Hamilton Historical Volume III, Issue II: Spring 2024

Hamilton Historical

An Undergraduate Journal est. 2020

Volume III Issue II: Spring 2024

Peer-reviewed by Undergraduates for Undergraduates

Based out of Hamilton College, Clinton NY.

Hamilton Historical

Volume III, Issue II

Spring 2024

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Quinn Brown

ASSISTANT EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Lara Barreira

Layout Czar

Jack Ritzenberg

Layout Czarevich

Mika Tortusa

Peer Editors

Miko Newman Nicole Mcdonough

Kloe Shkane John Sheets

Nick Fluty Katie Rao

Readers

Sam Minzter Ben Ingram

Helen Ziobrowski Allen Cao

Peter Hinkle Bennett Hauck Tim Murray

Editor’s Preface

Dear Readers,

Welcome to our second issue of volume III of the Hamilton Historical. This issue will be my last as Editor-in-Chief of the journal but I am pleased to announce that Lara Barreira will be taking over as Editor-in-Chief for our next volume after serving as Assistant Editor-in-Chief this semester. Joining Lara in leadership will be Mika Tortusa who will take over for our esteemed Layout Czar Jack Ritzenberg. I want to give a special thank you to all of our Readers and Peer Editors who have worked prodigiously to create our issue.

Since our establishment in 2020 we have made an effort to include a wide variety of historical scholarship from a range of our peer institutions as well as from our own Hamilton College. This issue is no different as our published pieces include research and historiography pieces ranging temporally from the Middle Ages to modernity. This issue will begin with an investigation of John Locke’s influence on English colonization in America from Meg Shelburne of Middlebury College. Next, Lara Barreira, our Assistant Editor-in-Chief, provides an analysis of Obeah magic. After that, we will turn to a historiographical discussion of race in theories of nationalism by Hamilton’s Jacob Piazza. A survey of the Animals of the Hereford Mappamundi by Alex Wilson of Carleton College will follow that. Our penultimate piece is an interrogation of French Photography in Madagascar by John Sheets of Hamilton. And wrapping up our issue is a discussion of the historiography of the Soldier-Symbol in America by Sumiko Newman also of Hamilton.

Thank you for continued readership and support of the Hamilton Historical.

Sincerely,

Quinn Editor-in-Chief, 2023-2024

Primary Title “Let Him Plant in Some Vacant Places of America”

John Locke’s Account of Property and 17th-Century English “New World” Colonialism

Meg Shelburne Middlebury College - Class of 2024

In his classic of Western political theory, Two Treatises of Government (1689), John Locke constructed an account of the origin and ends of government that centered above all on the protection of private property. The English historian Peter Laslett contends that the Two Treatises are most innovative in Locke’s justification of private property, in which individual labor provides the basis for the appropriation of common goods for private use.1 This grounding of private property in individual labor and the rights extending from self-ownership has traditionally encouraged scholars to situate Locke’s theory of property as a foundational idea of modern individualist capitalism. This idea has surfaced among 20th-century scholars as politically distinct as C.B. Macpherson, who indicted Locke’s “possessive individualism” as a foundation of the contemporary ills of capitalism, and Robert Nozick, whose Anarchy, State, and Utopia praised Locke’s account of property to advocate for a limited state and unfettered free market economy.2 Their more recent interpretations are the children of a long scholarly history that reads Locke’s property-centric liberalism within the natural law tradition, evaluating Locke’s theory of property as the product of 17th-century English philosophical contests over absolutism and monarchy. Over the last several decades, another powerful angle of scholarship has emerged that places Locke’s doctrine of property within another 17th-century context: English colonization in the Americas and the

1 Peter Laslett, “Introduction” in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 101107.

2 C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

mercantilist world system. As European monarchies— the already-established Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, and French, as well as the more late-coming English—attempted to assert their claims to “New World” territories throughout the 17th-century, justifications for property and land appropriation became increasingly contested.3 Locke himself stood in the middle of this contest: Locke’s extensive personal involvement in English colonial projects in the Americas has become evident over the last thirty years. Drawing on a wealth of previously overlooked biographical evidence, James Tully and Barbara Arneil make powerful cases for taking Locke’s numerous references to the Americas in the Two Treatises seriously as a defining feature of his theory of property rights. By foregrounding Locke’s personal involvement in English colonialism in the Americas, Tully and Arneil demonstrate how Locke’s account of property rights in the Second Treatise, which makes agricultural labor the basis for land rights and construes American lands as “vacant” or “waste,” can be read as a justification for the English seizure of Native American lands.4

This essay will extend Tully and Arneil’s reading of Locke as an essentially colonial and mercantilist thinker, closely examining how the need to legitimize English claims to Native American lands shaped Locke’s account of property. In particular, it will build

3 David Armitage, “Introduction” in Theories of Empire 14501800, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France c. 1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

4 James Tully, “Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights,” in An Approach to Political Philosophy: John Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 137-76; Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

on Tully and Arneil by emphasizing the way that the competitive mercantilist context incentivized Locke to construct his definition of property in order to position the English colonial project as a preferable or admirable alternative to other forms of European colonialism in the New World, particularly the Spanish. Locke constructs his philosophical justification of property rights in a manner that exalts noninvasive English yeoman agriculture while invalidating Spanish “just war” or conquest-based forms of land appropriation. However, rather than accept Locke’s differentiation of English practices at face value, this essay will examine the inconsistencies between the vision of benign English occupation of “vacant” American lands that Locke lays out in the Two Treatises and the actual colonial practices in which he was involved. In this light, it becomes clear that Locke’s treatment of property endorses a vision of colonialism that fails to be fundamentally different from the Spanish vision. For one, Locke and the Spanish alike used the religiously defined “uncivilized” nature of the indigenous populations as a justification for seizing their lands and overwriting their ways of life. As such, Locke’s account of property should be recognized as broadly continuous with patterns of European justifications for American colonialism and implicated in that world-altering historical process.

As Tully and Arneil bring to light, Locke played a central role in the English colonization of North America, an experience which strongly shaped his work on property in the Second Treatise. Locke sat at vantage point from which he could observe nearly every facet of the American colonial project—David Armitage concludes that “by the time [Locke] resigned from the Board of Trade in 1700, he had become one of the two-best informed observers of the English Atlantic world of the late seventeenth century.”5 Locke was introduced to colonial matters in the late 1660s through the patronage of the highly influential Lord Shaftesbury, the leading proprietor of the colony of Carolina, an association which changed the course of Locke’s life and gave him the political expertise to write the Two Treatises. 6 As the secretary to Shaftesbury, to the Lord Proprietors of Carolina (1668-1671), and to the Council of Trade and Plantations (1673-1674) he helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina and attained enormous knowledge of the workings of the

5 David Armitage, “John Locke: Theorist of Empire?,” in Empire and Political Thought, ed. Sankar Muthu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 90.

6 Laslett, Introduction to Two Treatises of Government, 26-27.

various English colonial projects.7 Later progressing to become a member of the Board of Trade (1696-1700), a Landgrave of the Carolina colony, and a stockholder in the slave-trading Royal Africa Company (1671) and Company of Merchant Adventurers to Trade with the Bahamas (1672), Locke made a number of significant contributions to shaping the colonial system in the Restoration period.8 While Locke writes primarily of Native Americans in Second Treatises’ discussions of property, his personal investment in the African slave trade was also substantial and worthy of notice. Regardless, Locke was privy to an enormous amount of detailed information about colonists’ interactions with Native Americans and the progress of colonial agriculture and settlement. The question of English property rights in the Americas was far from trivial for him: it had real and consequential daily ramifications for him. With this biographical information in mind, Locke’s repeated references to the Americas in the Second Treatise take on a much more important dimension, demonstrating the extent to which the Americas and Native Americans actually played a tangible role in his thinking on property rights. James Tully, followed later by Barbara Arneil, weaves together Locke’s colonial commitments with a close reading of Chapter 5—“On Property”—of the Second Treatise to argue convincingly that Locke bases property rights as he does on cultivation in order to justify English seizure of American lands.9 Locke’s investigation of property takes as its starting point the “Grants God made of the World” to humankind and then applies “Reason” to discover how individual property rights arose from this original state of communal goods and land.10 In so doing, Locke was operating within the 17th-century natural law debates on the origins of property that had been developed by Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf. But where Grotius and Pufendorf legitimize the development of private property through the notion of universal consent or agreement between individuals, Locke undertakes the task in Chapter 5 of explaining how property can

7 David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the ’Two Treatises of Government,” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (2004): 602–27.

8 Tully, “Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights,” 140-141.

9 Ibid.

10 John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, ed. Peter Laslett, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).

begin without the need for consent.11 Locke’s “endeavour to shew, how men might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to mankind in common, and that without any express Compact of the Commoners” has been classically interpreted as a refutation of Sir Robert Filmer’s absolutist and monarchist arguments, Locke’s object in the entire First Treatise.12 However, establishing an alternative to property by consent also had critical implications for England’s colonial projects, which depended on occupying land without the express consent of the natives.

Locke’s chief innovation in finding this consent-free foundation for property rights was to make individual labor the basis of appropriation, which both serves to delegitimize native forms of property and exalt a specifically English agricultural model of colonization. Locke, as Macpherson noted in Possessive Individualism, bases the origin of property in self-ownership—“every man has a Property in his Person” — such that each man’s labor is his own property. By applying “the Work of his Hands…whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.”13 Locke identifies the“chief matter of property” as land rights. He argues that God “commanded [man] to subdue the Earth, i.e. improve it for the benefit of Life” by laboring upon it. Locke contends that this divine grant means that the individual who will most maximize the value of the land deserves to appropriate the land: “[God] gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational, (and Labour was to be his Title to it;).”14 Locke contends that land has no value until cultivated—“let any one consider, what the difference is between an Acre of Land planted with Tobacco or Sugar, sown with Wheat or Barley; and an Acre of the same Land lying in common, without any Husbandry upon it.”15 This emphasis on cultivation implies that Native American communal land use fails to meet the

11 Barbara Arneil, “Colonialism and Natural Law” in John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

12 Laslett, Two Treatises on Government, “Second Treatise”, Ch. 5, para. 25. Note by Peter Laslett.

13 Locke, Two Treatises on Government, “Second Treatise”, Ch. 5, para. 27.

14 Locke, Two Treatises on Government, “Second Treatise”, Ch. 5, para. 32-34.

15 Locke, Two Treatises on Government, “Second Treatise”, Ch. 5, para. 40.

“rational and industrious” standard laid out in the initial divine grant to mankind and therefore fails to meet the requirements of property rights.

Thus, by making agricultural labor and cultivation the hallmark of property rights and contrasting this with imagined Native American practices in the “state of nature,” Locke presents indigenous land use as a natural antecedent to inevitably be superseded by European cultivation. As Locke constructs it, indigenous Americans practice only a very limited form of individual property based on hunting and gathering: “Thus this law of reason makes the Deer, that Indian’s who hath killed it,” since “‘tis allowed to be his goods who hath bestowed his labour upon it.”16 This activity of the “wild Indian,” is identified as an example of primitive society before European ways of cultivation and commerce developed. Following up his example of the Native American appropriation of a deer, Locke explicitly excludes Native Americans from the group he terms the “civiliz’d part of mankind.”17 In his most famous phrase equating Native Americans to the state of nature, Locke insists that “In the beginning all the World was America,” making it clear that Locke sees America as a blank canvas for civilized development. By using agricultural labor as the standard of civilization, Locke creates a dichotomy where natives cannot resist its march: they either must adopt English practices or give their land over to the English.18 By equating cultivation and civilization, Locke positions the development of America along the lines of English agricultural practice as inherently desirable. Indeed, Locke uses this dichotomy between English “civilization” and Native Americans in the purported state of nature to label lands in the Americas as unoccupied and vacant, demanding English cultivation and colonization. He argues that “Land that is left wholly to Nature, that hath no improvement of Pasturage, Tillage, or Planting, is called, as indeed it is, waste.”19 Locke, describing how the invention and adoption of money in ‘developed’ societies had led to the age of property consumption unlimited by spoilage,

16 Locke, Two Treatises on Government, “Second Treatise”, Ch. 5, para. 30.

17 Ibid.

18 Barbara Arneil, “The Wild Indian’s Venison: Locke’s Theory of Property and English Colonialism in America,” Political Studies 44, no. 1 (1996): 60–74, https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.1996.tb00764.x.

19 Locke, Two Treatises on Government, “Second Treatise”, Ch. 5, para. 42.

treats the Americas as an area where this inevitable and natural development has not yet taken place: “there are still great Tracts of Ground to be found, which (the inhabitants thereof not having joyned with the rest of mankind, in the consent of the Use of their common money) lie waste, and are more than the People, who dwell on it, do or can make use of, and so still lie in common.”20 Based on Locke’s aforementioned Puritan “rational and industrious” doctrine that God commands man to cultivate as much land as possible, the English settlers are essentially obligated to make use of these “wasted” lands for the good of mankind. As such, he combines his doctrine of hard-working English labor-based property and the insistence that America is wasted to create a subtle biblical mandate for English colonialism.

Locke’s labeling of America as vacant land and even as an uncultivated one was intentional, bordering on duplicitous. Locke was far from unfamiliar with Native American cultures, given his extensive exposure to news and literature from the colonies. Locke had even met and interrogated two Kiawahs from the Carolina colony who had traveled to England, an experience which influenced his conclusion in the landmark 1670 Essay on Human Understanding that Europeans had no exclusive cognitive or cultural superiorities.21 Besides the knowledge of native practices which accrued to him as the secretary of the Lord Proprietors of Carolina, Locke also had an impressive collection of colonial travelogues—over 195 titles, most of which describe trips to the Americas by European explorers like Sir Walter Raleigh and Richard Hakluyt.22 Locke clearly uses them to inform his concept of the state of nature throughout the Two Treatises, citing several throughout the First and Second Treatises—including, for example, Garcilaso de la Vega’s Commentarios Reales 23 Barbara Arneil concludes that “Locke was selective in the ‘facts’ he chose to include about them…what did not fit was ignored.”24 Most interestingly, Arneil notes that Locke’s exposure to colonial operations would have made him well aware of the fact

20 Locke, Two Treatises on Government, “Second Treatise”, Ch. 5, para. 45.

21 Armitage, “John Locke: Theorist of Empire?,” 88.

22 Barbara Arneil, “Locke’s Travel Books” in John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

23 Locke, Two Treatises on Government, “Second Treatise”, Ch. 2, para. 14.

24 Arneil, “Locke’s Travel Books”

that natives cultivated the land and grew corn and other crops. English colonists in Virginia and Carolina depended on local populations for food and farming technology and Locke knew this.25 Locke’s insistence on describing American lands as vacant and uncultivated thus serves the purposes of his argument by making use of common misconceptions, rather than being the logical product of his actual expertise with colonial administration and Native Americans.

As such, the biographical evidence compiled by Tully and Arneil provides a convincing demonstration of the way that Locke’s exposure to the contest between Native Americans and the English for North American land shaped his thinking on the origins and foundations of property. Locke’s labor-based theory of property owes much of its inspiration to the nature of England’s agricultural North American colonies. However, the older historiography led by Macpherson and Nozick that makes Locke’s theory of property the origin of individualistic, small-government capitalism does not give credit to this essentially colonial and mercantilist bent of Locke’s individualism. Locke emphasizes small-holding, individualistic yeoman farming as the appropriate use of land in part because of the influence of the English colonial project on his thought: the need to justify the occupation of American lands, and, importantly, to elevate English colonial practices above those of other nations, including the French, the Dutch, and, above all, Spain.

Given Locke’s involvement in this mercantilist context, his labor-based theory of property owes as much to the need to formulate a ‘better’ justification for colonial appropriation than the Spanish and other European competitors as it does to natural rights theories about individual ownership. In the mercantilist, rather than purely capitalist, world economy of Locke’s day, both individual and national economic success was closely intertwined with national colonial power.

As John Tully argues in response to Macpherson, this “mercantile system” centered the nation rather than the individual as the beneficiary of colonial projects and appropriation of Native land.26 The state carefully oversaw and sponsored labor by English colonists in the Americas in order to bolster England’s position “in a zero sum, balance of power system of military and commercial rivalry with other European states over the

25 Ibid.

26 James Tully, “After the Macpherson Thesis,” in An Approach to Political Philosophy: John Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 137–76.

conquest, colonization, and exploitation of the non-European world.”27 Locke’s unpublished “Notes on an Essay for Trade,” prepared in 1674, makes this mercantilist mindset clear: “The chief end of trade is Riches & Power…Riches consists in plenty of Movables that will yield a price to a foreigner.”28 Throughout his assorted papers on trade and the colonies, Locke repeatedly tallies the economic benefits accruing to England from colonization in the internationally competitive mercantilist scheme, indicating the extent to which he saw his colonial project as in service of English power rather than individual capital gain.29

In Locke’s effort to distinguish English colonialism from its European competitors, he draws an especially strong contrast with Spanish conquest-based conceptions of property. The Spanish empire in the Americas loomed large over the politics of English colonialism. England had spent much of the 16th-century locked in a fierce rivalry with Catholic Spain.30 As Anthony Pagden writes, Spain’s 16th-century American conquests had made it the most successful and notorious of colonial powers: “only Spain had been able to carry out sustained and well-publicized conquests… marked down as one of the most appalling chapters in the history of human brutality.”31 The “grab and run” mentality of many conquistadores and the absolute devastation of the environment and native population via the encomienda and repartimiento systems of quasi-plantation slavery were well publicized by Spanish writers throughout the 16th and 17th centuries.32

Theorists of English colonialism, including Locke, had significant incentive to emphasize their differences with these publicly abhorred Spanish practices. Though Spain was far from its colonial heyday when Locke wrote the Two Treatises in the late 17th-century, it remained the pre-eminent colonial power in North America when the first English settlers arrived. Controlling much of the west as well as the Carolina-adja-

27 Ibid, 85.

28 John Locke, “Notes for an Essay on Trade” in Papers of Locke Relating to Trade and the Colonies, Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, Locke Manuscripts, 1671-1702, MS. Locke c. 30, folio 18.

29 Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, Locke Manuscripts, Papers of Locke Relating to Trade and the Colonies, 1671-1702. MS. Locke c. 30.

30 Timothy Paul Grady, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry in Colonial South-East America, 1650-1725 (London: Routledge, 2016).

31 Pagden, Lords of All the World, 4.

32 Pagden, Lords of All the World, 66.

cent colony of Florida. Spain posed a formidable threat to the late-coming English as they attempted to carve out their Atlantic dominions.33 As they had done in South America, Spanish Catholic missionaries in Florida used the “implied threat of the Spanish garrison” to convert the natives, a practice which the anti-Catholic English roundly despised.34 Though mercantilism provided a significant element of the competition between the English and the Spanish, the role of the Catholic-Protestant competition and the quest to convert native populations should not be underemphasized. To justify seizures of indigenous property that often amounted to little more than open theft and plunder, Spanish philosophers offered the idea that property was based on conquest or, at best, was the prize of a “just war.” They turned conquest into a “just war” by construing the natives as resisting civilization and thus damaging the overall welfare of mankind. Among the earliest philosophical justifications was Juan Lopez de Palacios Rubios’ 1512 requerimiento (“requirement”) argument that built on 15th-century papal grants of the American lands to Spain and Portugal to argue on a theological basis that Spain deserved to be the ruler of an immense global empire and promised hideous punishments to any natives that resisted this march of history.35 Indians were labeled as deserving of conquest given their purported resistance to the march of ‘civilization’ and thus to the overall good of humanity.36 Indeed, Locke takes square aim at these Spanish conquests and “just war” based justifications for the seizure of native property in Chapter 16, “On Conquest,” of the Second Treatise. He categorizes aggressive and unwarranted invasions as an illegitimate basis for property, noting that it “will be easily agreed by all Men, who will not think, that Robbers and Pyrates have a Right of Empire over whomsoever they have force enough to master.”37 His second, and more nuanced argument, is his self-described “strange doctrine” that even the victor of a “just war” “has not thereby a Right and Title to their possessions.”38 Locke supports a rejection of conquest-based property rights by claiming that it is because the costs to the conquered cannot be

33 Grady, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 2.

34 Ibid.

35 Pagden, Lords of All the World, 66.

36 Ibid, 97-100.

37 Locke, Two Treatises on Government, “Second Treatise”, Ch. 16, para. 176.

38 Locke, Two Treatises on Government, “Second Treatise”, Ch. 16, para. 180.

justified: “the destruction of a Years Product or two… is the utmost spoil that can be done.”39

Having thus rejected the Spanish “just war” argument, Locke reiterates his own waste-based view of the conditions in which land can reasonably be claimed: “where there being more Land than the inhabitants possess, and make use of, any one has liberty to make use of the waste,” reiterating his doctrine of peaceful English colonization of “vacant” lands rather than Spanish-style conquest and plunder. While this chapter on conquest was certainly also shaped by pressing European warfare, Locke’s curious attention to rehashing the contrast between cultivated and uncultivated lands demonstrates the extent to which his colonial concerns and interest in rejecting Spanish theories of property influenced him here as well.

