PROSE OF COUNTERINSURGENCY From winning “hearts and minds” to intimidating and oppressing restive populations, or as is often the case, a combination of these and other strategies that combine coercion and persuasion, counterinsurgency has been a central strategy of empires and states. Counterinsurgency has also produced a dense archive of records and manuals, as well as visible and invisible marks on bodies and communities subject to its violence. These archives reveal various tensions of empire, the racialized and ethnicized logics of state power and its psychic consequences for citizens and subjects, and also the political consciousness of insurgents themselves. Writing from radically distinct spatial and temporal locations, the two essays in this rubric contribute to expanding our understanding of counterinsurgency, especially how it can shape societies long after the various states of emergency have ended.
Paul T. Clarke’s essay, “‘Child of Koevoet’: Counterinsurgency, Crisis, and the Rise of Private Security in South Africa,” turns to the counterinsurgency wars waged by a mix of state and, importantly, non-state actors inside South Africa and in neighboring countries in the 1970s and 1980s. This was a period when the apartheid regime, in response to a series of economic and political crises, turned to counterinsurgency doctrine in order to push back against what they saw as the rising threat of communist revolution in South Africa. Drawing from archival materials from the apartheid state’s security apparatus, and interviews with former and current members of the security industry, this essay is an insightful exploration of the ways a logic of near-permanent counterinsurgency shaped the late apartheid regime, and what emerged from the “wreckage of counterinsurgency.” Specifically, as Clarke highlights, counterinsurgency was part of a broader global “punitive turn” that emerged from the global economic crises of the 1970s and shaped the carceral state in the United States and the United Kingdom. He emphasizes that in South Africa the punitive turn emerged in response to the specter of communism, and was instrumental in creating the conditions, and providing the personnel, for the rise of private security in South Africa and elsewhere in the global South, as opposed to developing the carceral state.
Similarly, emphasizing the productive “half-lives” of counterinsurgency, Masayuki Ueno’s piece, “Purifying Istanbul: The Greek Revolution, Population Surveillance, and Non-Muslim Religious Authorities in the Early Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire,” takes us to 1820s Ottoman Istanbul, when the capital was on edge due to the ongoing revolt by Greek subjects in the Morea region as well as war against the Qajar dynasty in the east. In response, Ottoman authorities, as part of a strategy of counterinsurgency, turned to population surveillance, of Greek subjects, but also of Istanbul’s non-Muslims. The essay argues that the revolt marked a shift in how the Ottoman state understood surveillance and its non-Muslim populace. In particular, the state sought to create a population record and a system of internal passports. But these techniques of surveillance, as Ueno creatively argues, required the incorporation of non-Muslim subjects, particularly religious authorities who could vouch for the identity of non-Muslims. Counterinsurgency and the surveillance regime it spawned was a process that led to categorization and classification in ways that have been explored elsewhere but also provided space for smaller non-Muslim groups such as Latin subjects, Armenian Catholics, and Jews to claim recognition from the state.
THEOPOLITICAL LIVES The dead inspire a lively politics. In their material and symbolic representations, they live on and shape the political present and future. The two articles under this rubric turn to the specific ontologies, ways of thinking about the dead, and ritual practices and archives that shape encounters with them. In both essays, there is a recognition that the political lives of dead bodies defy distinctions between the secular and religious and each piece in different ways engages theology and ontology as key to thinking about the politics of the dead.
Jeanne Kormina tells the story of the remains of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family who were killed in 1918 and the controversies over the veracity of these remains, in “Popular Theopolitics and the Last Russian Tsar’s Intangible Remains.” For Kormina, this controversy revealed multiple and competing theopolitical imaginaries. At one end was a mode of historical optimism that sought a clear temporal boundary between the Soviet past and the non-Soviet present. Burial of the Tsar was part of a process of repentance and restitution. In opposition, a Russian orthodox theopolitics around bodies and the saintly nature of Tsarist power refused such distinctions and emphasized what Kormina calls a “spiritual realism” where no such ruptures were possible. By oscillating between these and other ontologies, the essay examines how popular theopolitics shape what can and cannot be done with the bodies.
