Experiencing Dominion

Thomas W. Gallant

Description

Experiencing Dominion contributes to ongoing debates on hegemony, power, and identity in contemporary historical and anthropological literature through an examination of the imperial encounter between the British and the Greeks of the Ionian Islands during the nineteenth century. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the imperial encounter, with topics including identity construction, the contestation over civil society, gender and the manipulation of public space, hegemony and accommodation, the role of law and of the institutions of criminal justice, and religion and imperial dominion.

Thomas Gallant—widely recognized as one of the leading scholars in historical anthropology— argues that a great deal can be learned about colonialism in general through an analysis of the Ionian Islands, precisely because that colonial encounter was so atypical. For example, Gallant demonstrates that because the Ionian Greeks were racially white, Christian, and descendents of Europe’s classical forebears, the process of colonial identity formation was more ambiguous and complex than elsewhere in the Empire where physical and cultural distinctions were more obvious. Colonial officers finally decided the Ionian Greeks were “Mediterranean Irish” who should be treated like European savages.

Experiencing Dominion pushes contemporary literature on historical anthropology in a new direction by moving the discussion away from an emphasis on a simple polarity between hegemony and resistance, and instead focusing on the shared interactions between colonizers and colonized, rulers and ruled, foreigners and locals. In this important study, Gallant emphasizes contingency and historical agency, examines intentionality, and explores the processes of accommodation and, when warranted, resistance. In so doing, he reconstructs the world Britons and Greeks made together on the Ionian Islands during the nineteenth century through their shared experience of dominion.

Sujets

• 19th Century
• Modern
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Briton
• Modern history
• Ionian Islands
• Greeks
• Eastern
• Greece
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 07 juin 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268159603
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

EXPERIENCING DOMINION
EXPERIENCING DOMINION
Culture, Identity, and Power in the British Mediterranean