Despite Locke’s insistence on rejecting Spanish-style practices in favor of a cultivation-based approach, he was basically splitting hairs: Locke and the proprietors praise themselves for improving on the Spanish model while still replicating the fundamental goals and practices of Spanish colonialism. Neither Tully nor Arneil fully reckon with Locke’s doctrine’s theoretical similarities and comparable consequences to the Spanish conquest-based project. Arneil largely accepts Locke and the proprietors’ attempts to differentiate themselves, emphasizing that “all of these perceived elements in the Spanish method of colonization—the lack of concern for the land, the refusal to recognize the rights of the Amerindians in terms of their lives and liberties, and the belief in colonization through conquest and the search for mines—were rejected wholeheartedly by the English colonizers.”40 She then goes on to suggest that Shaftesbury, assisted by Locke, even created Carolina as a contrasting model of this ethical, small-holding colony of freemen.41 Citing Locke and Shaftesbury’s advice to the governor of the colony in 1671 that suggested it would be more “advantageous” to pursue “Planting and Trade” instead of “rapin and plunder,” Arneil insists that Locke and the English colonists eschewed Spanish-style colonialism and actively sought to make ethical improvements

on the model.42

However, accepting this differentiation of the English and Spanish colonial practices ignores that even while trying to draw a contrast with Spanish abuses, Locke and the Carolina proprietors continued to construe Natives as remaining outside of civilization and operated under the same basic philosophical framework—America as a wasted divine grant that Europeans must make good on—as the Spanish. The Fundamental Constitution of Carolina, of which Locke was a principal architect, aims at a degree of tolerance but remains wedded to this basic Christian justification for land appropriation. It excludes non-Christians from landholding: “No man shall be permitted to be a freeman of Carolina, or to have any estate or habitation within it, that doth not acknowledge a God.”43 The constitution identifies the natives as these un-Christian men: “But since the natives of that place, who will be concerned in our plantation, are utterly strangers to Christianity.”44 Though the rest of the paragraph concedes that their “idolatry, ignorance, or mistake gives us no right to expel them or use them ill,” and advocates religious tolerance in the new colony for purposes of “civil peace,” it nods toward an improvement on the Spanish model fails to acknowledge a reality where indigenous practices were slowly but surely eradicated by Carolina colonists.45 In replicating the narrative of “civilized” Christians and the illegitimate “heathen” natives in the Fundamental Constitution, Locke’s doctrine echoed Spanish requerimiento logic even as it purported to condemn this. Locke’s agricultural appropriation hinged on the same basic justification as that of the Spanish: labeling the natives uncivilized and thus positioning the seizure of their land as a net benefit for mankind. While Locke’s characterization of labor as the defining feature of civilized land use masks this fact better than the “just war” doctrines of the Spanish, the basic effect of both remains the delegitimization of native forms of property use.46 Both doctrines—Prot-

42 Letter from Ashley to William Saile, 13 May 1671, written in Locke’s hand, Shaftesbury’s Papers, PRO Bundle 48, No. 55; Collections, 327–8. Cited in Arneil, “Carolina: A Colonial Blueprint,” 130.

43 “The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,” 1669, The Avalon Project, Yale University, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_ century/nc05.asp#1. Paragraph 95.

39 Locke, Second Treatise, Ch. 16, para. 184.

40 Arneil, “Carolina: A Colonial Blueprint,” in John Locke and America: The Defense of English Colonialism, 122.

41 Ibid

44 “The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina”, Paragraph 97.

45 Ibid

46 Tully, “Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights,” 140-141.

estant and Catholic alike—invoked divine mandates for “civilization” and demanded the eventual forceful replacement of indigenous ways of life in order to generate European profit and glory, with devastating consequences for the indigenous.

The fact that the activities of the Carolina colony in practice departed substantially from his described ideal and mimicked Spanish practices further weakens Locke’s rhetoric around a uniquely English and moral type of land use. Despite Arneil’s insistence that the colony under Locke and Shaftesbury’s guidance prohibited “slavery in all its forms” in an attempt to differentiate itself from the Spanish, the Carolina colonists periodically practiced Native American slavery (as well as African chattel slavery), as Locke well knew.47 Indeed, in the mid-to-late 17th-century, the Carolina colony led the English Atlantic world in the scale and of the enslavement of natives.48 It is a well-known contradiction of Locke’s philosophical thought that Locke himself was personally invested in the African slave trade in the English Atlantic colonies—as noted above, he was a stockholder in the Royal Africa Company and Company of Merchant Adventurers to Trade with the Bahamas—even as he wrote ringing rejections of slavery in the Two Treatises. 49 In a similar vein, despite Locke’s rhetoric around the need to cultivate a peaceful relationship with native populations, the Carolina colonists did turn to “just war” and the enslavement of natives to further their colonial aims. For example, colonists provoked a series of wars with the neighboring Westo tribe between 1671 and 1685 and began a thriving trade in native captives.50 Though illegal, the practice was widely acknowledged and demonstrated the ethical vacancy of attempting to pursue a moderated or improved version of colonization. English ideals that purported to improve on the Spanish fell short in practice—regardless of rhetorical trappings and efforts around the edges to moderate the impact on Native Americans, the core underpinnings of the English project were equivalent to that of the Spanish: mercantilist national economic gain at the expense of the indigenous.

Finally, given the actual historical consequences for the natives of Locke’s supposed “admirable”

47 Arneil, “Carolina: A Colonial Blueprint,” 122.

48 Ibid, 65.

49 Wayne Glausser, “Three Approaches to Locke and the Slave Trade,” Journal of the History of Ideas 51, no. 2 (1990): 199–216, https://doi.org/10.2307/2709512.

50 Gallay, “Carolina, the Westo, and the Trade in Indian Slaves.”

alternative, his argument in the Two Treatises fails to mark any real ethical or intellectual improvement on the Spanish “might makes right” land seizures. As Domenico Losurdo discusses in his history of the ills of liberalism, Locke’s doctrine of American vacancy found its fullest expression via 19th-century proponents of the westward expansion of the United States, legitimizing both Andrew Jackson’s westward deportations of natives in the east in the 1830s and then later 19th-century wars of conquest against Western native nations.51

In the hands of admired liberal thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville, Locke’s vacancy doctrine evolved into a theological mandate by God for the industrious white Americans to expand across the continent and make use of the lands—again, strongly reminiscent of and functionally equivalent to the arguments of the Spanish in South America over three centuries earlier.52 Regardless of the packaging of Locke’s property doctrine in its Puritan, individualist, and labor-centric values, its actual consequence—the eradication of indigenous ways of life—erodes the distinction between it and the conquest-based ideas that governed Spanish colonization. Though Locke laid claim to a more Puritan, industrious form of colonization and the global moral high ground for the English, his North American colonialism eventually resulted in comparable erasure of indigenous ways of life as in Spanish South America, if through a more drawn-out, long-term process. That such ethical baggage can be found attached to as central a doctrine of liberalism as Locke’s theory of individual labor-based property should be no surprise to any observer of liberalism’s history. Liberalism in the rear view is often marked by the tension between its lofty moral and ethical aspirations and the reality that the practical consequences of liberal doctrines often amount to little more than “might makes right.”53

As such, emphasizing the ways in which Locke’s treatment of property endorses a form of English colonialism—one that replicated the abuses of the Spanish land appropriation more than it avoided them—strengthens the line of scholarship begun by Tully and Arneil. Their work situating Locke’s doctrine of property in its appropriate mercantilist context and recognizing the strong influence of the contrast between Spanish and English colonialism does make important gains in addressing anachronistic treatments

51 Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counterhistory, trans. Gregory Elliot (Brooklyn: Verso Publishing, 2014), 230-233.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

of his theory of property. However, it is important to extend their arguments by recognizing that Locke’s intended contrast with the Spanish belies a basic fact of the English colonial project: it fundamentally stands alongside other European colonial projects as their moral equals in its mercantilist goals and terribly destructive outcomes for indigenous Americans. While the particular shape and nature of Locke’s treatment of property in the Second Treatise is certainly innovative and worth appreciating in its own right, given these essential similarities, it should also be understood as part of a broader picture of early modern European rationales for colonialism. As such, Locke and his theory of property form a valuable piece of the 17th-century colonial landscape, with all the implications that contains for the colonial origins of the world economy and the virtual erasure of Native American society.

The Magic of Healing

An analysis of the development and historicization of Obeah.

Lara Barreira Hamilton College - Class of 2025

The practice of healing, when pushed beyond the mundane and the ‘scientific’, becomes something like magic—the act of creating miracles through healing practices and ritual. The full extent of “healing,” for both body and soul, eclipses practices and concepts in modern medical vocabulary. It is difficult to historicize magic in the greater understanding of medicine and healing because ‘magic’ is more than material knowledge. Magic is a way of being and a social structure used to create an understanding of the world. Through an analysis of the historicization of Obeah, this essay will create “a conceptual space” that introduces the possibility of combining spiritualism, rituals, land, and politics to define Obeah in order to emphasize its role as a magical healing practice.1 I aim to define Obeah as a culture that exists beyond the constricting narratives of black magic or as a tool of resistance.2 Obeah instead represents the ways enslaved African people in the British West Indies engaged with their environment to create a culture of healing. In this paper, I will challenge the structures that historically have defined Obeah such as modern scholarship, legislation, and its societal perceptions, and bring it back to its “magic.”

“These are stories that did not wish to be told,” is how historian and professor Abena Dove Osseo-Asare describes her experience tracing traditional and oral

1 Diana Paton, The Cultural Politics of Obeah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 21. In her book, Paton uses the phrase “conceptual space” to refer to a rift in the understanding of magic and the world.

2 Obeah is capitalized in this paper because I view it as a religious practice as well as a culture that deserves to be acknowledged as one. In most modern scholarship and leading historians like Diana Paton decided to use lowercase. However, there should be a conversation about whether Obeah should be capitalized like Vodou is. It raises the question of what practices deserve or do not deserve to be categorized as a singular concept.

knowledge in Africa.3 To write a contextualized history of the extraction of African plants, Osseo-Asare turned to oral histories and on-site research of pharmacies and communities. I could not travel to Jamaica to create an ethnographic study. For this reason, this paper uses only what is available to historicize Obeah and does not claim to be a history. Rather, this research aims to understand the healing culture of Obeah and how it has influenced science and medicine in the Caribbean. Much of the corpus used in this paper comes from English colonial archives, historical British texts, and the evident silence from the Afro-Caribbean community caused by centuries of British criminalization of Obeah and its practitioners.

To contextualize the British understanding of Obeah, I turn to modern scholarship to trace the historical transgression of Obeah in the Caribbean, paying important attention to weakening European authority and the existing stigmatization of Obeah. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty reminds us, “Europe remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories.’’ Osseo-Asare directly references Chakrabarty in her book, Bitter Roots, as a warning to historians to not depend on European epistemologies.4 I instead turn to historian Londa Schiebinger and agnotology, the study of culturally induced ignorance that serves to counterweight traditional concerns of epistemology to prevent the English colonial perspective from overwhelming a study of the true nature of Obeah.5 This paper is a transhistorical analysis of the culture of Obeah as it shapes,

3 Abena D. Osseo-Asare, Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 7.

4 Osseo-Asare, Bitter Roots, 24.

5Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 3.

manipulates, and heals Afro-Caribbean society.

In the spring of 1760, Tacky, an enslaved man in Jamaica, led a group of 150 enslaved Africans from across the island to rebel against the British. What became “Tacky’s Rebellion” at Fort Maria quickly made the British realize the building unrest amongst the enslaved people, further emphasizing the immoral and destructive system of slavery. While the army managed to control the rebellion quickly, word of its occurrence and the development of other rebel groups subsequently spread anxiety across the British colonies. British planters discovered that Obeah was used to encourage the revolt; its rituals were used as a source of strength and protection for the African people.6 The English found out that an Obeahman started it all by convincing the enslaved people that his powers would make them invincible against the British. This Obeahman used his power and sorcery to strengthen the rebels, spreading the possibility of resistance across the West Indies.7 Cowed by Tacky’s Rebellion, various British colonies passed in ‘The Act’ criminalizing any use of Obeah before the year was out.8 This act put Obeah into a “conceptual space” engraved in Jamaican legislation inciting the spread of fear and distrust of the practice and those who interacted with it.9

During this period of increased anxiety around Obeah and rebellions, British scholars attempted to define the ambiguous practice of Obeah to further oppress the relationship between Afro-Caribbean people and the land they inhabit. Building on his experiences as a plantation physician from 1768 to 1778, Benjamin Moseley wrote A Treatise on Sugar about his understanding of Obeah and African people in the British West Indies. In this text published in 1800, Moseley began his section on Obeah by writing, “The Science of Obi is very extensive.”10 The science, as Moseley labels it, is the ways practitioners manipulate the material world to curse or to cure. Moseley’s book began to develop a concept of Obeah and brought clarity to the ambiguous nature of Obeah. When describing the people who practice Obeah, Moseley wrote, “The most

6 Diana Paton, “Witchcraft, Poison, Law, and Atlantic Slavery,” The William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2012), 256.

7 Paton, “Witchcraft, Poison, Law’’, 256.

8 Paton, The Cultural Politics, 19.

9 Paton, The Cultural Politics, 21.

10 Benjamin Moseley, A Treatise on Sugar, with Miscellaneous Medical Observations, by Benjamin Moseley,... 2nd Edition (1800), 190.

wrinkled, and most deformed Obian magicians are most venerated,” associating age and perhaps wisdom with success within the practice of Obeah.11 Moseley began to link Obeah practitioners to the production of knowledge; whether of plants, their environment, or their situation.

British scholars demystified this bewitching phenomenon, referred to as “Obi”, to disrupt the individuality and preservation created by its development. By doing so, Obeah was transformed from its broader definition of sorcery into a racial term used to categorize African people as uncivilized. One of the first full monographs on Obeah, Obeah: Witchcraft in the West Indies by Hesketh Bell, recounts the oddly fascinating but, according to Bell, fabricated practice of Obeah. After interacting with Obeah, Obeahmen, and their rituals, he defined the practice as: “witchcraft, sorcery, and fetishism in general.”12 This definition, used widely after Bell’s publication in 1893, forced a practice that was beyond language to fit into a Eurocentric vocabulary. However, this oppressive definition fails to include Bell’s later acknowledgment that Obeahmen had “some skill in plants of the medicinal and poisonous species.”13 The brief mention of Obeah as more than witchcraft began to unravel the criminalized and racist understanding of the spiritual practice.

Many British texts briefly, if at all, hint at the extraction of medicinal knowledge from Obeah practitioners. In 1820, James Thomson wrote in his book, Treatise on the Diseases of Negroes as they Occur on the Island of Jamaica, “The intimate union of medicine and magic in the mind of the African is worthy the consideration of those interested in their welfare….”14 Thomson acknowledged the interwoven nature of medicine and Obeah to be one and the same. Disrupting preceding colonial narratives, Thomson’s acknowledgment spoke to the nature of Obeah practice as Afro-Caribbean people understood it. In Moseley’s book, he also describes an Obeah as a type of cure. He retells an experience where the Obeahman interrogated a patient to target the most “affected part of their body,” and from there they began to “torture” the patient with pinching, painting with gourds and calabashes, and pressing. After being nearly exhausted from being roughed up, the Obeahman would extract a rusty nail or piece of bone from the patient, and the “patient

11 Moseley, A Treatise on Sugar, 192.

12 Hesketh Bell, Obeah: Witchcraft in the West Indies (1893), 6.

13 Bell, Obeah, 9.

14 Thomson, A Treatise on the Diseases, 10.

is well the next day.”15 In this case, Obeah is not solely a ‘magical’ practice but also a sophisticated medical practice that can be used to heal people.

Despite undermining the influence of medicine in the practice of Obeah, Thomson, similar to Moseley, acknowledged its value. Thomson recommends plantation physicians to “derive useful information from the most intelligent amongst them.” He even confesses to applying the knowledge of enslaved people to his own “most labored prescriptions.”16 Although Obeah is not classified as a medicinal practice, implying the medical knowledge developed by enslaved African people legitimized Obeah medicine. In between the paragraphs and chapters on the racial differences between African people and the British, Thomson managed to preserve evidence of Obeah. More importantly, he preserved the possibility of its practice becoming part of British Caribbean pharmacopeias.

While not explicit, the influence of Obeah on Caribbean medicine can also be found within the descriptions of diseases. Historian Jeffrey Cottrell suggests Thomson’s section on labor and its discussion of the frequency of miscarriages, abortions, and infanticide amongst African women is evidence of the use of Obeah knowledge to cause them.17 Thomson writes that when young women “find themselves pregnant, [they] endeavor to procure abortion by every means in their power, in which they are too often assisted by the knavery of others.”18 While knavery may mean either the use of Obeah or disapproval of abortion, it is evidence of the women’s dependence on local knowledge to help young enslaved women abort children they did not want. The use of the word knavery is not enough to suggest this knowledge was Obeah, but it is enough to suggest how important local knowledge and obscure measures were to enslaved women. The ambiguity of knavery, like the ambiguity of Obeah, symbolizes the resilience of Afro-Caribbean people to hide knowledge from the British to preserve some control over their own lives as enslaved people. If it were only a type of “sorcery”, where does this acknowledgment of plant and medicinal knowledge

15 Thomson, A Treatise on the Diseases, 10.

16 James Thomson, A Treatise on the Diseases of Negroes, as They Occur in the Island of Jamaica: With Observations on the Country Remedies (1820), 10.

17 Jeffrey Cottrell, “At the end of the trade: obeah and black women in the colonial imaginary,” Atlantic Studies 12, no. 2 (2015): 212.

18 Thomson, A Treatise on the Diseases, 111.

come from? Furthermore, how does Obeah disrupt science and medicine in the Caribbean? It is strikingly apparent that the discussion of Obeah often obscures advancements in medicine and instead focuses on social constructions of political and autonomous identities amongst the Afro-Caribbean community. Print culture and its involvement in the colonial Caribbean worked against Obeah as it fetishized the practice. Obeah became another tool used to control enslaved people by denying their beliefs. The medicinal print culture of books like that of Moseley’s, Bell’s, and Thomas’s became part of a corpus that labeled and categorized Afro-Caribbean practices as simple superstitions. They are all shrouded in layers of racist ideology and narratives made to stifle the resistance amongst the African enslaved populations in the British West Indies. While their work inaccurately represents Obeah, they captured elements of healing even within the horrors of enslavement.

After the first legislation against Obeah in 1760, the British colonies began prosecuting anyone or anything associated with Obeah. Between 1760 and 1807, the British colonial government began to use Obeah to discredit Obeah. This transition meant Obeah shifted from a healing practice into one believed to cause sickness, poverty, and insurrections. Obeah was used to show how ‘foolish’ enslaved people were for believing in it.19 Once used to quell British anxieties over slave revolts, now colonial depictions of Obeah solidified racial hierarchy in Jamaica.20 Plantation owners found Obeah necessary to augment their authority in the Caribbean. This period marks the beginning of Obeah’s separation from its roots of healing and protection to the modern construction of Obeah as a cursed practice. Modern scholarship no longer defines Obeah the same way British scholars did in the 18th and 19th centuries. Historians are also fighting against the existing stigmatization of Obeah to prevent it from being forgotten. Historians Handler and Bilby suggest viewing Obeah “as a kind of neutral or positive spiritual force” to prevent stigma from overwhelming an understanding of Obeah.21 However, while historians do not necessarily need to define Obeah, they do create new boundaries for the term Obeah. Historians who discuss the prac-

19 19 Paton, The Cultural Politics, 19.

