Reinventing the Wheel: Perpetual Innovation in Sinhalese Potter Assemblages

This paper describes a linked series of potter’s wheel reinventions and abandonments from the mid-20th century through 2013. The wheel is analysed as one element in a complex and dynamic assemblage of people, resources, technologies, meanings, places, and time. Primary data come from ethnographic observations and interviews in a Sinhalese Sri Lankan potter community followed since 1974. As they shifted from one potter’s wheel to another, these potters have altered social and physical supporting technologies for procuring and preparing clay, acquiring fuel, organising labour, and marketing pottery. Some, having reached the limits of a wheel’s capabilities and their own bodies, have abandoned the wheel in favour of moulds and mechanical presses, setting off more cascades of change. Their experiences help to clarify the adaptive capacities and limitations of both potter’s wheels and their users. As this story unfolds in often unanticipated ways, it reveals the importance of attending to spatiotemporal scale. Locally, the wheel highlights the relatively fast-changing affordances and constraints with which individual potters, households, and communities engage. But the wheel also brings into focus the slower moving consequences of regional heterogeneities and paths laid down by national colonial and post-colonial policies decades ago.

The Impact of Colonial Policies on the Waata People of Kilifi County, Kenya, 1895-1963

The Waata community is among the indigenous Kenyan communities whose social, political, and economic organization has not been adequately studied. The objective of the study was to examine the impact of colonial policies on the history of the Waata people of Kilifi County in the period 1895-1963. The study was guided by the cultural interaction and identity formation theory. The study was conducted using the descriptive research design which offered a chronology of events as they unfolded over time. A qualitative approach was significant because it allowed an in-depth collection of data to ascertain the attitudes, feelings, and opinions concerning the theme under study. The study site was Kilifi County. The study targeted both males and females above 18 years within Kilifi County who were knowledgeable about the existence of the Waata people. Purposive and snowballing sampling techniques were used to select the sample for the study. One hundred and twenty-two participants were interviewed. The study used both primary and secondary data. Primary data was derived from the one-on-one interaction with participants using interview schedules and Key Informant Interviews, oral interviews, and focus group discussions. Question guides and questionnaires with open-ended responses were also used. Secondary data was obtained from critical analysis of books, articles, papers, thesis, and dissertations. Additionally, archival sources, particularly colonial documents, annual reports, correspondents, letters, diaries, and political record books related to the area under study were consulted. The findings of the study revealed that colonial policies impacted significantly on the history of the Waata forcing them to adapt to different lifestyles in order to survive cultural extinction. This adaptation was informed by the colonial labelling of traditional hunting communities like the Waata as poachers and the progressive government efforts to stop them from their traditional source of livelihood as well as their eviction from their indigenous habitats and creation of National Parks.

On the Similarity of Colonialist Policies Implemented Against the Ottoman Empire and the Far East: The Bargains Over Korea After the Shimonoseki Agreement

The industrialized Western powers, seeking free trade, raw materials and market, turned their faces to the underdeveloped states of the Middle and the Far East in the 19th century. First Ottoman Empire, then China and Japan became the targets of this process in a short time. Ottoman Empire was transformed into a semi colony between 1856-1881. After China’s defeat against Japan, the French and British diplomats had discussed repeating the policy which they implemented against Ottoman Empire after the Crimean War in 1853-1856, for China. Colonial effects had begun with trade agreement in Ottoman Empire and continued with changes in judiciary, land laws and increasing the rights of foreigners. Also Japan, who learned how to be a colonialist from British Empire, captured the sovereignty and made changes to judicial and social laws in Korea. In this study, we emphasized that the colonial policies were the same everywhere in both the Near East or the Far East. The Archival documents show the similarities to colonial policies implemented in the Ottoman Empire and Korea. The main source of the findings in this study is the diplomatic correspondence of British diplomats in the region, in the National Archives.

The colonial origins of ethnic warfare: Re-examining the impact of communalizing colonial policies in the British and French Empires

Communalizing colonial policies (CCPs) include a variety of practices that recognize and institutionalize communal difference among colonized populations, and several qualitative analyses find that they promoted postcolonial ethnic conflict. In contrast, the few quantitative analyses that explore this issue focus on several mechanisms, make conflicting claims, and provide mixed results, thereby suggesting that CCPs do not have general effects. Yet the quantitative findings might be inaccurate for several reasons: Some use the identity of the colonizer as a proxy for CCPs, others measure a CCP but have small samples with limited variation in the focal independent variable, and all of these analyses are unable to explore whether CCPs affect ethnic conflict through different and competing mechanisms. To address these limitations, we create four ideal types of CCPs, gather data on a CCP that conforms to each ideal type, and test the relationships between CCPs and ethnic civil warfare onset using the set of former British and French colonies. We find that a discriminatory CCP is associated with high odds of ethnic civil war onset, especially shortly after independence. Alternatively, differentiating and accommodating CCPs lack general relationships with ethnic civil war onset, and an empowering CCP is negatively related to ethnic warfare in most models.

The Peacebuilding Endeavours of Daniel Oliver and the Palestine Watching Committee in Mandate Palestine, 1930-48

This paper analyses the peacebuilding efforts of the official British Religious Society of Friends representative in Mandate Palestine, Daniel Oliver, and the Palestine Watching Committee (PWC). Previously unexamined documentation stored in the Friends House library and Haverford College archives details the extensive negotiations by Oliver and the PWC, which he co-founded, to influence British, Arab and Jewish senior political and royal officials. Combining individual and collective Quaker values concerning the Peace Testimony with a deep focus on British government colonial policies proved problematic. Internal fractions developed over the conduct of British forces in Palestine and the issue of Jewish immigration. Oliver defended the British government and continued to press for peace, demonstrating how patriotism significantly influenced his own spiritually guided message, while the PWC reduced its activities and became despondent over their lack of success and the decline of the Mandate.

“Qué Bonita Mi Tierra”

Employing an anticolonial and anticapitalist approach to HIV/AIDS, the activists of the Latina/o Caucus of ACT UP/NY pushed beyond a biomedical framework of “drugs into bodies” that tended to dominate the larger organization. As US queer racialized/colonial subjects, Latinx AIDS activists enacted a queer and feminist decolonial activism that looked past the continental United States to the global South. In Puerto Rico, Latinx AIDS activists helped establish the first chapter of ACT UP in a Spanish-speaking country. Together, the Latina/o Caucus and ACT UP/Puerto Rico spearheaded a campaign against the colonial policies of the United States, the corporate greed of island-based pharmaceutical firms, and the heteropatriarchal investments of church and commonwealth officials—conditions that exacerbated the disproportionate rates of HIV/AIDS among Puerto Rican island and diasporic communities. Through these efforts, Latinx AIDS activists transformed the domestic and global fight against AIDS into a queer, feminist, and decolonial endeavor.