Original Departures
Initial Working Title (2002):
Civilizing Colonialism
and Taming the Criminal Savage
- Impression management and the making and unmaking of deviance and discipline in late colonial Philippines, 1900-1935.
Abstract
Theoretical and empirical departures
In the recent decade and a half, Foucault's major themes, concepts and statements have gained increasing currency in the field of colonial studies, opening up a whole new line of inquiry into what can broadly be labeled as the 'rationalisation of colonial rule' and its related deployment and practical application of s-c 'technologies of disciplinary power'.
Rationalisation in this sense implies the production and reproduction of new institutional forms and ways of organising and practicing control over subject populations in tandem with the rising objectification of these populations through concurrent classificatory and epistemic systems that presupposed and were reciprocally presupposed by those very practices - the net-effect of which tended to make colonial management both more cost-efficient (i.e. in terms of decreasing dependence on coercive modes of control) and intrusive (i.e. in terms of modifying mentalities, behavioral, and corporeal predispositions). As a general trend, this process coincided historically and logically with the 'Age of Empire' (1875-1914), an era which heralded what one historian called the growing 'embourgeoisement of imperialism' (Cooper & Stoler, 1997, Tensions of Empire...Berkeley: UCP: 31), when colonial powers were (articulating for instance in pan-imperial congresses at the close of the 1800s) negotiating the terms of a new imperial morality, one articulating bourgeoining bourgeois sensibilities at home and translating into truly 'civilized civilizing' agendas across the breadth of empire. Coercive force for extractive purposes alone would no longer do without, at least in rhetoric, the noblesse oblige of enlightening and reconstructing native societies and institutions in more stable, modern rational directions.
While there has certainly been an earlier tendency within the genre to depict if unintentionally rationalisation as an unilinear and unilateral process, running from metropole to colony, recent more culturally sensitive scholarship convincingly suggests the contested, negotiated often complex and hybridizing if reciprocal features of modern institutional and 'technology' transfer in the imperial peripheries.
US colonial rule and 'civilizing' agenda in the Philippines from the early to mid-1900s provides, at first glance, a cutting edge case of 'enlightened, rational imperialism'. After a short but vicious military pacification campaign, the Philippine Commission - the caretaker US colonial government, the technocratic ranks of which largely consisted of academics, lawyers, scientists and other professionals - set the stage for a bold experiment in building the basic institutions of what some contemporary analysts referred to as tropical democracy. It was to be a 'civilizing' project like no other: one with an unprecedented fast-track, condensed mentality-and-sensibility-altering agenda based on a scientifically managed popular pedagogy in modern democratic, responsible, auto-disciplinary citizenship and eventual native self-rule. Couched in the idiom of tutelage, American political, legal, judicial, educational institutions were to be gradually, systematically, and, on the broadest of fronts, transplanted through learning-by-doing exercises in self-government. A key strategic component to the American brand of tutelary, 'rational imperialism' is its deliberate and prominent application of knowledge-generating statistical and census-making technology - theoretically grounded in then emerging social Darwinism and positivist social sciences - to serve and inform colonial management as a whole and its component agencies.
Thus, between the two most comprehensive censuses of 1903 and 1918 the colonial census bureau and other government agencies and institutions unleashed an 'avalanche of numbers' in a scale never before seen on the Islands, creating and leaving durable statistical-izing median or average images and impressions of all sorts of populations, from draft animals to deviants and criminals. Not only were these informational technologies envisioned to rationalise the control and disciplinary capabilites of colonial management, the practical deployment and organisation itself in which these technologies were to be honed (like the Bureau of Census) became prototypes of the auto-disciplinary and self-policing institutions of democratic self-rule the Americans intended to subsequently reconstruct on the Islands at large. Together with judicial and policing institutions, the organisation of census-taking evolved into one of the first most indigenized government agencies during the American occupation. It was, in the words of its first director, to be the first attempt ever by any 'tropical people in modern times, to make an enumeration of themselves.'
Aim, argument, and departure from theoretical departure
This study will describe and explore the US-designed and led 'rationalisation of colonial rule' in the Philippines between 1900-1935. It will trace how this process panned out on the ground in the operation and organisation of the Bureau of Census, which acted as strategic informational powerhouse for the new evolving colonial bureaucracy at large, and the three concatinated institutions and sites of colonial disciplinary power - judicial, law enforcement, and penal.
Central questions
How and why impressions (and the need to maintain and manage precisely those impressions) about both colonial managers and the subject populations they are supposed to manage, matter as conditions and constraints to the practical operation of colonial management itself, and its deployment and application of 'technologies of disciplinary power'. Or alternatively put, how and why the way in which a colonial latecomer like the United States defines and projects itself as a unique 'civilizing' power (relative to a set of distinct 'audiences': other 'civilizing' powers, political constituencies and economic interests at home, colonial subalterns and subjects at large) bear on the actual course in which the practical bases (judicial and 'disciplinary' institutions) of such power evolves.
Project Sponsorship:
1998: Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA)/Sarec
Fall 2001 - Spring 2002: Kinanders Foundation, Stockholm University
Fall 2002 - Spring 2003: Kinanders Foundation, Stockholm University
Fall 2003 - Spring 2004 Kinanders Foundation, Stockholm University
Project-related Reports:
Rojas, V (1995) 'The Rational or Moral Tulisan?' Making Sense of Peasant Banditry in Pre-20th Century Colonial Philippines. Paper presented at the Graduate Course on Economic Theory, Dept. of Economic History, University of Stockholm.
Rojas, V (1998) 'A Thief with or Without a Cause' - Banditry and Rebellion at the Crossroads of Late Colonial Regimes in the Philippines, 1840-1940. Project synopsis submitted to SIDA/Sarec.
Rojas, V (2002) 'Civilizing Colonialism and Taming the Criminal Savage' - Impression Management and the Making and Unmaking of Discipline and Deviance in Late colonial Philippines, 1900-1935. Empirico-Historical Departures. Paper presented to the Graduate Seminar, Dept. of Economic History, University of Stockholm.
Rojas, V (2004) 'Crime & the Institutional Economy of Criminal Processing and Disciplining Agencies in Late Colonial Philippines Under US Occupation, 1900-1935. An Annotated Bibliography of Contemporary Primary & Secondary Sources.' Technical Report # 1 Parts I & II. Dept. of Economic History, University of Stockholm. (150 pp)
Rojas, V (2004) 'Crime & the Institutional Economy of Criminal Processing and Disciplining Agencies in Late Colonial Philippines Under US Occupation, 1900-1935. Case Directory & Data-Base Over Penal Cases Transacted by the Supreme Court of the Philippines, 1900-1935.' Technical Report # 1 Part III. Dept. of Economic History, University of Stockholm. (230 pp)
Forthcoming Project-related Reports:
Projected date of completion - SS 2007-SS 2008
Rojas V ( ) 'The Economy of Impression, Disciplinary Power, and Symbolic Subversions. Theoretical and Methodological Departures.'
Rojas V ( ) 'The Economy of Impression in Judicial, Policing, and Disciplinary Institutions' - Hispanic-Filipino Antecedents.'
+ 4 Still Untitled Empirical Chapters
Report Abstracts
For project-related report abstracts tune in on the following website: http://www.maxpages.com/ecohist