20 20 Paton, The Cultural Politics, 43.

21 J.S. Handler and K.M. Bilby, “Notes and documents - On the Early Use and Origin of the Term ‘Obeah’ in Barbados and the Anglophone Caribbean,” Slavery & Abolition 22, no. 2 (2001): 90.

tice attempt to contextualize the practice that allows for Obeah to become more than a taboo subject. Modern scholarship allows Obeah to once again, become a form of healing.

In Secret Cure of Slaves, Londa Schiebinger uses 18th-century physicians’ texts to depict healing in Obeah as a European cure. She constructs her understanding using physician texts that preserved Obeah’s healing practices but renamed them as a European cure. She argues that plantation physicians had the most contact with enslaved people, allowing them to understand what Obeah was. However, physicians discredited Obeah by calling it a part of the “African mind” to discourage respect towards practitioners. Most interestingly, physicians simultaneously began to implement Obeah-like practices into their treatments.22 European physicians also relied on the patient’s imagination, or “medical faith,” as part of their treatment.23 This faith convinced the body that it will get better; the same belief patients have as they enter modern-day clinics. The so-called African “superstitions” undermined in colonial texts became European “imaginations.”24 Slowly, this overlap between European medicine and Obeah practices became part of the same “cure.” In other words, Schiebinger begins to bridge the divide caused by the oppression of Obeah and African people.

Diana Paton, in The Cultural Politics of Obeah, rebuilds the relationship between the Caribbean people and Obeah broken by British colonialism. She uses British legislation against Obeah and trial records to extract the true nature of the practice. Instead of defining Obeah, Paton constructs an understanding of Obeah that pushes against the boundaries of only being a form of resistance. Through this framework, Obeah is understood as a product of the “cultural, political, and social effects of the consolidation of that term.”25 With time, Obeah became mutually reproduced by the enslaved population in the English West Indies and the colonial authority who acknowledged its existence.26 On the one hand, scholars must define Obeah to recognize it, and on the other, through this definition, Obeah becomes captured in another Eurocentric category. On

22 Londa Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2017), 125; .Thomson, A Treatise on the Diseases, 9.

23 Schiebinger, Secret Cures, 125.

24 Schiebinger, Secret Cures, 126.

25 Paton, The Cultural Politics of Obeah, 3.

26 Paton, The Cultural Politics of Obeah, 3.

the other, to extract the medicine from within Obeah is to ignore and wrongfully reject its cultural and political significance. Either way, the influence of Obeah continues to affect Caribbean culture and life.

27

Through trial records, Paton finds that Obeah was not exclusively a form of sorcery. Instead, Obeah was naturally a “ritual complex created by, for, and about people on the move.”28 Practitioners preserved the practice of Obeah as they moved to different colonies or plantations, and as they died. Practitioners were infrequently released after their imprisonment, and so Obeah had to be adaptable to those who used it: the enslaved Afro-Caribbean people as they moved across various forms of oppression. Paton finds that Obeah includes aspects of African traditions and Christian practices. In the trials, “Christian ritual, language, and iconography,” and the Bible were part of the rituals performed by persecuted Obeah practitioners.29 The relationship practitioners had with Christianity was similar to their relationship to African traditions. Obeah is a product of how the Afro-Caribbean population consolidated their identities in relation to Europeans. Benjamin Breen proposes a new analytical lens when looking for the healing qualities of Obeah. He considers the two monoliths of African healing and European medicine to always stand at odds/ This dichotomy results in incorrect assumptions that both should be separated.30 Breen argues that Caribbean healing created a social pharmacopeia of its own, although it was discouraged to create a network of knowledge. Social pharmacopeia, a term coined by historian Pablo Gomez, is defined as a pharmacopeia developed in sociocultural spaces by the experiences and local knowledge of the Caribbean people.31 Healers in the colonial Caribbean held onto vast amounts of knowledge specific to their local areas but also learned from the transient space to which they belonged. As Breen proposes, instead of defining Obeah as only a religious practice or form of sorcery, Obeah can be seen as a social pharmacopeia that preserved knowledge and is informed by European and African practices. As a social pharmacopeia, Obeah may have developed a different type

27 Paton, The Cultural Politics of Obeah, 316.

28 Paton, The Cultural Politics, 211.

29 29 Paton, The Cultural Politics, 211.

30 Benjamin Breen, “The Flip Side of the Pharmacopeia,” Drugs on the Page, 2019, 156.

31 Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2017), 144.

of authority that complicates the ways historians have used it so far.

If Obeah is its own authority, then like science, it can also have experts. Obeah created a space for practitioners to use their understanding of medicine and herbal remedies to become experts in healing. Historians Handler and Bilby trace the origins of Obeah in a better attempt than Hesketh Bell, observing that “Obia” is a variant of the Efik or Ibo word that simply means “Doctor.”32 But, the term doctor constricts the complex relationship between healing and Obeah. Handler and Bilby break down the word even further and observe that the originating word “Dibia ‘’ or “Doctor,” Di can mean ‘husband,’ adept, or master, while Obia can mean knowledge and wisdom. Essentially, Obeah means the master of knowledge. Thus, using Obeah in a broader sense means using the knowledge developed by the experts in the field.

Seeking help from a practicing Obeahman was complicated; just as easily they could perform miracles, they could cause illness.33 Hesketh Bell’s Obeah describes the use of a curse called “Dressing the Garden”.34 In this ritual, Bell observed that a planter friend of his needed to prevent the theft of these crops, and as a last resort, he turned to an Obeahman named Mokombo. Mokombo tied “small and large vials” to the crops, muttered an incantation accompanied by the movement of his arms, and ceremoniously placed a small coffin with water and an egg to finalize the curse over the garden.35 Mokombo cursed the garden so that any thief would be attacked by “criboes” or evil black serpents. While Mokombo cursed the crops that may have been the source of food for people of his own community, the use of Obeah is not so straightforward. As an expert in Obeah, Mokombo successfully established a relationship with the European planter that went beyond the one between an enslaved person and an enslaver. The planter acknowledged and legitimized Mokombo’s skills by asking for his help to resolve his problems and establishing a reciprocal relationship. After the curse was done, the planter paid Mokombo five dollars in exchange for the spells used. Mokombo’s expertise in Obeah allowed him, for a moment, to be equals with the planter. Obeah, in that instance,

32 Kenneth M. Bilby and Jerome S. Handler, “Obeah: Healing and Protection in West Indian Slave Life,” The Journal of Caribbean History 38, no. 2 (2004):91.

33 Bilby and Handler, “Obeah: Healing”, 160.

34 Bell, Obeah, 3.

35 Bell, Obeah, 3.

became just as important as any European structure. In other words, Obeah practitioners used their knowledge of plants and sorcery as weapons of resistance against the tyranny of colonials.36 For the Afro-Caribbeans, practitioners, and the British colonizers, Obeah developed into an epistemological authority that withstood efforts to be stigmatized and undermined as a superstition.

The persistence of Obeah in Caribbean culture reveals what the practice actually is: the authority to manipulate the spiritual and material world. Diana Paton refers to historian Vincent Brown’s analysis of Obeah, he argues that Obeah is an “alternative authority and social power.”37 The authority combined with its ambiguity allowed Obeah to become part of Caribbean life and culture in a variety of ways. Obeah could only exist in a space like the Caribbean because the people who were forcibly relocated and enslaved used their understanding to reflect and grow from their transient experiences. The ambiguity of Obeah, in other words, established a legitimate authority of knowledge. As an authority of knowledge, Obeah influenced the ways Afro-Caribbean practitioners established credibility in the Caribbean. Spiritualists with extensive herbal knowledge became “Obeahmen” or “witch doctors.”38 To compare it to science, these historical actors became important cultural and societal figures that brought legitimacy to the institution of spiritual healing. The obscureness of the practice and its connection to magic established a new authority as important as any European one. In the Caribbean, the African traditions of using herbs and plants for healing and the European traditions of magic and witchcraft were interwoven. Obeah is the culmination of these exceptional epistemologies condensed and framed by a nuanced understanding of the world.

However, only looking at the authority of Obeah fails to fully explain the relationship between folk medicine and practitioners. The knowledge of these remedies demands that Obeah is seen as more than an ambiguous practice. To reference British physician Benjamin Moseley once again, Obeah is considered a

36 Arvilla Payne-Jackson and Mervyn C. Alleyne, Jamaican Folk Medicine: A Source of Healing (Saint Andrew Parish: University of West Indies Press, 2004),134.

37 Paton, The Cultural Politics of Obeah, 316.

38 I use witch doctors to imply that Obeahmen and women were not necessarily using only medicine, they used rituals and spells to heal as well.

practice of science.39 Stephan Palmié, a historian with training in anthropology, engages in very similar questions to the ones asked in this paper. In his book, Wizards and Scientists, Palmié believes that Obeah and science are more similar in practice than one might think.40 He extensively quotes anthropologist Donald Hogg’s article titled “Magic and ‘Science’ in Jamaica” to interrogate the relationship between Obeah and science. Hogg believes that what is called “‘magic’ is not necessarily mere superstition, but may be the product of intelligent, careful searching for knowledge”.41 This appears in the examples of Mokombo’s curse, the use of local remedies for abortion, and the Obeahmen who healed injuries. Hogg struggles with the use of “magic” because it also becomes a source of stigma. To him, defining Obeah as science allows the culture of Obeah to be respected.

The word magic holds so much authority that it completely overwhelms any understanding of Obeah. Any association with magic will immediately cause skepticism or credibility because of the stigma surrounding it. However, Hogg observes that “magicians” go through a similar process to that of scientists as they “work sincerely” and look for ways to improve their practice. “Obeahmen,” Hogg concludes, “may be scientists too.”42 Yet good intention and work ethic are not enough for Obeah to be called science. To answer this question, Hogg proposes that Obeah men also have “suspicious attitudes which motivate their skepticism and experimentation” the same way scientists do. He even suggests investigating labs because there is a possibility that “some of them may turn out to be Obeah men.”43 If a scientist or doctor were told their practice is like Obeah or Vodou, it would destroy their careers. It also suggests that science is not a sterile practice exclusive to its methods and laws. Instead, the scientific way to understand the world must be questioned. Perhaps, interrogating Obeah across various physician texts allows historians to realize that magic and its practitioners actively contradict and challenge tradi-

39 Moseley, A Treatise on Sugar, 190.

40 Stephan Palmié, Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 207.

41 Palmié, Wizards and Scientists, 208. Donald W. Hogg, “Magic and “Science” in Jamaica,” Caribbean Studies 1, no. 2 (July 1961): 5.

42 Palmié, Wizards and Scientists, 208.; Hogg, “Magic and “Science”, 5.

43 Hogg, “Magic and “Science”, 5.

tional science. While it is optimistic to think science can be easily challenged, Obeah cannot replace science. I was recently asked how I would respond if someone were to say science that is like magic is not true science. I ask then, why is there a need to categorize one over the other? Is the development of knowledge limited to only one practice? Just as Hogg frames it, what if Obeah is considered a science? Then, should any evidence of sorcery and spiritualism be considered as empirical evidence to understand the way the world works? Yes! Obeah is a practice that has demonstrated through centuries that it is not only a symbol of resistance, extensive knowledge, a culture, or a crime—Obeah is inexplicably magical in its ambiguity. Defining Obeah in any other way will be just as harmful as the laws that have originally banned it. Perhaps, Obeah is, after all, the magic of healing.

Late 20th-century Theories of Nationalism

In Context with the History of Anthropology and Race as Mediated by George Stocking

Jacob Piazza Hamilton College - Class of 2024

In 1983, Ernest Gellner wrote Nations and Nationalism. This work marked the commencement of an increase in literature on nationalism that took on an interdisciplinary nature including scholarship by political scientists, anthropologists, and historians. Three of these authors, Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and Partha Chatterjee formulate theories on nationalism that progressively totalize less and move from a primary political and economic focus to a more social-cultural approach. However, These theories do not implicate nationalism in racism and race. Then, in 1995, Prasenjit Duara wrote Rescuing History from the Nation, in which he rejected totalizing theories of nationalism. Instead, Duara connected 19th-century ideas of race to nationality through intellectual history and Foucauldian post-structuralism, which argues against attempting to generalize historical phenomena. Examination of these methodological and racial trends in the context of George Stocking’s study of 19th-century anthropology, the works of Frantz Fanon, and 19th to 20th-century African American literature reveal that this early canon of nationalistic theory insufficiently addresses relations between nationalism and racism.

Gellner and Anderson, both writing in 1983, approached nationalism through a primarily totalizing political and economic lens. Gellner’s work, Nations and Nationalism, relies heavily on analysis of the transition of society from agrarian to industrial; he claims his explanation that “mankind is irreversibly committed to industrial society” represents “the most important steps in the argument” about nationalism.1 This economic and partially social argument shifts towards a more political and cultural one when he explains his typology of nationalism which defines the emergence

1 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2006), 38.

of nationalism based on access to education, culture, and power. Additionally, in his introduction, Gellner defines nationalism as “primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent.”2 Here, Gellner lays out his political approach to nationalism and emphasizes his totalizing interpretation of nationalism through this relatively un-nuanced definition. This tendency towards totalization also appears in his typology, which argues that there are only three types of nationalism, as well as his overemphasis on the Industrial Revolution’s impact.3 Thus, Gellner uses economic and political analysis to create absolute claims that overgeneralize.

Anderson’s Imagined Communities continues this pattern of economic and political analysis tempered by cultural and social influences. For Anderson, cultural changes in language, monarchical legitimacy, and conceptions of time permitted the emergence of nationalism. Each of these relates to economic and political analysis. However, Anderson focuses specifically on the economic and political factors of print capitalism and creolization. He contends that the effects of print capitalism created “the embryo of the nationally imagined community” and that creole functionaries’ “consciousness of connectedness,” which grew from local travel, provided the basis of nations in the Americas.4

In the second edition of his work, he examines the political aspects of the colonial state—census, map, and museum—which made possible nationalities such as “Burmese” and “Indonesian.”5 Early on, he defines nations as “an imagined political community—and

2 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 91.

3 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 91.

4 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 2016), 44, 56.

5 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 185.

imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”6 Through this definition and his use of “imagined,” Anderson acknowledges a cultural/intellectual aspect of nations, but assigns the possibility of their imagining to the distinctly political features of borders and sovereignty. This strict definition, along with his original primary focus on print capitalism and creolization, mirrors Gellner’s totalizing nature. Thus, Anderson’s investigation of the nation centers itself on economic and political factors, even as it accepts some cultural and social impacts.

Following this 1983 moment, Chatterjee’s 1993 book, The Nation and its Fragments, moves away from totalizing tendencies and leaves political and economic analysis behind for a primarily social and cultural examination. Chatterjee desires to “break down the totalizing claims of a nationalist historiography,” but contradicts this when he states that he hopes to create a “conceptualization of a new universal idea.”7 Additionally, he references Michel Foucault, whose historical genealogy characteristically refuses to totalize.8 Thus, he attempts to move away from totalizing assertions but still aims for universalism. Furthermore, Chatterjee’s reliance on colonial difference and emphasis on the colonized population’s creation of an independent domain of sovereignty represent different forms of the narrow totalizing thought that Gellner and Anderson use. Essentially Chatterjee relies on colonial difference in the same way that Gellner relies on industrialism to explain nationalism. However, Chatterjee differs from Gellner and Anderson in his focus on cultural and social history. His discussion of the inner/spiritual domain of sovereignty and Bengali “social agency” under British colonial rule exemplifies this, along with his scrutiny of the biography and vernacular plays of Sri Ramakrishna, a 19th-century Bengali religious leader.9 Therefore, Chatterjee begins a move away from Gellner and Anderon’s totalizing political and economic methodologies.

Duara completes this departure from Gellner and Anderson in Rescuing History from the Nation, in which he commits himself to Foucault’s anti-totalizing genealogical method and focuses on intellectual history. He claims that “nationalist consciousness is not… a unique… mode or form of consciousness,” to decon-

6 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6-7.

7 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 13.

8 Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 15.

9 Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 35.

struct the totalizing arguments of previous thinkers.10 He then explains that “it is important for [his] analysis to firmly grasp [Foucault’s] reworking of ‘genealogy’ as a way to disrupt the continuum of traditional history.” Foucault’s genealogy helps him to “understand history as simultaneously dual or bifurcated movement of transmission and dispersion.”11 With this declaration of methodology, Duara asserts the anti-totalizing character of his approach. Furthermore, he continues to differentiate himself from previous scholarship with his focus on intellectual history. Thus, Duara breaks from Gellner and Anderson completely in his movement to a Foucauldian anti-totalizing genealogy and an intellectual analysis of nationalism.

George Stocking’s intellectual and post-structuralist approach towards the history of anthropology, in 1968 with Race, Culture, and Evolution and, in 1987, with Victorian Anthropology, aligns with Duara’s methodologies. In the earlier of these books, Stocking expresses dissatisfaction with linear progressive modes of history that act as “chronicles of an incremental process.” He references Thomas Kuhn’s emerging post-structuralist perspective which “does encourage us… to see historical change as a complex process of emergence rather than a similar linear sequence.”12 In Victorian Anthropology, Stocking formalizes his post-structuralist approach with references to Foucault’s interpretation that “the human sciences… are the product of a radical rupture at the end of the eighteenth century” along with his own “multiple contextualization.” Kuhn informs this method which attempts an “augmentation of context beyond that normally attempted.”13 Thus, Stocking’s process appears distinctly anti-totalizing in its post-structuralist Foucauldian tendencies. This similarity to Duara continues in his focus on intellectual history. Both of Stocking’s books trace the history of anthropology through texts written by anthropologists. Stocking’s and Duara’s intellectual and anti-totalizing approach contributes to a critique of the late 20th-century moment of nationalist historiography based on a lack of scrutiny of race. Stocking’s intellectual history and multiple contextualization reveal connections between race

10 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 7, 8.

11 Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 71.

12 George Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1968), 7, 8.

13 George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 30, xii, xiv.

and nation in scholarly thought during the 19th-century. Firstly, both of Stocking’s works establish the wide array of racist beliefs in the 19th-century. These ideas range from monogenist social degenerationism, polygenism, physical anthropology’s racial formalism, and after 1850, social Darwinism, eugenics, and sociocultural evolutionary ideas. This prevalence of racist views among Europeans in the 19th-century, the same period that nationalism developed in Europe, suggests that nationalist theories ought to concern themselves with race. Additionally, Stocking’s research uncovers a direct link between anthropological racial thought and European policy. In his discussion of Henry Maine, an English jurist, he explains how Maine wanted to discover “a truly scientific jurisprudence… by penetrating the history of the primitive societies.’”14 This exemplifies how anthropological racial convictions influenced European state policy. Later on, Stocking reaffirms this when he claims that “there can be no doubt that sociocultural thinking offered strong ideological support for the whole colonial enterprise in the late nineteenth century” through its argument that “savages were… racially incapable.”15 Stocking qualifies this belief with the example of how a colonial official “attempted to apply Mainian principles to the government of Fiji.”16 Thus, Stocking’s intellectual analysis, put into context with the nationalist upheavals of the 19th-century, reveals a direct relationship between race and the state structures from which nationalism emerged in the colonial and European world.

Furthermore, within a discussion of these racist ideologies, Stocking’s mentions of nation suggest a significant connection between race and nation. Twice in Race, Culture, and Evolution, Stocking implies a direct link between race and nation. This first appears in Citizen Degerando’s, a French Revolutionary era intellectual, belief that “the ‘traditions’ of the savages… could ‘cast a precious light on the mysterious history of these nations.’”17 Later, Stocking argues that his research on polygenist thought in post-Darwinian anthropology has “ramifications” that “should be followed into… nationalism.”18 This illustrates Stocking’s belief that race and nationalism possess inherent connections. Therefore, Stocking presents an awareness of race’s significance to nationalism which reveals itself

14 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 122.

15 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 236-237.

16 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 236.

17 Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, 26.

