The Mestizos of Kisar: An insular racial laboratory in the Malay Archipelago

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-463
Author(s):  
Hans Pols ◽  
Warwick Anderson

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mestizos of Kisar, a dry, almost barren island in the Dutch East Indies off the coast of East Timor, were a model for the study of race mixing or human hybridity. Discovered in the late nineteenth century, these ‘anomalous blondes’ of Dutch and Kisarese ancestry became subjects of intense scrutiny by physical anthropologists. As a German specialist in tropical medicine in search of a convenient empire after 1918, Ernst Rodenwaldt favourably evaluated the physique and mentality of the isolated, fair Mestizos in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Back in Germany in the 1930s, as professor of hygiene at Heidelberg, his views on race hardened to accord with Nazi doctrine. Yet after the war, Rodenwaldt successfully cited his earlier appreciation of mixed-race peoples in the eastern Malay Archipelago as grounds for rehabilitation. Once a celebrated case study in human hybridity, the Mestizos of Kisar were erased from anthropological discussion in the 1950s, when race mixing ceased to be a biological issue and became instead a sociological interest. Still, Rodenwaldt's work continues to exert some limited influence in the eastern parts of the archipelago and among the Kisarese diaspora, indicating the penetrance and resilience of colonial racialisation projects.

Author(s):  
Marion Thain

Chapter 1 offers important historical and conceptual contexts for the late nineteenth century. The chapter suggests that ‘aestheticist lyric poetry’ might be usefully conceptualised ‘through the twin impetuses of conceptual expansion and formal reduction’. It then goes on to outline the context of ‘cultural modernity’, to which it is suggested aestheticist lyric poetry is responding, in order to define further the ‘crisis’ in lyric. It also introduces the three conceptual frames that set the remit for the three parts of the book; these are three key axes around which lyric poetry operates: time, space and subjectivity. Chapter 1 ends with a preliminary case study from the work of ‘Michael Field’ (the assumed name of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) to demonstrate in practice the relevance of the three frames to aestheticist poetry.


Author(s):  
Brianna Theobald

This chapter lays the groundwork for the book’s use of the Crow Reservation in Montana as an extended case study. After providing an overview of Crow history to the late nineteenth century, the chapter sketches the parameters of a Crow birthing culture that prevailed in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. Crow women navigated pregnancy and childbirth within female generational networks; viewed childbirth as a sex-segregated social process; and placed their trust in the midwifery services of older women. The chapter further explores government employees’ attitudes toward and interventions in Indigenous pregnancy, childbirth, and especially family life in these years, as these ostensibly private domains emerged as touchstones in the federal government’s ongoing assimilation efforts.


Author(s):  
K. Mitchell Snow

The extended turmoil associated with the decade-long armed portion of the Mexican Revolution provoked widespread concern about how the country would remake itself once the violence ended. Establishing a national esthetic as a means of unification played a significant role in this discussion, which began before hostilities ended. Some of the early manifestations of what might be regarded as Mexican nationalism arose from an appreciation of the land’s indigenous heritage while it was still under Spanish control. Although the willingness to fully embrace the indigenous components of its culture was largely a twentieth century phenomenon, by the late nineteenth century Mexican intellectuals did understand the nation to be essentially mestizo, or mixed race. It was from these premises that the discussion departed.


2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hillary Kaell

A century ago, the mite box (penny collection box) was ubiquitous in North America as a religious fundraising tool, especially for women and children. Using the Methodist Woman's Foreign Missionary Society as a case study, I ask what these boxes reveal about the intersection of gender, consumerism, and capitalism from circa 1870–1930. By cutting across traditional Weberian and Marxist analyses, the discussion engages a more complex understanding of religion and capital that includes emotional attachments and material sensations. In particular, I argue that mite boxes clarify how systematic giving was institutionalized through practices that created an imaginative bridge between the immediacy of a sensory experience and the projections of social policies and prayers. They also demonstrate how objects became physical points of connection that materialized relationships that were meant to be present, but were not tangible. Last, they demonstrate the continued salience of older Christian ideas about blessings and sacrifice, even in an era normally associated with the secularization of market capitalism and philanthropy.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Macleod

This thesis is a case study of 39 disbound album pages with 579 albumen photographic portraits, most attributed to James Inglis (1835-1904), an accompanying index book, four related documents, and two notes concerning the objects’ provenance. This object-based examination of these objects is intended to serve as a model for photographic and social historians when presented with inter-related, multi-part photographic objects. This extensively illustrated case study, which is supported by four appendices, reveals aspects of Montreal’s social history in the late nineteenth century and facilitates the objects incorporation into the McCord Museum’s collection. A brief biography and information on Inglis’ studio are included to contribute to the study of his career and nineteenth century portraiture in Montreal. While the exact function of these objects is still uncertain, this thesis explores their overall intellectual and historical value and is intended to foster further research in the collection.


2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 154-174
Author(s):  
Oiyan Liu

Confucian revivalism swept over China, the Straits Settlements and the Netherlands East Indies in the late nineteenth century. Rather than perceiving China as the single foundational centre for Confucian ideas, this article argues that pioneering Confucian revivalists who undertook to translate, interpret and spread Confucian knowledge in Java did not simply follow mainstream ideas that prevailed in China, or the lead of the Straits Settlements. Considered as the first Malay language translation of the ‘Great Learning’ and the ‘Doctrine of the Mean’, with accompanying commentaries, Yoe Tjai Siang and Tan Ging Tiong's Kitab Tai Hak–Tiong Iong (1900), contained an eclectic blend of Hokkien/Chinese, Malay, Javanese, Dutch/Christian and Arabic/Islamic concepts and vocabulary. Analysis of the translators’ aims and the work itself, shows that Java's peranakan Chinese initially developed a unique, creolised interpretation of Confucianism, while being connected to other reformers and revivalists in China and the Straits Settlements. As these connections and formal educational exchanges intensified, this creolised interpretation of Confucianism in Java would give way to a more orthodox version.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 320-350
Author(s):  
Nathan L. Lam

Late nineteenth-century organist-composers wrote liturgical music dans la tonalité grégorienne based on Niedermeyer and d'Ortigue's chant-accompaniment treatise Traité théorique et pratique de l'accompagnement du plain-chant (1857). The resulting music contained no musica ficta —, especially not raised leading tones in minor—a watershed moment in the nineteenth-century re-emergence of diatonic modality. Focusing on modes 1 and 2 (the Dorian modes) as a case study, part 1 of the essay discusses the historical background of Niedermeyer's treatise, part 2 examines features and theoretical implications therein, part 3 details large modal collections such as Guilmant's Soixante interludes dans la tonalité grégorienne, and part 4 analyses two Dorian marches: one from Guilmant's L'Organiste pratique and one from Gigout's Cent pièces brèves dans la tonalité du plain-chant.


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