Editorial Foreword

POWER FLOWER Imperial science and its collaborations, its landscapes, and its audiences is the theme of many interesting studies of late, including several pieces in this journal, such as Robert Shanafelt, “How Charles Darwin Got Emotional Expression out of South Africa (and the People who Helped Him)” (2003: 783–814), and Saul Dubow, “Earth History, Natural History, and Prehistory at the Cape, 1860–1875” (2004: 107–33). The first essay examines the practice and narrativizing of flower-collecting under imperial conditions.

Erik Mueggler examines the early twentieth-century itineraries of Francis Kingdon-Ward through China and Tibet to the “Lapponicum Sea,” a rhododendron-filled horticultural Eden in the Himalayas and its evocation in writing for a British gardening public that avidly consumed his books and new varieties. In the books, human companions, international relations, history, and culture are pushed to the edge of the frame and the text reproduces the motion and aesthetic of walking and seeing. There is here a labor of perception that deliberately forms practices of perceiving. Mueggler analyses this labor into two processes, which he calls “writing” and “revising.” In “writing” Kingdon-Ward struggled to define his sense of presence to the landscape in relation to companions of his journeys, especially guides, porters, and collectors; in “revising” he refashioned this sense of presence into a regime of ecstatic affect—the Lapponicum Sea—in relation to popular audiences in Britain. Mueggler's essay offers a strategy for exploring the full range of aesthetic endeavors, cosmological yearnings, and projects of self-fashioning involved in late imperial scientific undertakings.

MODALITIES OF IDENTITY The next three articles have to do with different aspects of the politics of identity, pressed by means of claims of religious authority, appeals for Asian solidarity, and the technology of the Internet.

Greg Johnson addresses the kinds of political action around the law governing the repatriation of Native American remains and artifacts, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA. The author examines three cases, showing how Indian groups have learned the language and politics of positioning themselves and their groups. The dynamics of the cases include intra-tribal as well as inter-tribal struggles, and those of tribes versus the larger American society and government, all involving questions of religious authority. The cases involve a Cheyenne leader who was “banished” by self-described religious leaders during a NAGPRA meeting; a Ute man who claimed to speak to Anasazi spirits, otherwise regarded by the Utes as dangerous ghosts and to be avoided; and a Crow religious leader, highly visible in international religious forums, who claims to derive authority from an ancient warrior and from Jesus.

Hong Kal gives us a study of the 1929 Korean Exposition under Japanese colonial rule, comparing it to the 1915 Korean Industrial Exposition and examining also Japanese participation in the 1862 Great Exposition in London as a source of their ideas of exposition-making deployed later in Korea. A main aim of the 1929 Exposition was to represent the “co-prosperity” of Japan and Korea. Ironically, the exposition also contributed to the formation of nationalist consciousness among Korean elites. The author is concerned with “the visual and spatial grammar encoded in the built forms of the expositions,” especially important given that the majority of Koreans under Japanese rule could not read.

Ronald Niezen is known to readers of CSSH for his article, “Recognizing Indigenism: Canadian Unity and the International Movement of Indigenous Peoples” (2000: 119–48). Here he analyses the use of the Internet in the international “indigenous peoples” movement, seeking to identify the specific effects of the net. It is an unusual piece, joining ethnography of the Cree and Sami with scrutiny of websites, including quantification of hits on keywords, use of the Internet for fostering languages of indigenous peoples and other things. While print capitalism fostered nationalism, according to Ben Anderson's Imagined Communities, Niezen asserts that the Internet seems to foster micronationalisms, and gives reasons why this may be so.

COMPARATIVE DEMOCRACY Critical and comparative study of democracy is a longstanding concern for CSSH; see, for example, the trio of articles on “Making Democracy” in the 1999 volume, by John Markoff (“Where and When was Democracy Invented?”, 660–90), Tereswa P. R. Caldeira and James Holston (“Democracy, Law, and Violence: Disjunctions of Brazilian Citizenship,” 691–729), and Michele Penner (“The Expression of Political Dissent in the Middle East: Turkish Democratization and Authoritarian Continuity in Tunisia,” 730–57).

Newly democratic regimes in the Republic of Congo and in Benin after 1990–1991 followed sharply divergent directions. Benin's democratic experiment has survived, twice leading to peaceful change of president through elections. Congo's transition to democracy, however, was dogged by severe crises from the start, issuing eventually in civil war. Bruce Magnusson and John Clark compare the two countries, similar in many respects, to explain the great divergence, examining differences of leadership, institutional choices, and economic structure. They conclude by raising questions about the nature of explanation in structured comparisons such as this.

LAW AND EMPIRE The next two pieces examine trials in distant parts of the British Empire, the first to explain the dynamics of black-white relations, the second to explain the things/persons distinction.

Melanie Newton uses a case of a slave accused of raping a poor white widow in Barbados to illuminate competing forces in the “British Atlantic empire.” The judicial and political systems were “not simply reflections of the will of white, male political and economic elites,” but were shaped through negotiations between colony and metropole and among unequal parties in Caribbean societies. The metropole imposed a policy of slave “amelioration” which was to lead to emancipation, but the planters resisted it. Subaltern and disenfranchised groups intervened in ways that shaped the reform process.

Rachel Sturman considers the adjudication of disputes about family property in British India to be an especially productive site for the construction of modern subjecthood. The relations of persons and things, rendered legally distinct with the abolition of slavery, remain densely interconnected in families. Legal judgments in family property quarrels promote the idea of the autonomous legal subject through imposition of a “fiction of disenchantment” of property. But, in families above all, property is always enchanted by its attachment to persons. The family is crucial for the opposing reasons that it is the hardest case for the imposition of the disenchantment fiction, and because it is the place most often exempted by law from imposed disenchantment, the author argues.

PATRON STATE When one wishes to understand the state, following the money is always a good strategy. To understand the peculiar historical trajectory of Florence, according to the author of the next essay, one needs to follow the trails of patronage.

The stalled evolution of the modern state at Florence, Paul McLean argues, was the result, not of excessive love of capitalism or insufficient lust for territory, but was the outcome of existing, structured, concrete interactions involving patronage. The effects of these interactions were the building of administrative innovations and the tearing down of them in response to culturally shaped patterns of interaction at the micro level. Patronage, through which clients sought both to escape state taxation and to gain entry into state office, was inextricably twined with the state. Exactly because the state was not seen to be a distant, predatory force, exactly because state and society were closely intermeshed and identified with one another, modernizing pushes and traditionalizing pulls were in balance, stalling forward motion.