18 Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, 26,44.

through his intellectual analysis of anthropology. Additionally, Stocking’s exercise in intellectual history uncovers that 19th-century thinkers often used race and nation either interchangeably or exclusively, and rarely with separate meanings. Stocking explains this exclusivity in the anthropological transition from the use of nation to race as the terminology to denote ‘savage’ people. Degerando represents the tail-end of anthropologists who defined the savage nationally, in which “different savage groups were always ‘peoples’ or ‘nations’—never ‘races.’”19 He later illustrates how in post-Darwinian thought “the adjectives ‘savage’ or ‘barbarous’ or ‘uncivilized’... were now applied to ‘races’ rather than ‘nations’ or ‘peoples.’”20 Through this, Stocking exposes how anthropologists defined nation more socially than politically such that they could—and would—easily replace nation, with race in a post-Darwinian milieu. Therefore, Stocking establishes that throughout the 19th-century, European thinkers used race and nation at times exclusively, but in these exclusive works for the same purpose. This reveals an inherent connection between the terms throughout academia that suggests that scholars cannot understand one term without understanding its relation to the other.

Moreover, in Victorian Anthropology, Stocking shows how other anthropological thinkers used race and nation interchangeably. This further emphasizes the connection between these two ideas. He first demonstrates this when he describes ethnology’s goal as “to fill the gap until the first historical records of each present ‘nation,’ ‘people,’ or ‘race.’”21 Here, in his synthesis of ethnology’s goal, Stocking implies an interchangeability and direct link between race and nation. He specifies this argument through a discussion of E.B. Tylor, one of the most influential anthropologists of the 19th-century. He explains the phenomenon of “the national specificity of Tylor’s highest category” of race, which Tylor labels as “Italian.” Furthermore, Tylor also includes “Tahitian,” which exemplifies how European ideas could create nationalities out of races for colonized peoples.22 Stocking interprets this as an expression of a “pervasive looseness” in conceptions of race and nation and an “ambiguity of the cultural and the biological” in Tylor’s thought.23 This specif-

19 Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, 28.

20 Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, 121.

21 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 50.

22 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 235.

23 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 235.

ic example highlights the direct connections between ideas of race and nation. He furthers this in his discussion of how Walter Bagehot, a major social Darwinist, would often “blur the distinction between race and nation.”24 Thus, Stocking displays a direct relationship of interchangeability in 19th-century thought between race and nation that directly influenced European political policy. In light of these terms possessing the same meaning at certain times, any study of either topic must consider the other.

On top of this, Stocking shows how this intimate link between race and nation contributed to European nationalism. He discusses ethnology before evolutionism to investigate “anglo-saxon racialism.”25 He argues that “anglo-saxonism was part of a broader tradition of European thought that validated national, religious, or class interest,” which directly implicates racialism with the formation of European nations.26 He explains how “racial nationalism” led to the conclusion that “the Germanic nations were superior ‘in moral energy’’’ to the rest of mankind” and that “the revolutionary epoch of 1848 gave the idea of race a greatly heightened saliency.”27 From this, Stocking concludes that “‘racial’ nationalism… may best be understood” in the context of anthropology.28 Through all of this, Stocking illustrates racial views’ direct connection and implication in nationalism, displaying how discussions of race and nation are central to a post-structuralist investigation of anthropology.

However, Stocking’s work lacks insight into the effect of European racialization on the colonized mind. The writings of various authors of African descent, which include Martin Delaney, Sutton E. Griggs, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Frantz Fanon, fill this gap by illustrating how colonialism’s oppressive racial reasoning contributed to the formation of nationalism among the oppressed. Within the African American canon of 19th and 20th-century literature, dreams of race-based nations often appear. African American novelist Sutton E. Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio provides a powerful example of these nationalistic hopes. In his novel, which focuses on racial analysis, Griggs imagines a secret African American political organization that operates within the United States and aims to “do what the general government could not do… protect the ne-

24 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 235.

25 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 62.

26 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 62.

27 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 63.

28 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 64.

gro in his rights.”29 Griggs frames this institution as a rational and morally upright organization at this point in the story. This ‘imperium in imperio’ represents a nation within a nation, and exemplifies how the vast racial discrimination of European-minded entities inspires racialized national sentiments within oppressed groups. Griggs furthers this in his representation of this secret congress’s desire to create an independent nation in Texas. Through this representation, he displays how the influence of European racial ideas creates nationalism. This racial nation that takes as its motive the idea that “the races… must separate,” mirrors the dreams of emigration to a racially united Africa of Delaney, Du Bois, and others.30

Delaney and Du Bois express the mental toll of racial oppression and how it leads to imaginings of nations and nationalisms. Delaney, born free in pre-Civil War Virginia, tried to move to Liberia before he died in 1885.31 In his work, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, he argues that “emigration is absolutely necessary to their political elevation” because “there is no species of degradation to which [they] are not subject.”32 About half a century later, Du Bois, who would emigrate to Ghana in 1963, showed the continuity of these beliefs when he penned The Souls of Black Folk. He describes black men’s condition under racial oppression as a “double-consciousness” in which one is “always looking at oneself through the eyes of others… looks on in amused contempt and pity.”33 Here, Du Bois explains how white racial reasoning penetrates black men’s consciousnesses in a harmful way, foreshadowing Frantz Fanon. Du Bois connects this directly to nationality when he describes how it is not “possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American.”34 He argues that “the freedman has not yet found

29 Sutton E. Griggs, Imperium in Imperio (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), 132.

30 Griggs, Imperium in Imperio, 120.

31 Martin Delaney, Extracts from The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States in The Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 299.

32 Delaney, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny, 317, 301.

33 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk in The Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 914.

34 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 915.

in freedom his promised land,” displaying the path through which racial thought leads to racial nationalism among the oppressed.35 Furthermore, he critiques the idea that “the negro’s only hope lies in emigration beyond the borders of the United States,” as nowhere is “safe from lying and brute force.”36 However, this still expresses how racial ideas and oppression lead to racial nationalisms. This racial nationalism that emerged from the United States in response to racism demonstrates the direct connection that the study of the two terms should possess.

The idea of a tortured double self that leads to racial nationalism appears another half-century later in the writings of Frantz Fanon. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes about his status as a black Antillean, whom French culture never fully identifies as either black or white. Through anecdotes, he illustrates how their education system “desperately” tries to make them white but in the end, tells them that they have a “dependency complex in regard to the white man.”37 His description of military service, in which there is “on one side the European and the French Antilleans; and on the other, the Africans,” exemplifies this.38 Through his discussion of this liminal position, Fanon explains how racial national reason differentiates its colonial subjects through national and racial ideas. Jean-Paul Sartre best summarizes the extreme nature of the racial reasoning that Fanon witnessed in Algeria in his preface to The Wretched of the Earth where he claims that “if they [the colonized] resist, the soldiers fire, and they are dead men; if they give in and degrade themselves, they are no longer men.”39 Through this discussion, Sartre explains how racist colonialism either kills or dehumanizes the colonized. For Fanon, this mental torture leads to the “agenda for liberation” and then “the emergence of the new nation.”40 This “national liberation” comes from “the violence of the colonized” motivated by racism, which “unifies the people” in an idea of a nation in which “major figures in the history of the colonized… are revived with par-

35 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 916.

36 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 915.

37 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 14, 3.

38 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 9.

39 Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to The Wretched of the Earth, ed. Frantz Fanon (New York: Grove Press, 2004) 1.

40 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004) 21, 30.

ticular fervor.”41 Thus, Fanon’s works clarify how the racial logic of Europeans led to nationalism among colonized peoples.

Within the context of these scholars’ connection of race and nation, theoreticians of nationalism’s minimizing treatment of race appears insufficient. In regard to nationalism, Gellner mainly argues that the transition from agrarian society to industrialization newly “linked” the state to culture and therefore guaranteed the emergence of “nationalism which engenders nations.”42 However, he addresses race’s role in nationalism in a discussion of what he calls “social entropy.”43 He asserts that, among the many “possible classifications” of people, only “some of them become socially and politically very important.”44 He describes these as “entropy resistant.”45 He uses blue people as a stand-in for race and asserts that blueness would only become a “social-entropy-resistant trait” if “the blues tend to capture either too many or too few of the advantages available in this society.”46 Through this explanation, Gellner separates skin color, the clearest marker of race, from what causes “trouble” or discrimination through the placement of the source of entropy-resistance on economic and political behavior.47 Thus, Gellner does not give race a direct role in his theory of nationalism.

Previous scholarship on race shows that Gellner’s work insufficiently addresses the realities of race. Stocking contradicts Gellner’s argument because he proves that race and racist thought develop, not just from social and economic factors, but also from Eurocentric classifications of humanity that focus on racial characteristics. Gellner’s theory also ignores the racial supremacy that Stocking believes motivated the creation of European nationalisms. Additionally, Gellner’s typology of nationalism excludes nationalism developed in colonial circumstances, and thus fully ignores the racially based nationalist dreams of colonized people. Therefore, Gellner’s overemphasis on cultural, social, political, and economic factors and ignorance of intellectual trends, creates a theory that insufficiently addresses race’s role in nationalism. Anderson’s treatment of race similarly appears insuf-

41 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 51, 30.

42 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 37, 54.

43 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 2.

44 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 63.

45 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 63.

46 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 64.

47 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 63.

ficient, as he denies race’s connection with the nation even though he acknowledges the realities of racism.

In light of Stocking’s work, Anderson’s aforementioned focus on economic factors and his ignorance of race in his cultural analysis seems insufficient by itself. However, when he moves to analyze race he argues that “the dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation,” which compounds his separation of race and nation.48 This separation uses economic analysis to support his assertion that “nations inspire love” not the “fear and loathing” of racism.49 Anderson, thus, aligns European racism with class rather than nation in a way that does not implicate European nations and nationalism with race and racism.

Anderson’s examination of race’s role in the colonial situation similarly refuses to link racism to nationalism. He reckons with race and colonial domination through explication of the census, which he acknowledges as “visibly and exclusively racial.”50 However, he does not connect the racial imaginings of the colonial census to nationalist movements within the colonies or the racially motivated national imaginings in Europe that justified colonial domination, such as those in Indonesia and Indochina which he previously discussed. Instead, Anderson returns to creolization and a unified print language to explain these nationalisms. He concludes his discussion of these nationalisms with the claim that “the interlock between particular educational and administrative pilgrimages provided the territorial base for new ‘imagined communities’ in which natives could come to see themselves as ‘nationals.’”51 In defense of this argument, Anderson does not connect the “particularly strong reaction” from French settlers in response to when “the Vietnamese elite” tried “to place their children in the best French schools” to European racism.52 Instead, he focuses on how this resulted in the development of a “‘Franco-Vietnamese’ educational structure” along with separate systems for other language groups.53 Through this argument, Anderson avoids racial analysis that would provide deeper insight, such as how the Vietnamese elite in this case may have been motivated by a desire to escape colonial racism through higher education. Anderson, thus, does

48 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 149.

49 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 141.

50 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 164.

51 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 140.

52 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 127-8.

53 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 128-9.

not avoid racism’s role in the colonies, or European influences on colonial nationalisms, but does not connect the two or argue that European racism played a role in the development of colonial nationalisms. In light of Fanon and Stocking’s work, Anderson’s argument would benefit from an acknowledgment of the connection between race and nation.

Chatterjee’s theory of nationalism acknowledges the role of constructed differences and racial discrimination in colonial imaginings but does not connect them to nationalism. This contradicts the previously examined writings by intellectuals of African descent that have clarified this connection. Race appears most prominently in Chatterjee’s discussion of colonial differences. He looks into the Ilbert Bill affair, in which Europeans in India protested a bill that allowed Indians to join the colonial administration, and the Nil Darpan Affair and Vernacular Press Act of 1878, which restricted Indian free speech. These circumstances exemplify situations that constituted power through “a rule of colonial difference”—the idea that colonizers conceived of the colonized as inherently different and thus not deserving the same treatment as Europeans—and marked “the points… where the colony had to become an exception” to universal ideals. Through this, Chatterjee makes the same observation that many postcolonial thinkers have made, that Europe’s universal ideals do not apply to the colonized. Like those thinkers, Chatterjee directly connects these exceptions to race in the claim that “marking this difference was race.”54 However, Chatterjee does not refer to how these racial imaginings affected the nationalisms in Europe and thus does not address European racial nationalisms. Furthermore, Chatterjee denies the influence of racial classifications on colonized people’s nationalism. In discussions of the “domain of sovereignty” focused on “the ‘spiritual’ or ‘inner’ aspects of culture that the colonies developed,” Chatterjee analyzes cultural and social factors instead of race.55 He argues, through linguistic analysis of the Bengali word “jati,” that Bengali people had no conception of race.56 From these mentions of race Chatterjee moves on to discuss Bengali forms of community and identity that led to nationalism and never returns to race. The writing of Stocking, Grigg, Delaney, Du Bois, Fanon, and Duara has shown how European racial imaginings of nations reach the colonies and provoke racialized nationalistic ideas.

54 Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 19.

55 Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 26.

56 Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 221.

The obvious impact of European imaginings on colonial government and the colonized people’s self-perception suggests that Chatterjee’s work insufficiently addresses race when it brushes over race’s impact on Indian imaginings of the nation. Thus, Chatterjee continues nationalist theories’ pattern in his book’s insufficient acknowledgment of race’s role in nationalism. In Duara’s writings, this pattern shifts. Duara’s critique of previous nationalist scholarship, his wide breadth of intellectual analysis, and his use of Stocking’s and Foucault’s methodologies allow him to address race’s role in Chinese nationalism and its relationship to European ideas. Duara directly connects nationalism to European ideas through claims that nationalists wrote history in the “enlightenment mode… to serve as the foundation of the new nation-state.”57 Further, Duara clarifies that European racial ideals penetrated non-European imaginings. He explains, based on his interpretation of Stocking, that, in social Darwinism, “the only justification for nationhood was whether a race” fit within “Historical progress.”58 Duara’s use of the capital ‘H’ history here refers to the teleological notion of an ever-progressing history. He clarifies that this assigns the status of history-lacking “non-nations” to “backward races” who, therefore, must use history to be “converted into nations.”59 Thus, Duara emphasizes the relevancy of European racial thought to the nationalisms of Europeans and colonized peoples alike.

Duara further reveals the importance of race in his intellectual analysis of 20th-century Chinese nationalists. He explains how Wang Jingwei believed that “superior” nation-states consist “of a single race,” how Liang Qichao Liang’s “evolutionist notions” caused him to believe that Aryan and Han people were the only ones who “possessed History,” and more.60 Ultimately, through his intellectual focus, he concludes that “social Darwinism… guided by… the three terms of race, nation, and History had taken root among the Chinese intelligentsia.” In a later chapter, Duara continues to emphasize how it was “important for the revolutionaries to constitute the nation as a race,” but qualifies this by raising the realities of non-European racism.61 He argues that “social Darwinism in China translated historical Chinese conceptions of inferior races into a

57 Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 33.

58 Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 21.

59 Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 22,27.

60 Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 35 - 37.

61 Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 140.

conception of a new global order of a hierarchy of races and nations.”62 Duara’s intellectual analysis led to this conclusion through a discussion of “the racism of the secret societies” that existed prior to European colonization.63 His discussion of pre-colonial racism, and its relation to nationalism after its confrontation with European ideas, reinforces the importance of race in theories of nation and nationalism.

Duara and Stocking’s works present post-structuralist Foucauldian methodologies that focus on intellectual history and agree on the importance of race in theories of nationalism. This connection is strengthened in the writings of authors of African descent from the 19th to 20th-century who also see racism and nationalism as intertwined. These authors’ conclusion that race and nation are inherently connected reveals that historians and scholars of nationalism must reevaluate these previous nationalist theories. The contrast between these authors’ treatment of race and nation with Gellner, Anderson, and Chatterjee’s totalizing political/economic treatment of the same phenomena further highlights the saliency of post-structuralist intellectual methodologies in understanding the past. Further comparative study of nationalist theory with post-colonial theories of race could shed light on the degree to which Anderson’s and Gellner’s theories overemphasize categories like print capitalism and the industrial revolution. Considerations of this overemphasis, alongside the insufficient treatment of the role of race, suggest that these thinkers may have also missed the influence of other cultural and intellectual factors beyond just race. Stocking’s writings place significant emphasis on conceptions of civilization and the influence of religion on anthropologists during the 19th-century. Further research into the effects that European religious ideas and definitions of civilization had on nationalism within and outside the continent could provide a more comprehensive treatment of nationalism.

62 Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 141.

63 Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 116.

The Bestiary and the Hereford Mappamundi

Animals Mapped Across the World

Alex Wilson

Carleton College - Class of 20XX

Looking at the Hereford Mappamundi, or the Hereford World Map, it is almost impossible to miss the pelican, bonnacon, or any of the other animals scattered across the map. As large figures that take up a significant amount of the work’s surface, beasts often appear both on and around the circular map. Animals and mythological creatures dot the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe, as well as the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the waters in between. However, out of thirty-three marked plants and animals, only four appear in Europe. The vast majority of plants, animals, and humanoids are found in Africa and Asia, covering the edges of the map with intricate figure work.1 Modern scholarship has often struggled with how to interpret these beasts and the cultural traditions associated with them. An assessment of the role of the

1 The humanoids and hybrids—often known as the “monstrous races”-- filling the edges of the map will not be the focus of this paper. Often referred to in contemporary scholarship as the “monstrous races” of Asia and Africa, humanoids fill the outer edges of the Hereford World Map. While my argument does not examine the liminal spaces of these figures, with my discussion mainly focusing on the direct nature of animals and the natural world as represented on the Hereford Map, there is much to be learned from these humanoids about Medieval thought and culture. Each humanoid is a distinct take on the grey area between man, beast, and the otherworldly within a distinctly European Medieval context. Besides a passing mention, the only particular relevance of humanoids in this paper is their relationship with animals on the map. This includes depictions of humanoids alongside animals or their interaction with various beasts. For more scholarship on humanoids, see the following: Asa Simon Mittman, Maps and Monsters in Medieval England, (New York: Routledge, 2006); John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 2000); Naomi Reed Kline, “The World of Strange and Monstrous Races,” in Maps of Medieval Thought : The Hereford Paradigm (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2001).

bestiary, and the Christian literary traditions associated with it, could provide a lens to interpret the Hereford Mappamundi.2 This form of cultural literature may demonstrate that animals of the Hereford Map are not evidence of an exoticized mysterious world but instead are symbols of medieval European culture and Christianity mapped onto every region of the earth.

The medieval bestiary was a kind of encyclopedia of animals, compiled by contemporary scholars from a variety of classical and post-classical sources. The bestiary served as an important source of knowledge for the mapmakers who constructed the Hereford Mappamundi. The first bestiaries came from Antiquity and pulled together the works of classical historians, grammarians, and scholars into digestible encyclopedias. Physiologus, the first recognizable text in the genre, compiled animals together as chapters, attaching their traditional lore, fables, and Christian moralizations.3 Through Latin and vernacular texts, the bestiary became a critical resource for European societies by the Middle Ages, with “frequent appearances in

2 A bestiary is a didactic and cultural tool that compiles information about animals and accompanies them with moral lessons. Bestiaries are not as much scientific texts as cultural ones, taking information about natural history from classical and medieval scholars alike and relating them to the trends and beliefs of their authors. For a recent discussion and further literature, see: Elizabeth Morrison and Larisa Grollemond, eds, Book of Beasts : The Bestiary in the Medieval World (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019); Debra Higgs Strickland, The Mark of the Beast : The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature (New York: Garland Pub., 1999); Megan Cavinn, The Medieval Bestiary in English : Texts and Translations of the Old and Middle English Physiologus (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 2022).

3 Willene B. Clark and Meradith T. McMunn, “Introduction,” In Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages: The Bestiary and Its Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 1-11, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv4v32fh.4.

medieval libraries in England and on the continent.”4 Bestiaries became integral parts of the literary canon, and quotations of them in a variety of medieval works and sacred and secular iconography reinforce their importance to pre-modern societies.

To understand the Hereford World Map and its contents, we must acknowledge the motives and lived experiences of its creators. Like other multifaceted works of material, academic, and artistic labor, many individuals were likely involved in the complex process of the map’s creation. From the initial preparation of the parchment to the design of the geographical zones, the placement of labels, and the final coloring of the various places and figures, there were a multitude of craftspeople and laborers involved. M. B. Parkes has convincingly shown that only one scribe worked on the textual aspects of the map, due to identical penmanship and style, however, it is likely that multiple artists participated in the map’s construction.5 Art historian Nigel Morgan has argued, for example, that two different artists completed the figure-work of the map, as “the animals and birds seem all to be by one artist, the cities by another.”6 Furthermore, one can imagine that still other artists and scribes worked to construct this map, each accomplishing their specialized task and leaving their mark on the document. Most scholars date the origin of the map to the 1280s but suggest that it could have been completed as late as 1300 due to stylistic clues and regional developments within this timeframe.7 Scholars have also determined that the map was likely hung on public display in the cathedral complex and would have been available for instruction and public

4 Beryl Rowland, “The Art of Memory and the Bestiary,” in Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages: The Bestiary and Its Legacy, ed. Willene B. Clark and Meradith T. McMunn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 12-25, http://www.jstor. org/stable/j.ctv4v32fh.5.

