TASTE, TERRITORY, AND “THE PEOPLE” The three essays joined here each reveal how aesthetics, taste, and delight—in the forms of wine, cinema, and architecture—are harnessed to political projects that, in spite of their attempts, never quite contain or direct affect in quite the ways the authors of those projects might have hoped.
Daniel Monterescu and Ariel Handel work through the terms terroir and territoriality, the first a branded locality, the second a border that contains, and constrains, political meaning. In “Terroir and Territory on the Colonial Frontier: Making New-Old World Wine in the Holy Land,” they apply a “liquid anthropology” that straddles the Green Line dividing Israel from Palestine, to show how high-end vintners play on the tropes of “the Mediterranean,” biblical authenticity, and Jewish heritage. Territoriality ultimately trumps terroir, though, in that Palestinian land is actually appropriated even as it is redefined for branding purposes. Frontier wines, they show, are a key site where settler colonialism is enacted in and through the market economy.
In “The Kaččā and the Pakkā: Disenchanting the Film Event in Pakistan,” Timothy P. A. Cooper explores the allure that outdoor traveling movie-shows once held over rural viewers, and how the British Empire used that excitement to forge “cinema-minded subjects,” a strategy of managing morality. After Partition, an independent Pakistan continued to use and scrutinize movie-viewing as a way to read and document subjects’ tastes. In both cases, cinema linked delight with matters of population management and rule. Cooper shows how, nevertheless, the affects generated by cinema often overloaded and outran any “official” objectives, with unforeseen consequences.
Finally, José H. Bortoluci explores the architectural design movements in 1950s and 1960s Brazil. In “Brutalism and the People: Architectural Articulations of National Developmentalism in Mid-Twentieth-Century São Paulo,” he shows how architecture works as political practice, as it seeks to represent, and shape, an image of “the people” in relation to the nation. Architecture aligns aesthetic, social, and pragmatic factors, both material and political, as “semio-material” practice. In mid-century São Paulo, Brutalist architects mostly conceptualized their work in relation to notions of the urban poor—variously in progressive or authoritarian terms—that were, however, distant from the realities the actual urban poor faced. In that sense, at least, Brutalist design failed, in spite of the ideological success it enjoyed.
AT THE EDGE OF THE STATE States have many more edges than geographical and temporal ones; frontiers and historical pre- and afterlives. They also have legal limits, narrative drop-offs, affective intensities that fade, and theoretical or philosophical terms of legitimacy that are variously more or less persuasive. The two essays here each consider the edges of states in creative, idiosyncratic ways.
Since the First World War, non-national states—empires—have been viewed as deviant or politically retrograde. In “The Sociological Idea of the State: Legal Education, Austrian Multinationalism, and the Future of Continental Empire, 1880–1914,” Thomas R. Prendergast questions the inevitability of the modern state and the social science models that helped form and conceptualize it. There were, after all, long-lasting modern empires in continental Europe, as in other regions. Such non-national states, like nation-states, laid down claims, narratives, laws, and philosophies as foundations on which to rest their right to exist. Prendergast revisits the work of Austrian social scientists writing under the Hapsburg monarchy to see how they justified and defended the viability of the continental empire: often in terms of the affective ties that subjects expressed for “the Empire,” or in terms of the capacity of multi-national states to accommodate ethnic and religious differences in ways modern European nation-states seemingly could not.
What gaps are opened in the moments between the end of a state and the beginning of a state on the same territory, and governing the same people? How do you know exactly when the new state becomes valid? Rephael G. Stern looks closely at the transition from British Mandate Palestine to the State of Israel on 15 May 1948. In “Legal Liminalities: Conflicting Jurisdictional Claims in the Transition from British Mandate Palestine to the State of Israel,” he shows the complex ways the early Israeli regime drew upon the jurisdictional authority of the British Mandate, and the ways in which it resisted or overturned it. The difference was marked in the terms of time—the new state's shifting uses of “past.” The British Mandate's rules were sometimes relegated to, and cast off as, “the past,” while at other junctures its rules were embraced as forever valid, “ultimate standards of reference.” It afforded Israel a wide range of possible claims to authority at a crucial moment.
EXPEDIENT ETHNOGRAPHY In “‘Their debts follow them into the afterlife’: German Settlers, Ethnographic Knowledge, and the Forging of Coffee Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala,” Julie Gibbings shows how tightly bound were the commercial and ethnographic interests of Guatemala's German coffee planters cum ethnographers. Relying on a close analysis of plantation records read in relation to ethnographic production of the same period, Gibbings uncovers a series of striking relationships between distinct domains of knowledge production. Ethnography was enlisted for, among other objectives, the maintenance of the coffee labor force, comprised of indigenous workers. But Gibbings goes further to show that the German ethnographic tradition of the period also helped to shape the nature and view of capitalism in Guatemala, in ways that endured well into the twentieth century.
Meanwhile, in “‘Intertribal’ Development Strategies in the Global Cold War: Native American Models and Counterinsurgency in Southeast Asia, Jacob Tropp disentangles the extraordinary web connecting Native American history and U.S. Foreign Relations’ development projects of the 1960s and 1970s. Indian country development projects and Native Americans themselves were enlisted in counterinsurgency projects in Laos and Thailand. Laotian and Thai village leaders were brought to the United States to observe Apache, Hopi, Navajo, and Pueblo life. Agencies from the CIA to the USAID pushed Native Americans into an overseas mission of political disruption and transformation in Vietnam—all under the shelter of pleasing monikers like “intertribal” and “tribe-to-tribe assistance.” Tropp's story stands clear of the genre of Indian victimhood. Rather, he shows how Indian communities’ interests in development support collided with the CIA's cold war anti-communist agenda, to generate a surprising series of transnational encounters in which the real interests were never revealed to the indigenous and villager protagonists.