University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
Rights Reserved http://undpress.nd.edu
Copyright 2002 University of Notre Dame
Published in the United States of America
A record of the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request from the Library of Congress
ISBN 9780268159603
This book is printed on acid-free paper .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Preface
Abbreviations
CHAPTER ONE Introduction: The Ionian Islands
CHAPTER TWO European Aborigines and Mediterranean Irish: Identity, Cultural Stereotypes, and Colonial Rule
CHAPTER THREE Creating Western Civilization on a Greek Island
CHAPTER FOUR Indirect Rule and Indigenous Politics: The Case of the Foundling Home on Kefallenia
CHAPTER FIVE Turning the Horns: Cultural Metaphors, Material Conditions, and the Peasant Language of Resistance
CHAPTER SIX Dueling with Daggers: Masculine Identity and Ritual Violence
CHAPTER SEVEN We re All Whores Here : Women, Slander, and the Criminal Justice System
CHAPTER EIGHT We Are the Christians : Religion, Identity, and Colonial Rule
CHAPTER NINE The Imperial Encounter on the Ionian Islands: A Summary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is the result of many years work, and some of the chapters have already appeared in print, albeit in a rather different form. I acknowledge and thank those who helped me with the previously published article versions of some of the chapters. I cannot thank enough the three people who have most shaped the way I study the past: Jeffrey S. Adler, Mary P. Gallant, and Michael Herzfeld. My deepest appreciation goes also to Barbara Hanrahan and the staff at the University of Notre Dame Press for their help with publishing the book. The following foundations provided the financial support for my researches: the National Science Foundation, the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation, and the Division of Sponsored Research at the University of Florida. Finally, I acknowledge the invaluable assistance of the archivists, librarians, and staff at the Topiko Istoriko Arheio tis Kefallenias in Argostoli, the Istoriko Arheio tis Kerkiras in Kerkira, the Gennadeion Library, the British School at Athens, and the Public Records Office, Kew Gardens.
A version of chapter 4 appeared originally as: Agency, Structure, and Explanation in Social History: The Case of the Foundling Home on Kephallenia, Greece, during the 1830s. Social Science History 15:4 (1991): 479-508; chapter 5 as: Turning the Horns: Cultural Metaphors, Material Conditions, and the Peasant Language of Resistance in Ionian Islands (Greece) during the Nineteenth Century. Comparative Studies in Society and History 36:4 (1994): 702-19; chapter 6 as: Honor, Masculinity, and Ritual Knife-fighting in Nineteenth Century Greece. American Historical Review 105:2 (2000): 359-82; and chapter 8 as: Peasant Ideology and Excommunication for Crime in a Colonial Context: The Ionian Islands (Greece), 1817-1864. Journal of Social History 24:3 (1990): 485-512.
PREFACE
Dominance in India was doubly articulated. It stood, on the one hand, for Britain s power to rule over its South Asian subjects, and on the other, for the power exercised by the indigenous elite over the subaltern among the subject population. The alien moment of colonial dominance was thus matched by an indigenous moment within the general configuration of power. (Guha 1993: 69).
All resistance is not constructive, nor are all subordinate peoples able to critique the conditions of their subordination. (Merry 1995: 14).
These two passages aptly capture the focus of this book. Guha s comments remind us that we need to be attuned to the layers of power relationships that exist in any society but that may achieve an even deeper stratigraphy in colonial situations. Merry s observation, based on her assessment of the importance that law played in shaping imperial rule, suggests that we need to exercise care in identifying acts of resistance because we always run the risk of imputing motives that may exist more in the mind of the modern analyst than in that of the historical actor. As I delved deeper into this study of the interaction between British representatives of the Colonial Office and the Greeks of the Ionian Islands whom they were sent to rule, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the emphasis on resistance that has become prominent in the contemporary literature on imperialism and colonialism. Conceptually, I found the antinimous pair of resistance and accommodation too constraining for a deeper understanding of the colonial experience. I increasingly came to share the concern recently voiced by Michael F. Brown (1996) and others (e.g., Fox and Starn 1997) that we need to resist resistance, or at least to conceive of it in more complex and nuanced ways. Not all actions of the ruling groups, either foreign or domestic, are hegemonic, and not every response by the subaltern constitutes resistance.
What I want to capture in this book is the complex, variegated, and often-ambiguous experience of imperial rule shared by Britons and Greeks when the islands were part of the British Empire. Conceptually, I have chosen dominion to express the thing that they experienced. Because dominion emphasizes the unity of power, authority, and sovereignty, it better conveys the complexities and ambiguities of imperial rule than do hegemony, accommodation , and resistance .
The central aim of this book, then, is to undertake an engagement with debates on hegemony, power, and identity in contemporary historical and anthropological literature. Each chapter individually engages a different aspect of that literature. 1 Together they are intended to move the discussion away from an emphasis on a simple polarity between hegemony and resistance, and instead to focus our attention more on the shared interaction between colonizers and colonized, rulers and ruled, foreigners and locals. I want to emphasize contingency and historical agency, to examine intentionality, to explore the processes of accommodation and, when warranted, resistance, and to reconstruct the world Britons and Greeks made together on the Ionian Islands during the nineteenth century through their shared experience of dominion.
Few readers, besides those who have an interest in the Hellenic world or who are aficionados of Lawrence Durrell s novels, have probably heard of the Ionian Islands, let alone know that for much of the nineteenth century they were part of the British Empire. Moreover, it is indisputable that in the annals of the empire, the isles occupied only a marginal position and were simply a sideshow in the great game of European imperial expansion. The Ionian Islands lacked the sense of exoticism, romanticism, and adventure that the British associated with Africa, India, and the Far East. To visit Kerkira was not to traverse into the heart of darkness. But it is precisely because the islands did not fit neatly in the usual colonial categories that an analysis of the experience of dominion there can be especially fruitful.
Basic elements that shaped the colonial encounter were more ambiguous in the Greek case than elsewhere. Were the Ionians, for example, racially Europeans? Were they culturally western ? Answers to these basic questions about their identity were not self-evident. How could the descendents of the ancient forebears of western civilization not be western ? How could the cosmopolitan Greek bourgeois merchant or the crimson-cloaked Italianate Ionian aristocrat not be European ? In short, on the Ionian Islands, the British confronted a complex, sophisticated, white, Christian indigenous culture, and so the process of identity formation and cultural categorization was different from elsewhere. And this further complicated the dynamics of imperial rule. Compounding the complexity of the situation was the anomalous political status of the islands. They were, in theory, a sovereign state under the protection of the British crown. Perforce, the local Greek political elite had to be accorded a greater degree of political power than in other types of direct-ruled colonies. In sum, since the Ionian Islands presented the British with a situation different from elsewhere in the empire, an analysis of how Greeks and Britons experienced dominion and hegemony, resistance, and accommodation here will enrichen our historical understanding of imperialism more broadly.
Chapter 1 briefly introduces the reader to the Ionian Islands and explains the genesis and development of the British protectorate over them from 1815 to 1864. Chapters 2 and 3 are related and deal with the issue of identity. In chapter 2 , I examine how the British crafted an identity for the Greeks. In so doing I engage the literature on identity and Otherness, and on Orientalism and postcolonialism. I argue that much of that literature simplifies the process of identity formation by envisioning it as a straightforward process predicated on bipolar opposition. Instead, using the case of the British and the Ionian Greeks, I show that the process was more complex than that and that it was based on the construction of colonial stereotypes through analogies rather than through single dichotomies. In this case, the British created an identity for the Ionians either as Mediterranean Irish or as European aborigines. But identity formation w