5 M.B. Parks, “The Hereford Map: The Handwriting and Copying of the Text,” in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, ed. P.D.A. Harvey (London: British Library, 2006), 107.

6 Nigel Morgan, “The Hereford Map: Art-Historical Aspects,” in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, ed. P.D.A. Harvey (London: British Library, 2006), 128.

7 Nigel Morgan, “The Hereford Map: Art-Historical Aspects,” pp. 132-133; Valerie I. J. Flint, “The Hereford Map: Its Author(s), Two Scenes and a Border,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 8 (1998): 19–44. https://doi. org/10.2307/3679287; Thomas De Wesselow, “Locating the Hereford Mappamundi,” Imago Mundi 65, no. 2 (2013): 180–206. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23480778.

viewing. For example, pilgrimages to the Hereford Cathedral during this period would have included tours of the monastery’s various art installations, including the Hereford Mappamundi.8 Pilgrims from all over Britain would have heard of the work, influencing their perception of Hereford as a place of great religiosity and scholarship. In this way, the artisans, scholars, and religious figures of Hereford tailored the world’s perception of their holy places through the development of the Mappamundi and other cultural, scientific, and artistic works.

Before discussing the animals, their surroundings, and their positionality, it is helpful to have in mind a description of the Hereford Map and its contents. By considering these elements it is possible to convey points of importance and notice on the map. The vellum upon which this map is framed is almost pentagonal, with the circular map in the middle, allowing for significant room near the top for extensive artistry outside of the bounds of the double circle within which the world is encapsulated. Green, blue, red, and gold are the only colors featured in the tan hide’s background. The map is 117 centimeters across at the bottom and nearly 137 centimeters from the top to bottom at the most extreme points. The vellum begins to taper into the point of the pentagon at nearly 92 centimeters from the bottom, creating a natural shape that reflects the material conditions (the shape of the animal) the mapmakers contended with while designing the piece.9 A two-centimeter border is filled with an intricate pattern providing an artistic framework for the geographical work within. While several motifs can be seen on each side, there is an emphasis on lush, floral imagery, relating the map directly to the natural world.10 Another two centimeters within this outer border is another border, which contains an inscription in large red letters in Lombardic display script proclaiming in Latin the mapping of

8 Sarah Arrowsmith, “Hereford Cathedral’s Medieval World Map” (West Midlands History), accessed March 12, 2023, https://historywm.com/articles/hereford-cathedrals-medieval-world-map.

9 All of these measurements and observations have been done through a true-to-size facsimile, provided by Carleton College’s Special Collections program; Harvey, P. D. A., and Scott D. Westrem. 2010. “The Hereford World Map : Mappa Mundi.” London: Folio Society.

10 Christopher Clarkson, “The Hereford Map: The First Annual Condition Report,” in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, ed. P.D.A. Harvey (London: British Library, 2006), 95-96.

the world under the command of Augustus Caesar.11 The word “MORS” also appears on the border of the map, which reminds “the observer of human mortality and of the world’s eventual passing away.”12 The bottom left corner, still outside of the map itself, contains Emperor Augustus ordering the creation of a map of the Roman Empire to three individuals below him. The label cites “Luke in his Gospel,” who stated that “a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.”13 The bottom right corner has a rider atop a horse, followed by a man leading two domesticated dogs. With no lengthy written description, this segment is inscribed briefly as “Descripcio Orosii, De Ornesta mundi, sicut interis ostenditur,” which is translated by Scott Westrem as “Orosius’ account, De Ornesta mundi, as is shown within.”14 Orosius’ Seven Books of History Against the Pagans included a “geographical survey of the world,” and was an influential Christian text on the history of antiquity produced in the early 5th-century, making it an important resource for medieval mapmakers.15 The margins and spaces outside of the image of the world itself thus serve to center the map and provide a frame that emphasizes the importance of Christianity and the longstanding culture of mapmaking.

Located at the top of the pentagon, Christ plays a central role on the Hereford World Map, influencing the animals and figures on the rest of the work by association. Jesus is depicted as seated, surrounded by a mandorla and praying angels, with his stigmata and side wound visible in dark red ink. A larger angel to the left of Jesus holds the cross, while a similarly sized angel to the right holds the crown of thorns and a spear. In the scene immediately below Christ seated in judgment, and above the map itself, scenes from the resurrection appear to the left and right of Christ. To the right of the seated Christ, figures emerge from cof-

11 Lombardic text or Lombardic capitals are large, decorative letters used for inscription.

12 Scott D Westrem, The Hereford Map: A Transcription and Translation of the Legends with Commentary (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), 4-5; Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 151.

13 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 8-9; Luke 2:1, New King James Version.

14 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 6.

15 Westrem, The Hereford Map:, pp. 6-7; Joshua Mark, “Orosius,” World History Encyclopedia. Last modified April 03, 2019. https://www.worldhistory.org/Orosius/.

fins marked with crosses, where they join a procession of figures towards the gates of Heaven, guarded by an Angel. This angel is holding the wrist of the man at the front of the line, seemingly guiding him through the gates; angels are seen playing the trumpet, holding a cross, and kneeling at the feet of the much larger Jesus Christ. On Christ’s left, another gate into heaven is guarded by a flying angel with a sword, driving away a procession of naked individuals led by a horned, winged devil. They are being pulled on a rope by three demonic figures, seemingly into the gates of Hell itself, which is depicted as the maw of a large, scaly, sharp-toothed beast. This procession is broadly representative of views of the Last Judgment, with Jesus as the judge of Heaven and a distinct separation between Heaven and Hell; a similar organization adorned the main doors or western walls of many churches. Other explicitly religious sequences dot the entire Mappamundi, with a depiction of the Crucifixion outside of the city of Jerusalem, the massive Tower of Babel in Babylonia, and an angel fiercely guarding the gates of Paradise with a flaming sword.16 Jesus’ depiction, supported by significant textual references to the Christian Bible, marks the Hereford Mappamundi as a clearly Christian artifact. As the Christian theological content in the top section outside the map highlights Christ’s role in the living world and the afterlife, it reflects and subordinates the entire map to his image. Therefore, all of the land, creatures, and figures beneath are within his domain, clearly demarcating the Earth and its creatures as within the story of salvation and creation told in the Bible.

Thus, the creators of the Hereford Mappamundi used traditions of both Christian theology and Roman mapmaking to contextualize their geographical content. With a diameter of about 112 centimeters, the circular map itself takes up about 73.5% of the entire vellum surface. The general form of the circular map is similar to that of a traditional “T-O” map, with three major continents Asia, Africa, and Europe.17 All of the continents on the map are surrounded by a Green ocean, clearly distinct from the bright blue rivers that

16 Genesis 3:24.

17 A “T-O” map is a 20th-century categorization of tripartite medieval maps that uses the Mediterranean Sea and the Rivers Nile and Don to separate the three continents on a circular world map; David Woodward, “Medieval Mappamundi,” in The History of Cartography: Volume One, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, eds. J.B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 292-302.

dot the landmasses. Situated with Asia at the top of the map, the top of the pentagon of vellum serves as the highest point. “West” is at the bottom of the work, with Europe and Africa each extending to the near bottom of the vellum. Paradise, surrounded by water, a circular wall of fire, and a large, closed gate, is depicted at the top of the circular map, just East of the continent of Asia. Within Paradise, the four golden rivers of “Euphra,” “Tigra,” “Gihon,” and “Phison” are depicted, each traveling out of the Garden of Eden to the corners of the globe, as described in Genesis.18

Just west of the small island that is Paradise, Asia takes up nearly half of the Hereford Map. The Red Sea, depicted as two striking maroon gulfs, occupies the southeast portion of Asia. Various rivers, cities, landmarks, figures, and explanatory texts dot the continent of Asia. At the very center of the map, Jerusalem sits on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, with jagged gear-like walls differentiating it from the other cities and landmarks on the map. Asia is separated from Europe and Africa by the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, which protrudes vertically nearly to the halfway point of the map.

With Europe to the observer’s left and Africa to the right, the viewer can compare the two and their contents due to the proximity and similar sizes of the two continents. Europe is seen as largely urban, covered in named cities, mountain ranges, and rivers. Conversely, Africa is depicted as sparsely populated, with cities along the coast of the Mediterranean, and a variety of beasts, texts, and creatures as the eye travels south. In contrast to the much more urban and inhabited portrayal of Europe, other parts of the world are covered in figure work and references to biblical and classical texts. These texts and images serve multiple purposes. In some cases, they serve to orient the reader in the geographic space of the map, while in others they provide geographic context for major biblical and classical historical events. Biblical history takes a prominent role, with places and objects like the Tower of Babel, the Garden of Eden, and Noah’s Ark tying the map to its surrounding religious contextual tradition. Furthermore, the images can provide interpretive lenses that filter and focus the meaning of the map’s regions. The depictions of animals provide one such lens which, mediated by the learning of the medieval bestiary, helped viewers add value and meaning to geography. In the T-O projection common in the medie-

val European 13th-century cartographic trade, the Levant is centralized, with Jerusalem and the surrounding territories depicted as significantly larger than the other regions of the world. Through these landmarks, inscriptions, and animals/figures, modern scholars can better interpret how medieval audiences were meant to perceive certain cultures, places, and peoples through several cultural lenses, including the bestiary. Nearly twenty animals inhabit Asia, which will be described in the following sentences to provide orientation to the beasts on the map. To the Far East, the elephant and parrot are described as inhabiting India or Southeast Asia. The alerion birds, of which there is “one pair in the world,” are depicted in a small triangle of mountains within central eastern Asia and are a notable addition to the bestiary tradition by French authors of the 12th-century.19 The lacertus is depicted on the map as a reptilian beast, inhabiting the space “between the Acesines and Ydaspes rivers” near the coast that borders Paradise.20 Several dragons are featured across eastern Asia, with two depicted circling the other on an island between two portions of the Red Sea and another seen guarding a “mountain of gold” in the northeast of the continent.21

In central-eastern Asia, several animals make appearances amidst the region’s various cities, biblical references, and rivers. A camel is visible along the eastern coast a body of water labeled the “Caspian Sea.”22

Just to the north of this figure is a pelican, perched in a nest atop a high tree, providing nourishment for its three chicks below. Across the sea from these two animals are two others, a manticore and a tiger, that are accompanied by lengthy blocks of text that describe their traits and are largely attributed to classical natural historians. Further to the northwest of these two beasts, near the border of Eurasia, is the griffin, accompanied by a large block of text that describes its strength and ability to fly. Central to the continent of Asia is the marsok, a small beast with the feet of four different creatures: a human, a bird, a lion, and a reptile.23 Within the modern region of Anatolia, there is the lynx in the west and the bonnacon to the east, each depicted in a typical bestiary tradition.

Though the Levant itself is nearly free of beasts, one large, perched bird labeled “Cirenus” is depicted just

19 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 54-55.

20 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 40-41.

21 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 32-33..

22 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 70-71.

23 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 115.

south of Jerusalem. Along the border of Afro-Asia, a phoenix, just beside the northernmost point of the Red Sea, is depicted atop a pyre of flames, while the yale, a horned beast known for its aggression, is visible to the west along the banks of the Nile. Finally, in eastern Egypt, just across the Nile from Africa, a salamander is depicted with wings slithering to the north.24 The sheer variety of animals depicted across this continent of Asia highlights the wealth and diversity Europeans projected onto Asia, but also the differences they saw between the easternmost portions of the landmass and the north and west.

As the smallest continent on the Hereford Map, Europe is dotted with cities and other physical places of interest. Created in Hereford, at one of the furthest edges of the map, the mapmakers depicted many cities across the British Isles and Europe that they knew through trade, exploration, and pilgrimage. However, this is not to say that Europe is entirely absent of animals. A bear, simply accompanied by the word “Ursus” in red ink, is visible in what would likely be depicted as Lapland or northeastern Europe. To the north of the bear is an ape, scratching itself in a seated position, just along the border with the northern ocean. An ostrich is just to the east of each of these two figures, demarcating the edges of Europe and Asia beside a humanoid figure standing next to an equine laden with a saddle of human flesh. One bovid beast labeled “buglossa” is to be found in Europe, amidst the cities of the Mediterranean, just south of the Alps. One small animal labeled as the “genet” inhabits the Iberian coast amidst numerous cities and rivers. Scholars believe this to be the result of a confusion between the small Spanish horse known as the “jennet” and the small feline “genet” known to inhabit the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa.25 Finally, there is a figure labeled “Scorpio” within central northern Europe on the map; however, it is unknown whether it is referring to the astrological figure or a scorpion as described in the bestiary tradition, a creature typically seen in barren deserts and hot regions.26 While the bear, ostrich, monkey, and scorpion are placed in northern Europe, only the buglossa and genet are depicted in mainland Europe, with much of the continent populated by rivers, cities, and other structures. The limited number of animals and higher

24 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 177..

25 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 330-331.

26 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 228-229; David Badke, “The Scorpion,” in The Medieval Bestiary, August 12, 2023, https:// bestiary.ca/beasts/beast281.htm.

number of landmarks in Europe compared to the other continents reinforces that the Hereford mapmakers had significant knowledge of urban central and western Europe due to the region’s wool trade with cities along the Rhine, North Sea, and the Bay of Biscay.27

Africa contains a large number of animals for its size, with several placed specifically around the Nile Valley, denoting the mapmakers’ familiarity with this region. Much of Saharan Africa is populated by hybrids and humanoids, while Africa south of the Sahara Desert is mostly absent. This duality reflects general knowledge of Africa in Europe. The plethora of information about the world around the Upper and Lower Nile available in classical texts, Christian accounts, and the bible itself, contrasted with the limited knowledge of the sub-Saharan regions to the south and west of the Nile. In East Africa, on an island placed squarely in the middle of the Upper Nile, a crocodile is seen mounted by a rider. Along the western banks of the Nile, a sphinx is visible along with a description that relates closely to a poem by the 4th-century grammarian, Ausonius.28 Just to the west of the Upper Nile are the rhinoceros and monoceros, which are each depicted just on the border with Asia and Africa, possibly emphasizing that they could be positioned within the boundaries of both continents. In south-central Africa, an interesting depiction of the basilisk, with wings, a serpentine tail, and a distinctly avian beak, is visible. Further west, a lion and leopard are depicted side by side, each indicating a relationship between the two feline species highlighted by their mirror image positionality, with two raised paws nearly meeting each other in the middle.29 Just to the west of the lion are two ants, depicted hoarding golden nuggets. These beasts, refer-

27 Victoria Morse, “The Medieval Mappamundi,” History 231: Mapping the World before Mercator. (class lecture, Carleton College, Northfield, MN, January 9th, 2023).

28 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 134-135.

29 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 366-367; The Leopard, Leopard, and Lion, Leo, have a complicated history. Some medieval natural historians denote the leopard as a type of lion, descended from the beast as a more common variety without a mane. Pliny the Elder is attributed as the source of the term, establishing the belief that a leopard is the offspring of a lion (leo) and panther (pard). The two are placed side-by-side on The Hereford Map, perhaps as reference to this shared ancestry and their habitation of similar regions of the earth. For more, see: David Badke, “Leopard,” The Medieval Bestiary, September 6, 2023, https:// bestiary.ca/beasts/beastsource547.htm; Isidore of Seville, “Animals (De Animalibus),” In The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, edited by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof, 251-252.

enced by Solinus and requoted throughout the Middle Ages by other natural historians, were known as the large ants of Africa who “keep watch over their treasure.”30 Each of these animals functions to link the map to existing information about European depictions of Africa, with references to contemporary bestiaries and classical texts tying together a broad understanding of the region. At the same time, the representations of animals like the basilisk and crocodile on the Hereford Map differ significantly from their representations in bestiaries and classical sources providing grounds for new interpretations.

Symbolism on the Hereford Mappamundi is often attributed to classical sources. Certain creatures, beasts, and animals that are depicted on medieval maps such as the Hereford Mappamundi occur earliest in classical texts. The Parrot, the Yale, and the Rhinoceros are accompanied by brief text passages that are nearly identical to Solinus’ works, connecting their meanings directly to classical literature.31 Scholars have debated the connection between medieval works such as the Hereford Mappamundi to classical texts such as Solinus’ De Mirabilibus Mundi and Pliny the Elder’s The Natural History for many years.32 Modern research suggests that enough difference can be found within the subtext and description of medieval maps that they are not drawn directly from classical or late antique sources. For example, some descriptions of animals differ slightly from their classical sources, such as that of the Yale, which is described by Solinus as having “the jaws of a wild boar,” while in medieval bestiaries and on the Hereford map, it is described and

30 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 366-367; These ants are often referred to by scholars as a “corruption” of Solinus’ description. Ants went through a variety of changes from the initial classical description, with their initial size far smaller than that as depicted in later bestiaries and The Hereford Map

31 Margriet Hoogvliet, “Animals in Context: Beasts on The Hereford Map and Medieval Natural History,” in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, ed. P.D.A. Harvey (London: British Library, 2006), 153; John Wiliford, The Mapmakers. (New York, NY: Random House, 1981), pp. 40-41; Gaius Julius Solinus was a 3rd century Latin scholar who wrote an encyclopedia titled Polyhistor on a variety of subjects and regions. A portion of this work was devoted to animals across the known world, outlining certain traits and characteristics that would make their way into bestiaries in the Medieval period. For more see: David Badke, “Gaius Julius Solinus,” The Medieval Bestiary, March 29, 2023, https://bestiary.ca/prisources/psdetail947.htm.

32 John Wiliford. The Mapmakers, 40-41.

illustrated as having “the jaws of a goat.”33 Other descriptions, such as that of the “marsok,” vary significantly from classical sources or have no counterpart within the texts of antiquity altogether.34 Thus, rather than drawing directly on classical texts, it is far more likely that the creators of the Hereford World Map used a far broader medieval literary canon. This cannon may have included contemporaneous bestiaries, scripture, and religious writings, which contained selections of texts from the classical period. For the animals in the Hereford Map, the bestiary tradition would have been particularly important. As I assess these animals’ roles on the Mappamundi, I will discuss a few specific creatures and how they tie into the bestiary tradition and the medieval textual tradition more broadly. The pelican, placed along the coast of northeast Asia, is a clear sign of biblical tradition mapped across the world. Pellicanus, as it is denoted on the map, is depicted atop its nest, wings outspread, as its beak tears a hole into its flesh. The text accompanying the pelican on the Hereford Map reads “For my chicks’ sake I rend my heart,” referencing the three hatchlings in the nest below, mouths agape, seemingly waiting to be fed by their own progenitor’s blood and body.35 Many bestiaries describe the Pelican as a deeply devoted parent. Similar to the words of God, as told through Isaiah in the Bible: “I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me;” the Pelican is deeply frustrated with its children’s defiance as they age.36 Contemporary bestiaries describe that, when the children “flap their parents in the face with their wings,” their parents strike back, killing them.37 The parent then, after three days, pierces its breast and pours blood over the bodies of its children, reviving them, as represented on the Hereford Mappamundi. This wellknown story, related closely to the Christian tradition, places the beast firmly in alignment with Christianized animals like the phoenix or lamb. The pelican’s story on the Hereford Map links the map, bestiaries, and the wider culture together, tying them in an immutable bond through both textual and descriptive similarities and shared allegorical meanings.

Like the pelican in northeast Asia, the monoc-

33 Margriet Hoogvliet, “Animals in Context,” 154.

34 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 114-115.

