counter the official script that miscegenation was not the inmost desire of the nonwhite peoples but the result of white rape (p. 274). In both the Indies and the United States at the same time, the figure of the Indo-mulatto looms large in both dominant and subaltern literary production, serving to convey strategic social dilemmas and political messages. It is not surprising, then, that the portrayal of the Indo in fiction was widely discussed in the Indies and metropolitan press by many more than those who were interested in literary style alone.

127 Taylor, The Social World ofBatavia, 155.

128 Carole Pateman argues that the sexual contract is fundamental to the functioning of European civil society, in that the principle of patriarchal right defines the social contract between men, and the individual and citizen as male (The Sexual Contract [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988]Google Scholar).

129 I thank Luise White for pressing me to think out this point.

130 Wright, Gwendolyn, “Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in French Colonial Policy, 1900–1930,” Journal of Modern History, 59 (06 1987), 291–316,CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 297.