35 Margriet Hoogvliet, “Animals in Context,” 158.

36 Isaiah, 1:2.

37 White, The Book of Beasts, 132-133; David Badke, “Pelican,” The Medieval Bestiary, https://bestiary.ca/beasts/beastsource244. htm.

eros ties African creatures into the Christian tradition. The inscription accompanying the monoceros on the map and its numerous descriptions in contemporary bestiaries relate it to Christ and religiosity. While difficult to distinguish from the rhinoceros on the map due to their proximity, portrayed size, and shared physical features, the two beasts represent very different entries in the bestiary tradition. The rhinoceros is described in bestiaries as “monsters” with a “horrible howl,” “horse like body,” and a horn that “sticks out from the middle of its forehead with astonishing splendor to the distance of four feet, so sharp that whatever it charges is easily perforated by it.”38 Regularly indicated as one of the only beasts able to kill an elephant, the fierce rhinoceros is rarely comparable to the much smaller monoceros. Only the size of a goat, the sole similarity shared between the two is the horn each of them has protruding from their nose.39 This animal is often described as “excessively swift,” able to evade the capture of hunters easily. A story stated in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, and summarized on the Hereford World Map describes the capture of the monoceros as follows: “a virgin girl is brought before this monoceros, and on his approach, she bares her breast, on which he rests his head – all ferocity abandoned – so that, stupefied, he is captured like a harmless creature.”40 The monoceros, unlike the beastly-yet-secular rhinoceros, is clearly defined as a symbol of Christ throughout medieval bestiaries. The beast’s speed is compared to that of the Lord who could not be contained by demons during the Harrowing of Hell; the horn represents the unity between Christ and God; and the animal’s goatlike form as “the Savior himself was made in the likeness of sinful flesh, and from sin he condemned sin.”41 The maiden described in the story is regarded as Mary, with a virgin womb that draws Christ to her motherly

comfort.42 This creature’s clear relationship to holiness is a fascinating example of the ways beasts in Africa could also be placed in a European Christian context. The elephant, found in Southeast Asia, is depicted with a large structure atop its back. The description by its side can be translated as “India also produces enormous elephants, whose teeth are believed to be ivory, which the Indians utilize in battles with surmounted towers.”43 This description does not exactly match either Solinus’ or Isidore’s natural histories. Instead, the mapmakers utilized a separate amalgamation of cultural evidence, with no attribution to a specific text. Here, the bestiary is critical for relating the elephant of the Hereford Map to that of the broader European medieval world, which provides several examples that give various allegorical and descriptive information about the beast. The elephant often is found in both India and Asia east of the Red Sea in bestiaries and on maps. It is likely the mapmakers did not need to research the elephant itself in bestiaries and natural histories, as it can be seen as a cultural staple in a variety of the period’s texts.44

The Hereford Map’s elephant depicted riderless but with a large structure on its back, is quite similar to other interpretations of the time. Structures appear on several illustrations of Elephants as well as nearly every bestiary description.45 Although we cannot know the implicit takeaways of this work by the general medieval population, we can infer through bestiaries the important characteristics that were associated with them. One bestiary emphasizes the creature’s

42 There are some questions of the interpretation of this attribute, with some recent scholarship questioning the phallic nature of the unicorn’s horn, often shown in the virgin maiden’s lap at the time of its capture. This interpretation would imply something deeply different of the beast, with the hunters supposedly protecting the maiden’s purity from the unicorn’s defilement; David Badke, “The Unicorn,” The Medieval Bestiary, March 1, 2023, https://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast140.htm; Isidore of Seville, “Animals (De Animalibus),” In The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, edited by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof, 252. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511482113.016.

43 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 42.

38 White, The Book of Beasts, 43-44.

39 White, The Book of Beasts, 20-21.

40 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 182-183.

41 White, The Book of Beasts, 20-21; In illuminations that show the beast’s capture/execution, it is often depicted being killed by a hunter with a large spear, with a side-wound quite similar to that of Christ as is depicted in medieval texts.

44 Kiwako Ogata, “The Iconography of the Elephant in the Middle Ages,” Collection of Essays in Commemoration of the 30th Anniversary of Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts, 2018. https://www.academia.edu/38802123/The_Iconography_of_the_ Elephant_in_the_Middle_Ages_Some_Observations_on_its_ Anatomy_in_Visual_Art.

45 David Badke, “Elephant,” The Medieval Bestiary, November 2, 2023. https://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast77.htm

size, denoting that “no larger animals can be found,” while another indicates the beast’s “intelligence and capacious memory” as key tenets of its being.46 Several expansive bestiaries relate the elephant to Adam and Eve due to the female’s consumption of fruit from the Garden of Eden, and subsequently the action of giving “some to her spouse,” in order to conceive.47 This directly ties the creatures of the bestiary to the tale of Genesis, with some bestiaries deliberately emphasizing the elephant’s temptation to consume the fruit by a dragon.48 As the dragon is referred to as “the biggest of all serpents,” this could be construed by a Christian audience as sharing a metaphor with the devil disguised as a serpent in Eden.49 The animal’s proximity to Eden in the Far East is pertinent, reinforcing their physical migratory relationship with the Garden. The hybridization of clearly Christian mythos and largely unrelated secular facts, such as the elephants’ intrinsic fear of mice, complicates any clear mapping of morals onto the beasts of India. Through these complex portrayals, Medieval audiences likely saw sides to these animals of varying moral or factual certainty which drew them to multifaceted conclusions about their nature.

The phoenix, a dark black bird perched atop a pyre of vibrant red flames, is located just next to the Red Sea on the Hereford Map. Next to the bird is an inscription stating: “The phoenix is a bird, it lives 500 years and, furthermore, it is unique and unparalleled in the whole world.”50 This exceptionality is reflected through the animal’s location and dark color which cause it to stand out from other birds on the map. Bestiaries from the medieval period discuss the phoenix in further detail, noting that as it grows old, the phoenix will build itself a funeral pyre and self-immolate, only to “rise from its own ashes” on the ninth day afterward.51 In this way, the bestiary’s representation mirrors the story of Jesus Christ, with its emphasis on

46 White, The Book of Beasts, 24-28; 18.

47 White, The Book of Beasts, 26-26.

48 The dragon is listed in some bestiaries as a source of temptation and many others as the mortal enemy of the elephant, who often threatens their young and forces the female to give birth in water so that the male can protect her from shore, complicating this interpretation; David Badke, “The Elephant,” The Medieval Bestiary, March 1, 2023, https://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast77.htm.

49 White, The Book of Beasts, 165-167.

50 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 366-367.

51 T. H. White, The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century, (New York, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1954), 125-128.

resurrection and rebirth and the offering of oneself to death to bring about life.52 Furthermore, the placement of the phoenix at the west edge of the Red Sea is critical, relating it both to the Christian tradition and Mesopotamia.

The buglossa, a large bovine, is depicted centrally in Europe near the Mediterranean coastline of France and next to the city of Narbonne.53 As a beast with little connection to Christian allegory, no explanatory caption, and only the label “Buglossa,” scholars are left to ponder the relevance of the beast within Europe.54 Bestiaries provide interpretive clues for this animal. It seems as though the buglossa is a more colloquial term for the bubali, which is described as a race of “buffaloes or wild oxen.”55 These beasts are described as “unbiddable” and untamable in bestiaries, with immense horns that have “a notable capacity for booze” once carved into drinking vessels in Germany.56 Scott Westrem concedes that the name, “Buglossa” could be a reference to the plant, ox-tongue, which is also referred to as bugloss.57 As a visual pun, this would solve for the location of the beast in Southern France, which is in the range of the plant, while also hinting at the humor and cunning of the medieval mapmakers.

The marsok, depicted near the mouth of the Euphrates near Sodom and Gomorrah and the Tower of Babel, is a figure that has greatly confused scholars of the Hereford Mappamundi, appearing in neither bestiaries of the 13th-century nor classical texts of natural history. Next to the beast is an inscription: “the marsok, a shape-changing wild animal.”58 Scott Westrem, the author of a seminal study, The Hereford Map: A Transcription and Translation of the Legends with Commentary, and the translation of the map into modern English hypothesizes that the beast could be connected to a “chameleon-like” animal described by Solinus. However, he concedes that the marsok is remote both “geographically and lexically” from the beast described by classical natural historians.59 Another scholar, Margriet Hoogvliet, connects the beast to a similar composite animal seen in a statue on a

52 White, The Book of Beasts, 125-128.

53 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 194-195.

54 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 294-295.

55 White, The Book of Beasts, 77-79.

56 White, The Book of Beasts, 77-79.

57 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 294-295.

58 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 114-115.

59 Westrem, The Hereford Map, 114-115.

13th-century cathedral in Worms.60 This interpretation derives not from a classical context, but a medieval Christian one, in which the four legs of the beast represent the four evangelists: a man (Matthew), a lion (Mark), an ox (Luke), and an eagle (John). However, the proximity of the marsok on the Hereford Map to Lot’s Wife and the Tower of Babel could suggest a negative interpretation of this creature, and Hoogvliet leaves the representation of the marsok open to the interpretation of the audience.61 As a creature without mention in any surviving bestiaries, classical texts, or biblical resources, a modern audience is left to interpret this animal based on this specific design, the brief description attached to it, and a few surviving contemporary artistic works that depict a similar being. While the bestiary cannot offer access to the cultural and experienced knowledge that a medieval audience, artist, or scholar brought to the Hereford Mappamundi, this tool is critical in understanding how Europeans viewed themselves and the outside world. The beasts of the Hereford Map are given deeper meaning and symbolism when put in context with the works of the mapmaker’s contemporaries and the basis of scholarship they have constructed their work. Europe, Asia, and Africa are all commented on through creatures as regions with diverse values and cultures, all with their unique complexities. Animals, as symbols for a variety of sacred, secular, and intermediate traits, have both implicit and explicit meanings in every society, including the contemporary period. While some of these meanings transcend the boundaries of time, with lions still seen as regal symbols of kingship and phoenixes as representations of the resurrection and cyclical nature of time, many others have morphed or disappeared completely. The characterizations of animals in the Hereford map have been replaced by new knowledge, as beasts and the natural world have different connotations in the nations and cultures of our contemporary world. Scholars must be careful to keep from projecting modern perspectives on the past. Therefore, when interpreting the Hereford Mappamundi, scholars should be wary of anachronistic judgments or assumed meanings and instead attempt to read the map within its contemporary intellectual philosophies, material conditions, and lived experiences.

60 Hoogvliet, “Animals in Context,” 159-160.

61 Hoogvliet, “Animals in Context,” 159-160.

Figure 1: Hereford Mappamundi

French Photographic Imaginations

Primary Title

John Sheets

Hamilton College - Class of 2024

In 1897, after thirteen years of continuous conflict with the indigenous Merina Kingdom, the French colonial empire successfully overthrew the monarchy and claimed the Kingdom as a new colony.1 France, in a diplomatic conflict with Great Britain, looked for control over the Indian Ocean to gain easy access to trade routes. Furthermore, the islands in the Indian Ocean were excellent locations for agricultural production. These qualities made Madagascar an ideal island for France’s colonial administration.2 This takeover was a matter of great significance for the French, for James Sibree of the Royal African Society coined Madagascar as the “Great African Island,” seeing it as powerful for its location and rich soil.3 One British geographer wrote that France’s Madagascar was the fourth cornerstone of an “ideal quadrilateral”, that being Tunis, Tonkin, Congo, and Madagascar.4 France thus possessed a sizable portion of the African continent and dominated the Indian Ocean, propping Madagascar to be a prized colony.

Both upon France’s 1883 arrival as a protectorate and more so in its complete colonization of the island, the French grew fascinated with Madagascar’s environment. This interest continues in contemporary perceptions of Madagascar. Environmental scientists note the island’s immense endemism both in flora and

fauna.5 The French colonial empire preceding identified such natural peculiarity, and available photographic archives demonstrate that colonial administrators admired the Malagasy environment. Much of the available photographic repository of French Madagascar focuses on the landscapes of the island, whether it be waterfalls, mountain rangers, or the coastlines.6 France’s abundant documentation of Madagascar’s nature lacks acknowledgment of the indigenous population. From its initial colonization to the economic development of the island, France clearly disregarded local peoples for the island’s natural bounty. Through photographic evidence, the French Colonial Empire’s fascination with its colonial Malagasy landscape subverted or removed the indigenous population. That French neglect of Malagasy people reflected agricultural and environmental exploitation. Its perspective of a humanless island, or an island in which people are flattened into the environment, continues in later thought of Madagascar.

Photography as a Colonial Tool

Photography, a European invention, is an intentional and collectivizing process. In other words, there is a possessive element to a photograph.7 The photographer captures and thus possesses the moment that they are documenting, and then one typically possesses the photograph in print. Furthermore, photography is

1 Solofo Randrianja and Stephen Ellis, Madagascar: A Short History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

2 Radrianja and Ellis, Madagascar, 140.

3 James Sibree, “General Gallieni’s ‘Neuf Ans à Madagascar’: An Example of French Colonization,” Journal of the Royal African Society 8, no. 31 (1909), 259.

4 Samuel Pasfield Oliver, “Madagascar as a French colony,” in Foreign and Commonwealth Office Collection (1896), 59.

5 Ken Behrens and Keith Barnes, Wildlife in Madagascar, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

6 Digitally accessed through the “Base Ulysse” of the Archives nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM).

7 Susan Sontag, “On Photography” in Communication History: Technology, Culture, Society, Fourth Edition, (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2002), 166-170.

not an accidental practice; the photographer has a clear plan and subject of which they are photographing.8 With a camera, the photographer identifies the subject, takes its picture, and meticulously magnifies it onto a print. With an intent and the opportunity for pictures to be decisively printed, each photograph works as a thoughtful visual art form.

Photography, whether purposely or coincidentally, reflects the colonial dynamic of exploitation of a subject. In any photography, there is a unique relationship between the photographer and the subject in that the subject becomes a frozen visual spectacle.9 The relationship between photography and the subject becomes amplified and apparent under a colonial lens. Assuming that a colonial power operates the camera, the colonist imposes its intention onto the colonized subject. Such an imposition weakens the subject because the photograph takes interpretation and perspective out of the subject’s authority.10 It is up to the photographer to frame, document, title, and distribute the photography to how they desire. The subject, whether it be a person, an animal, or a landscape, has no agency as to how an audience perceives the photograph. A colonial power therefore has the ability to possess the colony in a picture and manipulate it to its desire.

In photography, a landscape is a human construction.11 Landscapes do not occur naturally but rather are perceptions of existing environments. Within the frame of a landscape photograph, there is a clear intention of what to include and what not to include. In photographing the environment, there has to be a clear decision on where and what to photograph. Acknowledging that a landscape is intentionally crafted removes the assumption that nature photography is sporadic or that it captures sceneries that are exactly as they appear. In the colonial context, landscape as construction reaffirms the point of photography as a possessive tool.12 A landscape photographer, particularly a European one documenting a colony, captures and claims the environment to create a deliberate image of nature.

8 Sontag, “On Photography,” 166.

9 Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View.” Art Journal 42, no. 4 (1982) 311-319.

10 Daniel Foliard, The violence of colonial photography, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 37.

11 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape” in Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) 5-34.

12 Christabel Devadoss, “Monolith, the colonial face of landscape photography” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 29, no. 1 (2022), 26-51.

There is little English language academic work on French colonial photography of Madagascar, but this does not suggest that there is an insignificant photographic collection. In the Archives Nationales d’OutreMer (ANOM), the French colonial archives, Madagascar has the largest available photographic collection of any French colony.13 This is significant for a few reasons. First, the large collection indicates that Madagascar was not an ignored colony and clearly interested the French. Second, this French interest was administrative, and the ANOM is primarily for government or public records. Given that most of the photographs exist within administrative archives, this must mean that French administrators had an intent to document Madagascar. Third, the audience of these photographs was not private. It is not certain who viewed these photographs, but given their availability in public administrative archives, the photographs were most likely available to other public administrators. These photographs of Madagascar were not for private interest but instead reflected the public perspectives of French administrators.

Before examining any photographs of Madagascar, it is important to remember that each photograph comes from a French photographer with a clear intention. The camera is a tool and an agent in the European desire to exercise control over its colonized populations. A photograph conveys what is visually important to the photographer. With that, there are no spontaneous photographic instances. Instead, photographs are meticulously taken and printed for a purpose that exemplifies an exploitative power dynamic.

First Explorations of the Malagasy Colony

To consolidate and control Madagascar, French officials first had to explore and document the island. Though Madagascar was a protectorate of the French from 1882 until its 1897 colonization and France had trading posts along its coast for decades prior, the interior was unfamiliar to the French as the Mering Kingdom still held power in the central regions during that period.14 It was up to Joseph Gallieni, General turned Governor of French Madagascar, and his staff to explore the island previously undocumented by the empire. Upon arrival, Gallieni and his personnel im-

13 Digitally accessed through the “Base Ulysse” of the Archives nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM).

14 Radrianja and Ellis, “Madagascar”, 156.

mediately began colonial development and exercised French control over the local population.15 Not only did this involve creating administrative control and placing military throughout the island, but it also required extensively documenting the island itself.

The earliest photographs of French Madagascar primarily document the travels of either Gallieni and his staff, or of fellow Frenchmen first traversing the island. In both cases, the photographs reflect the French as first time witnesses to the foreign landscape. The utility of the earliest French photographs of Madagascar was to document what already existed in Madagascar. The top two photographs shown above were taken anonymously along French travels, documenting the environment from either roads or emerging railway routes. In the case of the bottom two images above, both photographs were taken as a part of agronomist Emile Prudhomme’s agricultural service mission. In all four of these photographs, the intention was simply to survey the new colony. In some cases, people and culture were the subjects, as shown in the top right photograph, but most photographic work examined the island’s environment. In capturing the Malagasy en-

15 Joseph Gallieni, “Lettres de Madagascar: 1896-1905: I,” Revue des Deux Mondes 44, no. 4 (April 1928), 776-807.

16 Clockwise from top right: Anonymous, Un village sur la route de l’est dans la Mandraka, [1896-1905], photograph on baryte paper, 11.8 x 16.9 cm, 44 PA 221/15, Archives nationals d’Outre-Mer (ANOM), Aix-en-Provence, France; Emil Prudhomme, Le raphia, (1898), fixed albumen photograph on laid paper, 11 x 8.5 cm, 44 PA 179bis/58, ANOM; Emile Prudhomme, Les environs de Ranopiso (1898), fixed albumen photograph on laid paper, 9.5 x 3.5 cm, 44 PA 179bis/81, ANOM; Anonymous, Angavo et tracé du chemin de fer près d’Ambohimanjaka, [1896-1905], photograph on baryte paper, 11.8 x 16.9 cm, 44 PA 221/4, ANOM.

vironment, the French were able to contextualize the island’s landscape, making it accessible for colonial construction, agriculture, and other general development plans.

The photograph above from Gallieni’s general staff exemplifies the beginning of the photographic trend in which nature takes precedence over the people. Taken between 1900 and 1904, the purpose and title of this photograph, Baobab, was to capture the large and endemic baobab tree. In Madagascar, the baobab is of varying cultural significance. Indigenous passersby often cherish and embrace the baobab as a host of spirits.17 The two indigenous men pictured are most likely either standing by or embracing the tree, but that is not the purpose of this photograph. To the French, the baobab is a visual spectacle for its bizarre shape, and it is peculiar how the photograph renders the two indigenous men. Their identities are unknown and no other context exists to help illuminate their presence. In the context of the photograph, the men are instead reference points to demonstrate the scale of the tree, as well as pieces of the landscape. Instead of the subject, they act as supplements to Madagascar’s endemic wonder. In this manner, they are then subverted as

17 G.E. Wickens, The Baobabs: Pachycauls of Africa, Madagascar and Australia (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2008), 63.

Figure 2: G.E. Wickens, The Baobabs

Figure 1: French photographs of the Madagascar16

a part of the wilderness. Their dress and the lack of anyone else present reaffirms this exoticization.18 To an outside viewer, it appears that the two men exist in the plains with no shelter or contact with others. The people, as the Gallieni era photograph above indicates, were a part of the spectacle in Madagascar.

Colonial Development

Various indigenous groups combated the French infrastructural projects throughout the island. Gallieni and his personnel established military posts to stop rebellion, imported French goods and propaganda, and began constructing railways.19 By 1902, the French military had completely penetrated the island, squashing any local rebel groups. In 1905, the military administration switched to a civilian one.20 Though slow and difficult as Gallieni reports of indigenous hostility towards the transition, the French were able to control the entire island only within a decade of its Merina overthrow.

Emile Prudhomme’s photograph above combines the French fascination with the baobab with the landscape photographic trend while removing any indigenous cultural presence. The photograph confronts the baobab with the mountainous terrain of central Madagascar. This photograph aligns with the subject material of the preceding image, Baobab, but instead of two indigenous men at the base, it is two black colonial soldiers. Though their identity is unknown, they again serve to illustrate the scale of the tree. Unlike the previous image, there is no indigenous cultural connection to the baobab. Instead, the colonial soldiers cement their authority beside the tree.

From the onset of French colonization, Madagascar was a new land of beauty to photographers. The French witnessed the landscape, its endemic species, and the new treasures of the island that they could now claim. With that, there arises a question on the status of the indigenous population and how they appeared to French officials. French landscape photography flattened indigenous presences into the environment. Whether or not the Malagasy people would become integral actors in French Madagascar would become a recurring question in the ensuing decades.

18 Etat-major de Gallieni, Baobab, [1900-1904], photograph on baryte paper, 17.1 x 12.2 cm, 44 PA 157/73, ANOM.

Madagascar best suited France for its agricultural potential. Since the early nineteenth century, the French colonial empire had operated plantations of spices and tropical crops, such as vanilla and sugar throughout the Indian Ocean. The Comoros Islands and Bourbon Island, now called Réunion, were French colonies but lacked the size to become prominent agricultural bastions for the Empire.21 However, Madagascar was suitable for crops, such as vanilla, and had the land to produce them at a much higher quantity than other Indian Ocean colonies. The chief example of French agriculture in Madagascar was vanilla. In 1900, vanilla plantations multiplied on the island’s north coast, and by World War I the colony was the world’s largest producer of vanilla.22 Other spices and crops such as cloves, coffee, and cassava arrived at the turn of the century as well, and Madagascar quickly became a center of spice and production for the French colonial empire.23

The French intended to turn Madagascar from an island of indigenous subsistence agriculture to a plantation based capitalistic production colony. Like in other colonies, the French sought to transform the production in Madagascar from indigenous food sustenance into export focused farming. Madagascar’s indigenous

19 Gallieni, “Lettres de Madagascar,” 782-790.

20 Michael P.M. Finch, Progressive Occupation? The Gallieni-Lyautey Method and Colonial Pacification in Tonkin and Madagascar, 1885-1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 222-224.

21 Serge Volper, Une Histoire des Plantes Coloniales ( Paris: Éditions Quæ, 2011) 134-135.

22 Volper, Une Histoire des Plantes, 137-138.

23 Jarosz, Lucy, “Defining and Explaining Tropical Deforestation: Shifting Cultivation and Population Growth in Colonial Madagascar (1896-1940),” Economic Geography 69, no. 4 (1993), 370.

Figure 3: Emile Prudhomme’s photograph of a baobab

population primarily grew rice and used a shifting cultivation method called tavy.24 It was a slash-and-burn method used throughout the island but upon French arrival was subsequently banned. To the French, tavy damaged both France’s potential value in Madagascar and forest covers. French officials neglected agriculture for indigenous food supply but were rather interested in monocropping plantations that provided a steady supply of exports. The French cleared forests to make way for new plantations, while indigenous peoples’ rice and food yields declined.25 Within the first years of arrival, Madagascar was another agricultural outpost of exploitation. Though the French clamped down on environmentally damaging farming methods of the indigenous communities, colonial farmers replaced them with detrimental plantation development.

Around the same time, the French believed that there was a need to preserve the Malagasy environment. French administrators identified and blamed the Malagasy people as deforesters of the island. In 1909, Governor General Victor Augagneur expressed that natives continued to landscape with tavy, a destructive slash-and-burn farming style. He concluded that the French must abolish tavy to preserve Madagascar’s ample forests.26 In the 1920s, botanists Henri de la Bâthie and Henri Humbert mistakenly believed that Madagascar was once entirely forested prior to the indigenous arrival in Madagascar.27 In 1927, the colonial administration furthered forest conservation legislation and created ten nature preserves.28 The Eaux et Forêts, the colony’s environmental department, identified part of its goal as preserving the island’s rare vegetation. French preservation was able to hide the continuing degradation and deforestation required to grow its export centered agriculture. Meanwhile, France portrayed the indigenous population as an agent of destruction more so than itself.

Amid the first decades of French rule, there was a dual process of degrading and preserving the Malagasy environment. Colonial interest promptly undercut indigenous agriculture in favor of establishing capital

24 Genese Marie Sodikoff, Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2012), 5-6.

25 Jarosz, “Tropical Deforestation,” 370-371.

26 Jarosz, “Tropical Deforestation,” 370.

27 Sodikoff, Forest and Labor, 12-13.

28 Genese Marie Sodikoff, “Forced and Forest Labor Regimes in Colonial Madagascar, 1926-1936,” Ethnohistory 52, no. 2 (2005), 407-408.

intensive farming. In doing so, the French introduced new crops and amplified existing ones that were only of export and not of any indigenous value. In this process, there was rampant deforestation. In the early twentieth century, the French had a paradoxical interest in preserving the Malagasy forests. The French understood Madagascar as a unique landscape. Preserving vegetation and wildlife would keep the European fascination with the island, and eventually craft Madagascar as a tourist destination. These two processes, at times appearing contradictory, cemented a French perspective on Madagascar that excluded and marginalized one component: the island’s indigenous population.

Photographic Reflections of Degradation and Preservation

Because photography reflects and exemplifies the photographer’s perspective, the colonial photography of Madagascar demonstrates France’s complex relationship with nature. A clear conflict existed between documenting Malagasy landscapes and France’s agricultural production that was destroying said landscapes. Expanding beyond travel photography, French officials used photography to justify and express control over the colony. The camera was no longer a witness to the island but rather became a weapon to subjugate it. In the context of colonial landscapes, the French used the photograph as a means to possess the environment.29

French photography of Madagascar remained focused on the landscape but with the added dimension of demonstrating France’s production. As agricultural

29 W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5-34.

30 Starting from left- Anonymous, Plantation d’ylang et de canne à sucre (October 30 1945), analog photograph on cardstock, 10.5 x 15.9 cm, 30Fi85/50, ANOM; Anonymous, Hauts-plateaux. Rizières en gradins, [1930/1946], analog photograph on cardstock, 11.4 x 16.5 cm, 30Fi85/66, ANOM.

Figure 4: French sugar and cassava plantation in Madagascar (left) and rice plantation (right)30

output increased, administrators merged that interest with the landscape to showcase the island’s bounty. The left photograph above is of a cassava and sugar plantation. On the right, it is of a rice plantation. Both photographs come from the economic agency of the French colonial administration; however, without such contextualization, the images operate as landscape photographs. Both present vast views of Madagascar yet also show how the French manipulated such views. In the left photograph, the plantation is almost invisible without the image’s title. In the photograph of the rice plantation, there is also the visible dimension of land degradation. A rice plantation requires vast deforestation and soil destruction to create the paddy fields. Given that they belong to the economic agency and showcase plantations, there is a layered goal in the two photographs. The two images showcase not just the vast plantations but the beauty in which they exist, downplaying the destruction that these farms create.

Magnifying the focus from landscape to plantation labor, the environment remains the subject of many photographs. The two photographs above depict indigenous laborers harvesting rice. Certainly, the laborers are closer to the camera’s focus and their centrality in the frame makes their presence noticeable. However, there is still a distance that places the individuals within the harvest landscape. There is anonymity to those photographed, and the titles of both photographs place them only as harvesters of rice. In the left photograph, the laborers exist within the rice field, trapping them within the larger subject. In the right photograph, the laborers exist not in the field but also in front of it. However, none of them face the camera. Because no interaction between the photographer and the laborers takes place, a disconnect exists between them. This suggests

31 Starting from left- Anonymous, La moisson du riz, [19301946], analog photograph on cardstock, 11.1 x 16.5 cm, 30Fi85/34, ANOM; Anonymous, Scène de moisson du riz, [1930-1946], analog photograph on cardstock, 11 x 16.5 cm, 30Fi85/42, ANOM.

that the photographer did not mean to interact with them and instead focused on their work, thus reducing the people to their tasks. Though people are present and are perhaps the subjects of these photographs, their work within the broader landscape became the French administrator’s purpose in documenting them. In both of these photographs, the French admiration of Malagasy agriculture and nature marginalizes the indigenous population even when it is present.

The photograph above directly submerges the indigenous workers within the rice plantation. The title of the image, Station de Nanisana. Plantation du riz, places the rice farm itself as the subject. The two laborers are merely a part of said subject, absorbed in the rice field. Though the person on the left is immediately visible by their white shirt, the person on the right is hidden in the field. Like the previous photographs of other rice plantations, the photographed people exist not as autonomous subjects but as workers. Unlike the previous photographs, the photographers capture the people as hidden within the crops that they farm. Connections to Malagasy nature also exist within the image above, as the upper third of the frame comprises the landscape beyond the field. In the image, the farmers become submerged within a layered landscape of nature and rice.32

32 Anonymous, Station de Nanisana. Plantation du riz, [19301946], analog photograph on cardstock, 11.1 x 16.7 cm, 30Fi85/30, ANOM.

Figure 6: Station de Nanisana. Plantation du riz

Figure 5: Laborers in a rice field31

The two photographs above detract the focus away from landscapes, and they place indigenous children as props for production. Certainly, the two children present in the photograph satisfy the photographer’s intent. Both photographs are of coffee harvests from two different plantations. The bodies’ presence implies that they are responsible for the harvest. Additionally, they serve as scales to show the size of the one coffee branch. Whereas other photographs may dismiss workers or not include people within their pictures, these two separate photographs do the opposite and showcase those perhaps responsible for production. However, what these children represent are actually props to the valued coffee production. The photographer intentionally frames the boy behind the coffee branches. Not only does this trap them within the bush itself, but it suggests that they are not as important as the coffee itself. In the foreground is the coffee branch, not the person. Similar to the photographs of the rice plantations, the boys depicted as coffee harvesters are present yet made inferior to agriculture.33 Once again, the indigenous population exists with production, not separate.

The photograph above culminates French attitudes towards both the Malagasy people and nature. Taken between 1930 and 1946, the image showcases a fully grown cassava field with one black individual, most likely the worker responsible for the yield. As one can observe, the yield is large. Like the indigenous people photographed at the baobab or the children with the coffee bushes, the man shown above demonstrates scale to understand the depth of the cassava yield. Not only is this an economic demonstration of agricultural wealth, but it is also a shrinking of the man present. The title of the photograph, Plantation de manioc, reinforces that the subject is the plantation, not the man. Furthermore, the man stands just outside the plantation as if emerged from within it. The upper third of the frame gives the image depth, documenting how vast the cassava is as well as the hills beyond. In the photograph above, the black laborer is a part of the landscape and not his own being.

French photographic interest in nature continued into the twentieth century, as shown above, but it never had the same frequency as it did in the first years of colonization. Even in nature or landscape photographs that attempt to depict Madagascar as it is, the French made a visible impact on the environment. The French built roads and dams for the sake of their colonial and agricultural development. In both images above, the French infrastructure becomes a new part of the environment. Just like with other photographs in the ANOM archives, this continuation of landscape photography denies the indigenous presence in Madagascar. Instead, the only ‘human’ aspect of the photographs above is French made.

As agricultural value grew on the island, the

33 Starting from left- Anonymous, Caféier Kouilou au moment de la cueillette, [1930-1946], analog photograph on cardstock, 10.8 x 16.5 cm, 30Fi85/22, ANOM; Anonymous, Caféier, [1946-1958], analog photograph on cardstock, 12 x 13.4 cm, 30Fi85/18, ANOM.

34 Starting from left- Georges Robert Lisan, Lac Itasy. Vue prise du Bois sacré, (October 30, 1945), analog photograph on cardstock, 10.6 x 16.6 cm, 30Fi91/25, ANOM; Anonyme, Barrage d’Antelomita (SEEM) [Société des eaux et de l’électricité de Madagascar] [1930-1958], analog on cardstock, 12 x 17 cm, 30Fi91/53, ANOM.

Figure 9: French-made infrastructure in Madagascar34

Figure 7: Coffee harvesters

Figure 8: Plantation de manioc

French photographic focus hid the indigenous population in favor of capturing the economic prospects. Of course, it would be ignorant to suggest that indigenous people were not depicted in photographs. If shown, the Malagasy people were either adjacent or props to agriculture. Certainly, landscape photography continued in Madagascar, but, by 1902, the French completely chartered and controlled the island.35 Photographing the unknown, exotic landscape was no longer enticing as French administrators identified Madagascar as a colony valuable for its agricultural output. Whether it was roads, cities, or plantations, the focus on the exotic was no longer the driving force of photography. Instead, it was to document bounty, all the while diminishing the indigenous presence.

To place indigenous people in the background of or adjacent to the landscape or plantations is to make them less valuable than nature or agriculture. In this context, an indigenous boy is a farmhand more so than he is a person. Framing the subjugation within photographs allows it to be seen around the world. Many of the photographers worked for the colonial economic administration, which means that their audience ended up living not in Madagascar but in France. The silencing of indigenous people became not just a Malagasy issue, but an issue raised by French people.

Visual Legacies of the Environmental Focus

By removing or submerging the indigenous population, Madagascar’s geography became a commodity that the French could exploit. Landscapes became an artistic and romanticized tool for any French purpose. This coincided with an exoticized view of the island, anchored by a fascination with endemic species and the tropical climate. While Madagascar was an island of immense agricultural exports for France, many French administrators and European spectators saw it as a paradise. Following World War II, such romanticization of Madagascar fueled tourism and further photographic ventures.

This 1945 photograph of a baobab tree exemplifies how French photographers remained enamored with Madagascar. Over forty years after the first French photographs of baobabs, the intrigue with the tree’s bizarre shape continued. With the cloud atop the branches, it appears as though the tree has leaves of its own. Whether or not that was intentional is unclear. However, the clouds strengthen the spectacle that the photograph tries to convey by making the baobab an entity artistically blended with the rest of nature. With the title, Environs de Diego-Suarez, there is a concise effort to capture the landscape as well. The lake and mountains are just as much a part of the focus as the baobab. There is just as much a microscopic focus on the endemic baobab as there is a macroscopic focus on the surrounding landscape. In the image, there is a lack of civilization presence, and it instead presents Madagascar as a serene, humanless environment.

35 Finch, Progressive Occupation?, 222-224.

36 Georges Robert Lisan, Environs de Diego-Suarez. Baie du Courrier, (October 30, 1945), analog photograph on cardstock, 12.1 x 16.8 cm, 30Fi94/68, ANOM.

Figure 10: Environs de Diego-Suarez36

Straying away from photography, Madagascar’s image as a humanless paradise developed in tourism as depicted by the two maps above. In both maps, the indigenous peoples remain at a lesser status than the environment. Because these are drawn maps, greater artistic freedom exists to emphasize what makes Madagascar unique as an island. On the left is a 1950 map made by Affiches Gaillard, a French print company, for the Ministère de la France d’Outre-Mer. Given that there is little cartographic substance beyond the outline of Madagascar, this map was not used administratively. The map showcases indigenous designs, endemic zebus, and farmland. Whereas the animals graze on Madagascar, the people depicted are silhouetted caricatures removed from the island. Rather than being a part of Madagascar’s geography, the indigenous people are inconsequential to it.37 Instead, the French continue to focus on Madagascar’s exotic elements.

The 1952 map on the right is similar to that from 1950, but it adds new complexities and details. Another map for the French colonial economic agency, its artistic features indicate that this map was also meant for a broader audience. The map expands on endemic crops and animals. All of the crops depicted in the map are important to the French because they are valuable for export. The map’s artist both draws them on the island but also lists them in the bottom right. Crops include sugar, vanilla, cloves, coffee, and ricin for example. Given such information, it is clear that the map was an artistic exemplification of Malagasy agricultur-

al value.38

In terms of people, the map reifies Joseph Gallieni while once again removing the Malagasy people from the landscape. In the bottom right, Gallieni appears as a figurehead on the map’s key. In placing him on the map, the mapmakers impose Gallieni as a hero or paternal figure in French Madagascar. Indigenous people are present, and even different ethnic groups are labeled under each person. Though their presence is seen, the mapmakers once again remove the indigenous people from the island itself, instead drawing them as indigenous caricatures. Their traditional clothing places them as figures not living in a modern Malagasy landscape. With the other exoticized elements on the map, the figures shown become antiquated and reduced to presenters of the island to the viewer.39

Though not photographs, the two maps reinforce the French environmental imagination that became frequent in the photographic archives. To the French, Madagascar was an Edenic, natural wonder capable of a cornucopia of food and crops. Photographs, and later visual media, reinforce that motif which places indigenous people somewhere secondary or adjacent to nature. France’s imagination of the environment erased Madagascar’s own people.

Conclusion

From the 1897 arrival, the French were conscious of the Malagasy environment and its uniqueness. From Joseph Gallieni’s travels onward, France’s interest in baobab trees and endemic species remained unfettered. To document said wonder, photography became the ideal platform. French photographers captured anything in nature, from the coast to the inward expansion of the mountains and forests. The question then arose: where do the indigenous people exist in France’s photographic imagination?

The French made a concerted effort to maximize the colony’s profits and at the same time maintain the country’s beauty. In that confluence of efforts, French administrators blamed the Malagasy people for deforestation, though it was French plantations that did more damage than previous farming practices. The French built-up infrastructure and plantations to fur-

38 Maurice Tranchant, Madagascar, (1952), print, 111 x 73 cm, 0009Fi392, ANOM.

37 L. Craste, Madagascar (1950), print, 119 x 79 cm, 0009Fi78, ANOM.

39 Maurice Tranchant, Madagascar, (1952), print, 111 x 73 cm, 0009Fi392, ANOM.

Figure 11: A 1950 map by Affiches Gaillard (left) and a 1952 map with more detail (right)

ther exports but also strengthened their conservation goals by establishing natural preserves. In the dual process, French officials disregarded indigenous interests. Photography became a tool to present such agricultural and environmental bounty, thus flattening or removing indigenous peoples from the landscape. Photography turned from landscapes to plantations and human constructions. In this turn, indigenous workers emerged as new elements of photographs. However, workers never emerged as the main subject. Instead, vast yields loomed over and hid them from the focal point of French photographs. Indigenous people became adjacent to agriculture and nature, and, in some extreme cases, became nonexistent in artistic depictions of Madagascar.

While French administrators created environmental imaginations across various colonies, the perceptions of Madagascar linger in contemporary views of the island. Views that exemplify Madagascar’s nature and suppress indigenous presences are commonplace both in academia and popular media. For instance, indigenous peoples and their culture are secondary to the vanilla grown or the zebus grazing. While there is copious academic work within environmental studies of Madagascar, little scholarship exists in terms of English language historical or sociological work. Furthermore, a humanless Madagascar persists in popular media. One can examine this perspective’s legacy in the 2005 animated children’s film Madagascar. In the movie, Madagascar is a depopulated island. Rather than being an island with cities and villages, it is a jungle rampant with lemurs and other animals. The only evidence of humanity in the movie is a plane crash with skeletons, implying that humans cannot live in the Malagasy wilderness.40 Through photography, one can examine that the French valued Madagascar for its natural and economic wealth. Due to French colonialism, there is now an ingrained cultural image of Madagascar as a distinct environment devoid of any indigenous humanity.

40 Madagascar, directed by Eric Darnell & Tom McGrath (2005; Glendale: DreamWorks Animation), digital film.

Primary TitleAmerican Civil Religion and War

Historiography of the Soldier-Symbol

Sumiko Newman

Hamilton College - Class of 2024

Although the United States touts a separation between church and state, religion, in particular, Protestantism, provides a foundation for American culture and historical narratives. Scholars of civil religion interrogate this apparent contradiction, with Robert H. Bellah, the scholar who borrowed the term from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and transformed it into a sociological concept in his 1967 essay “Civil Religion in America,” at the center of this discourse. Bellah begins this essay by providing excerpts from President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address in which the young politician makes several references to God. Bellah is less interested in what this blatant acknowledgment of Christianity reveals about Kennedy’s private faith, and more preoccupied by what it reveals about the fabric of American public life. Although Bellah asserts that American Civil Religion is “clearly not itself Christianity” and lacks a “formal creed,” he does admit that “much is selectively derived from Christianity.”1 He argues that another “religious dimension” to America exists alongside traditional religion that is institutionalized through a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals, such as a presidential inauguration ceremony, and articulates Americans’ dual commitment to Western religious traditions and their self-understanding in the light of shared national realities.

Bellah asserts that American Civil Religion serves a distinct function from one’s private religious affiliations. To Bellah, this distinction between one’s private beliefs and a universal civil religion manifests in the election of a Catholic president in Kennedy and the possibility of a Jewish president in the future. The framers established a separation of church and state, yet Bellah argues that pursuits of American public

1 Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967): 7, 15, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027022.

life, in particular in the political sphere, follow a transcendent goal of fulfilling God’s will on earth. War disrupts these pursuits and heightens the stakes of national goals in the face of immense loss. He observes that Americans required civil religion during and after the Civil War, as the conflict fundamentally altered the nation’s self-understanding. He states that the war introduced themes of “death, sacrifice, and rebirth” into American Civil Religion, but only devotes three pages to the topic.2 Since this observation in the 1960s, many scholars have continued to investigate civil religion’s role in the justifications of war and in remembrance of war, as well as the ways war serves as a vehicle for the formation of an American national identity. This scholarship on warfare, for the most part, takes the meaning of civil religion for granted and leans heavily on Bellah’s assessments. Instead of engaging in theoretical explorations or defining terms in their right, civil religion serves as an instrument to explore varied locations of the intersection between war and national identity. Four sites of intersection emerge as consistent themes within the historiography of this topic: soldiers, rituals, space, and policy decisions. A survey of this scholarship indicates that soldiers envelope these other themes and incite the most historiographical contestation. This paper explores how works from Charles Reagan Wilson, Jonathan H. Ebel, and Peter Gardella use the subject of the soldier within their analyses of American justifications of war and in the remembrance of war. The treatment of war will not be the target of the paper, rather the focus will be on how these scholars have turned to soldiers to reveal traits of civil religion and American involvement in conflict from the Civil War to the postwar period. Ebel’s writing serves as a central point of comparison, as he best articulates

2 Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” 10.

the duality of the soldier as both symbol and individual. The three books reveal the drawbacks of the lens of civil religion that could be improved with a consideration of the work of two historians of nationalism. The soldier as a site of civil religion exists as highly public and masculinized, and thus the American experiences interrogated remain limited and exclusionary. However, the work of Prasenjit Duara in Rescuing History from the Nation provides a framework that questions accepted American historical narratives and identifies the largely ignored place of private life and gender in the current historiography.

In 1980, Charles Reagan Wilson published Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920, the first full study of civil religion in the post-Civil War South. He investigates how the Lost Cause, a mythology fostering a heroic image of Southern secession, allowed Confederates to salvage their honor after a sweeping defeat, connecting religion and history to create a culture separate from the North. This resulted in a “Lost Cause civil religion,” or “Southern civil religion,” that replaced Southerns’ failed political dream of a separate nation. Wilson argues that this Southern civil religion stemmed from the experience of the Civil War, and worked in opposition to a broader American culture and civil religion. Wilson directly mentions Bellah’s nationwide civil religion and sees his predecessor’s observations as coexisting with the distinct Southern civil religion that harbors different origins and functions. He explains that Southern civil religion stressed virtue over democracy with “less optimistic, less liberal, less democratic, less tolerant, and more homogeneously Protestant” qualities than its broader American counterpart.3 He also includes input from other religious studies scholars such as Clifford Geertz, Anthony F. C. Wallace, and Emile Durkheim, yet he neglects to formulate a clear-cut definition of civil religion that combines all of these approaches into something distinct from Bellah. Despite this, he remains clear on the function; instead of functioning as a unifying force for national action and identity, “Dixie” civil religion and its mythology gave Southerns’ meaning to their perceived suffering and “an identity in a precarious but distinct culture.”4 Wilson identifies a pantheon of Confederate military leaders, and Southern veterans at large, as critical features of

3 Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1980), 12.

4 Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 13.

the civil religion. The book is not preoccupied with the biographies of these men, instead, Wilson explores how they emerged as battle-worn heroes and martyrs and remained so decades after the political cause of the Confederacy died out.

Wilson asserts that the military leaders of the Confederacy animated the mythology of the Southern civil religion as heroes battling for the virtue of the South against the Northern Yankee. Proselytizers of this civil religion, most often ministers, presented men like Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson as a combination of “military hero and the religious saint” to teach “moral lessons on suffering, humiliation, defeat, and death.”5 According to Wilson, this mythology of a Lost Cause civil religion reassured impoverished Southerners after defeat and provided them with models of virtuous sacrifice. Although Wilson reiterates that the Southern civil religion arose purely from the ordeals of the Civil War, he also mentions popular legends and histories that legitimized the apotheosis of these Southern warriors. The mythology drew upon the chivalric tales of King Arthur and figures of Greek antiquity, such as Achilles and Ulysses.6 Southern civil religion originated from a discreet, regional experience of war, yet pulled from larger narratives of sacrifice and heroism that transcend space and time.

In addition to the pantheon of well-known names, Wilson reveals that the Confederate army and the average soldier served as centerpieces to the civil religious narrative. Combat itself took on a spiritual significance, with the Confederate soldiers undergoing a “baptism of blood,” in the words of a Mississippin minister, throughout their time on the battlefield.7 As a result, veterans represented the holy cause of the Confederacy and served as inspiration for future Southern men fighting for the United States. Wilson provides examples of sons of Confederate veterans making parallels between their efforts as soldiers during World War II with their fathers’ sacrifices years prior. Despite serving the nation their fathers fought against, these Southern men used their shared civil religion to draw a throughline from the Confederacy to their contemporary experiences of war.8 Wilson mentions that the sacrifices undertaken by soldiering have a “communal aspect,” with “the shedding of blood [cleansing] all of Southern society, as well as its individual

5 Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 57.

6 Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 39.

7 Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 44.

8 Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 173.

soldiers.”9 Amid the carnage of war, Confederate soldiers and their descendants take on the responsibility for the moral sanctity of the region as key players in the mythology of a virtuous South. This phenomenon pervades beyond Wilson’s work on Southerns and the Civil War; contemporary scholarship further develops how the soldierly body stabilizes and embodies an American Civil Religion.

In his book G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion, Jonathan H. Ebel argues that the American notion of the military was highly Christian in the first half of the 20th-century, with soldiers acting as agents in shaping civil religion. As a religious studies scholar, he directly engages with Bellah’s definition and aims to investigate the locations of American Civil Religion, and how its practitioners engaged, and continue to engage, their bodies in these endeavors. For the purpose of this paper, I will restrict my analysis to instances related to the two World Wars. Ebel notes a development in the field of religious studies since Bellah wrote in 1967 from simply examining religious traditions through words spoken and written to engagement with “embodied practices and lived patterns.”10 Ebel understands civil religion as ingrained in pre-existing Christian frameworks and manifested in “the narratives, symbols, practices, and institutions that create and sustain a sense of America’s special purpose and place in the world.”11 Similar to Wilson, he falls short of providing any typology or further theoretical analysis of the concept. He writes on six case studies spanning from World War I to the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, using archival materials, newspapers, periodicals, published memoirs, films, and memorial environments as the bases of his claims.12 Whereas Wilson almost exclusively engages with the imagined, symbolic soldier, Ebel argues that both the American archetype of the soldier and “his more fragile, more complicated, human counterpart” participate in American Civil Religion. 13

Ebel begins his book with two case studies from the First World War, the life of Lieutenant Colonel Charles White Whittlesey and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, to illustrate soldiers as sites of American Civil

9 Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 44.

10 Jonathan H. Ebel, G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 17.

11 Ebel, G.I. Messiahs, 2.

12 Ebel, G.I. Messiahs, 10.

13 Ebel, G.I. Messiahs, 2.

Religion and symbols of and for the nation. Whittlesey rose to fame after he led his battalion throughout a five-day German siege in the Argonne Forest during a crucial phase of the war’s final offensive. Ebel explains that although Whittlesey was a humble and private man, he emerged from the conflict as a public “symbol of wartime heroism” and a civil religious instrument taken up to “fill the vacuum of identity that war had created.”14 Rather than resuming his ordinary life as a lawyer at the war’s end, Whittlesey received numerous requests for public speeches and events, and this public strain, according to Ebel, led to his suicide in 1921. Unlike Wilson who just examines the symbolic function of soldiers and veterans within Southern mythology, Ebel delves into what both the historical narrative and the individual lost through pure symbolism. He writes, “the symbol of the soldier and the soldier as symbol facilitate a ‘not knowing’ of the soldier who is identified and partially known, a hiding of the visible body, a forgetting of the remembered personality.”15 all soldiers elevated by the nation persist as partially unknown, with their role of symbol dominating over all other facets of their existence. Despite the rhetorical benefit of symbolic analysis, Ebel demonstrates that a soldier as a symbol diminished the individualism and hardships endured during and after life on the battlefield.

Religious Studies scholar Peter Gardella touches upon this disconnect between the celebrated soldier and the reality of enduring military conflict. In his book, American Civil Religion: What Americans Hold Sacred, Gardella assumes the existence of an American Civil Religion and devotes his work to presenting the creation and endurance of certain monuments, texts, and images that “amount to a real religion.”16 He never scrutinizes what a “real religion” entails, instead, he zooms in on the manifestations of this so-called religion and its syncretism of ancient Roman and Christian values. Unlike the aforementioned scholars, Gardella recognizes the existence of civil religions in other countries, yet he maintains that America’s version “may claim to be the strongest and most elaborate” because Americans lack a “natural, common culture.”17 He believes that four values dominated American Civil Religion from the nation’s conception: personal free-

14 Ebel, G.I. Messiahs, 51, 65.

15 Ebel, G.I. Messiahs, 51, 65.

16 Peter Gardella, American Civil Religion: What Americans Hold Sacred (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2.

17 Gardella, American Civil Religion, 6.

dom (often called liberty), political democracy, world peace, and cultural (including religious, racial, ethnic, and gender) tolerance. Each chapter of the book provides the story of a monument, text, or image from its creation, along with reflections on how the chosen subject reflected these civil religious values. Most of Gardella’s work takes on a material cultural approach, however, his chapter on Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s photo of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima (see fig. 1) briefly weighs in on the human costs of war.

1: Rosenthal, Joe, photographer. American Marines Raising American flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima. Japan, 1945. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/96515062/.

Rosenthal’s iconic photograph depicted six U.S. Marines raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi. Gardella argues that the image persists as “one of the purest icons” of American Civil Religion” and captures its “commitments to liberty and democracy to a commitment to world peace.”18 Beyond this favorable reading of civil religion as a driving force for good during wartime, Gardella also discusses how the notoriety of the photo, and its subsequent transformation into the Marine Corps Memorial in Washington D.C., disguised the human cost of the battle at Iwo Jima. In the spring of 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt called the photographed men back to the U.S. to take

18 Gardella, American Civil Religion, 270, 272.

part in nationwide rallies of a war bond drive. Gardella notes that by this time, only half of the men remained alive and those survivors “bore emotional scars” that lasted for years.19 By including brief mentions of the private lives of the soldier-symbols, Gardella’s chapter provides a more conservative counterpart to Ebel’s analysis, in particular his writing on Charles White Whittlesey’s suicide. Ebel asserts that “with respect to soldiering, war, and American Civil Religion…all soldiers as public symbols are, at best, identified and partially known.”20 Gardella goes further than Wilson in recognizing the suffering of American soldiers and separating the man from the symbol, yet this remains a peripheral part of his analysis; while Ebel bases his entire argument on the dark realities of soldiers’ private existences.

Gardella’s discussion of the Marine Corps Memorial further illustrates the scholar’s shallower reading of the soldier as a spokesperson for American Civil Religion. In 1954, at the end of the Korean War, President Dwight D. Eisenhower dedicated the Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery in honor of all Marines who have died in the defense of the United States since 1775. The photo from Iwo Jima served as a direct model for the bronze creation, however, Gardella notes that in the image the “six men (two of them hardly visible) are nearly anonymous, backs bent and faces obscured by helmets and raised arms,” whereas the memorial portrays the men visible from all angles.21 Gardella argues that by displaying “the calm but heroically determined faces of the Marines,” the monument produces “a more triumphal effect,” compared to the photo, which “[expresses] democracy.”22 He recognizes the utility of the soldier, both in its anonymous and identifiable forms, yet he shies away from exploring the range of implications of this practice beyond its ability to embody his list of four civil religious values. Gardella asserts that the monument became a sacred site for Americans to reflect on national identity by embodying the values of liberty, democracy, and world peace, albeit with an emphasis on victory. Therefore, once the nation cast the photographed men in bronze, they transformed from individuals to noble symbols of American Civil Religion and military might.

Ebel similarly recognizes another Arlington

19 Gardella, American Civil Religion, 275.

20 Ebel, G.I. Messiahs, 65.

21 Gardella, American Civil Religion, 273.

22 Gardella, American Civil Religion, 277.

Figure

monument, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, as a manifestation of 20th-century civil religious sentiments, but he provides a more explicit interrogation of the characterization of death through the military as a righteous endeavor. He argues that this memorial facilitated the transformation of the Unknown Soldier and all dead soldiers into American imitations of Christ. Gardella does not devote a chapter to the Tomb, but within another section, he does write that the Unknown Soldier serves as a martyr of American Civil Religion and that religions require martyrs to “stand for commitment to the ultimate power that holds things together.”23 Ebel may agree that the celebrated set of human remains and its tomb “holds things together” for a national public, yet he also contemplates what is lost with this martyrdom. While Gardella, as well as Wilson in his interpretation of the Confederate pantheon, accepts the soldier’s status within the civil religious mythology, Ebel identifies a tension in this acceptance. He asserts that the tomb allowed Americans to better imagine their own national identity, while also articulating “competing claims as to the ownership of the soldierly body and the nature of soldierly identity.”24 For Ebel, the soldier inhabits multiple historical meanings, as both an American symbol and an American man. Notably, Ebel writes only a year after Gardella, meaning that Ebel’s interpretation of the soldier within civil religion cannot be read as part of a chronology of historiographical progression.

To a varying degree, the three scholars produce a largely masculinized history of civil religion and war. The notion of civil religion created by Bellah explicitly prioritizes the public and political spheres, which men historically dominated. In doing so, the historiography of the soldier as an instrument of civil religion presents a consistent historical narrative of American involvement in war reliant on legible symbols. Wilson, Ebel, and Gardella demonstrate that the soldier from the Civil War to the postwar period served as an effective rhetorical site to interrogate how civil religion stabilized American identity in times of uncertainty and loss. Nevertheless, the soldier limits the historical narrative to sites of masculine civil religious symbolism and national identity. These scholars are not accountable for the gender norms that placed men as the public heroes and martyrs of war, yet their approaches undeniably erase women from the history of American war.

Regardless of his unrelated area of historical focus, Prasenjit Duara presents a framework of nationalism that ameliorates this limitation of the soldier-symbol framework and thus can serve as an alternative way to study how America relied on a civil religion during times of war.

In Rescuing History from the Nation, Duara uses Chinese history to interrogate the unquestioned narratives that constitute the historiographical landscape of nationalism and prioritize a single national history. Given the novelty of his scholarly intervention, Duara defines his terminology, including “history” itself. History with a capital H refers to Enlightenment History, or a mode of reckoning with the past that is linear and teleological, and engaged in a “repressive connection” with the nation.25 Duara traces these ideas back to the work of Hegel, and he highlights the philosopher’s claim that only subjects with History, or those who have self-awareness of Spirit, can form and manage their own nation. He asserts that the “self” exists as superficial and relational, and, therefore, readers must consider the national self as defined by the Other. Nations contain various “others,” such as the Muslim woman in British India, however, historians overlook their existence in order to “[secure] for the contested and contingent nation the false unity of a self-same, national subject evolving through time.”26 Through a recognition of alternative histories of “others” in China’s past, Daura strives to uncover the narratives and schemas used by historical actors and historians to elevate a History that serves the nation-state. Duara coins the term “bifurcated history” as an alternative to History, as it looks at the less dominant histories of the “others” and avoids retrospective constructions that serve present needs.27

In his chapter on American overseas cemeteries and the soldiers and war workers buried in them, Ebel engages in an analysis that reflects the interests of Duara’s bifurcated history. He grounds his analysis of these cemeteries of the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) in the story of Felicitia Hecht, an American army nurse who died in France during World War I. He argues that her story is “subordinate to and shaped by a more powerful narrative of divine action and ideal human interaction” because accounts of

25 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4.

23 Gardella, American Civil Religion, 79. 24 Ebel, G.I. Messiahs, 52.

26 Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 4.

27 Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 5.

the past “are the results of purposeful processes of narration and preservation that reflect the interests of an individual or a communal author.”28 Ebel believes that through the religious iconography, the cemetery becomes “hallowed ground” that highlights a collective sacrifice of the nation in the service of Christian ideals, rather than allowing space to confront the individual suffering of those buried. He identifies the existence of historical narratives, as embodied by women like Felicitia, that disappear under the weight of the narrative of a triumphant nation made up of Christ-like soldiers. Similarly, Duara deemphasizes the importance of identifying a “true” Chinese past, and, instead, investigates how historians privilege certain narratives over others to reproduce “the ideology of the nation-state.”29 Through the formulation of a homogeneous and continuous national subject, most often concentrated on the Han race, these Chinese historians attempted to reconcile the aporias of linear history. This analysis can be translated to Ebel’s work, with the Christ-like soldier-symbol as the privileged national subject that frames warfare as a divine endeavor and reconciles the breaks in an American trajectory of triumph.

In his chapter on Charles White Whittlesey, Ebel further aligns with Duara’s bifurcated history by wading into fictional writing. Duara lays out the varying rhetorical approaches of 20th-century Chinese intellectuals in their constructions of national histories. He claims that Chinese historian Lu Xun “comes closest to challenging the totalizing disposition of History” by merging the techniques of historical and fictional writing.30 The fictional form subverted the clout of the historian and distinguished Lu from his contemporaries who claimed to write objective, apolitical accounts of the past. Ebel interprets Whittlesey’s suicide as a personal civil religious “counter-ritual” that stood “starkly against the uncontrolled, public, gory, no-time-to-say-good-bye deaths of war as any death possibly can.”31 The nation successfully engrained these uncontrolled and public deaths into the American consciousness by creating a History of Christian sacrifice through warfare, and Ebel points out that the counters to this narrative remain unseen. Throughout the section on Whittlesey’s death, Ebel includes italicized portions to convey the imagined intentions of the veteran as he reckoned with the strain of living as

28 Ebel, G.I. Messiahs, 71.

29 Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 33.

30 Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 44.

31 Ebel, G.I. Messiahs, 64.

a symbol. For example, Ebel imagines that Whittlesey used his suicide to proclaim, “War does not redeem, war injuries and degrades. Through its absence, my body will tell a different story.”32 By infusing his historical writing with Whittlesey’s imagined intentions, Ebel acknowledges that Whittlesey himself can inhibit bifurcated history. Ebel demonstrates that Whittlesey’s private life presented an alternative narrative of American Civil Religion centered around human experience, rather than the soldier as symbol. Through a recognition of these alternative histories, both Ebel and Duara strive to uncover the narratives and schemas used by historical actors and historians to elevate a History that serves the nation.

Since 1967, scholars have exemplified how Robert Bellah’s civil religion applies to American involvement in war and the maintenance of national identity. Bellah’s articulation of a religion that serves the nation and its cohesion allowed historians to freely explore how Christianity and its symbols intersect with American efforts to construct a collective heroic character, without being bogged down by political scientific discourse on the separation of church and state. Wilson, Gardella, and Ebel all agree on the existence and authority of civil religion and then build off this consensus to interrogate specific sites of its manifestation. They demonstrate that the soldier– in the form of a Confederate hero, entombed remains, or a photograph– took on a symbolic function in the remembrance of war. As religiously infused, and at times overtly Christianized, symbols of American military strength, soldiers preserved a mythological American identity characterized by triumph and collective sacrifice. The work of Duara on nationalism offers frameworks to extend scholarship on war and civil religion beyond the theme of the soldier, with slivers of Ebel’s work providing a glimpse into the possibilities of this intersection. Applying Duara’s ideas allows for a more holistic view of the American past that recognizes the historical actors, notably women, and narratives that failed to serve as a representation of a triumphant nation, but remained integral to activities surrounding war and its legacy.

32 Ebel, G.I. Messiahs, 63.