The bodies of the dead are also at the forefront of Jon Bialecki’s essay on Mormon transhumanism. In “The Mormon Archive’s First Ten Thousand Years: Infrastructure, Materiality, Ontology, and Resurrection in Religious Transhumanism,” he notes that among scholars of transhumanism there is a tendency to debate the religious nature of even secular forms of transhumanism. Focusing on the ontology of an avowedly religious transhumanist movement, the Mormon Transhumanist Association, Bialecki shows how forms of technological resurrection are informed by the infrastructures and ontologies of Mormon “proxy baptisms” and are a unique blend of Mormon cosmology and transhumanist techno-optimism. Situating Mormon transhumanism within the history and materiality of Mormon religious practice, the author presents Mormonism’s proxy baptism as a way of dealing with trauma and premature death and theorizes Mormon archives as a practice of resurrection and simulation, foregrounding the importance of writing and inscription as a technology.
TASTE, PLACE, AND POWER In his sweeping history of how sugar shaped the world, the anthropologist Sidney Mintz tells the story of sugar’s transformation from luxury commodity to household necessity. In doing so, he delinks the notion of biology and desire for sugar, instead emphasizing sweetness as located within histories of colonialism, capitalism, industrialization, and global interconnection. Mintz’ scholarship and others like it, set the stage for emphasizing how notions of taste are always linked to wider social and political processes. These imbrications of taste, power, and place are wonderfully explored in the next two papers in this issue.
Samuel Dolbee tells the story of raisins, displacement, and disconnection in the late Ottoman Aegean, but through the vantage point of the microscopic phylloxera insect in “The Sick Vines of Europe: Raisins, Phylloxera, and the Politics of Place in the Late Ottoman Aegean.” A non-human stowaway that made its way from the United States to Western Europe and eventually the shores of the Aegean, the phylloxera insect was a key actor in the “hypermobile” world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and various state infrastructures, from passports to quarantines, which sought to regulate this mobility. For Dolbee, the Ottoman response to phylloxera was more dynamic than the image of the Ottoman Empire as the “sick man of Europe” would suggest. Additionally, grape ecologies became key to creating disconnection for post-Ottoman states as the threat of phylloxera became a way for these states to disentangle from regional geographies and claim national protection. The essay ties this to wider histories of displacement going on at this time across the Aegean and the forgetting of linkages between people, place, and taste across the region.
These themes of regional formation and imperial space also feature prominently in Alyssa Paredes’s essay, “Topographies of Fungibility: Reinventing the Japanese Taste for Sweetness in the Philippine Highlands.” In explicit conversation with Mintz, Paredes turns to the landscapes of East and Southeast Asia in order to think topographically about the supply chains of bananas. Instead of a typical story of flattening and standardization, Filipino and Japanese traders transformed the banana from a “fungible commodity” into a “differentiated product” categorized and priced by lowland, midland, and highland grades. Fungibility and distinction emerge in this essay, not solely as strategies of marketing, but deeply linked to colonial nostalgia, various environmental displacements, and harms across variegated landscapes and topographies.
SUBMERGENT HISTORIES Far from being spaces outside history, seas and oceans, as many have argued, are key locales for creating and contesting the categories that shape social worlds. The maritime realm is also ideal for comparisons and connections that are often submerged when viewed from the solidity of land. The final three essays in this issue take us on a maritime journey from the waterfront of Miami, Florida, to the nineteenth-century Caribbean, and finally to practices of mobility between Oman and Zanzibar across the Western Indian Ocean.
In “Breakbulk Pasts and Containerized Futures: Submergent Histories on a Saltwater Frontier,” Jeffrey S. Kahn focuses on the history of Haitian-owned freighters that trade between Haiti and Miami and the legal, regulatory, and aesthetic registers within which their racialized presence is erased and at times submerged by processes of containerization and gentrification. Kahn compellingly highlights how both on the surface and in the depths a process of racialization is at play where threatening forms of Haitian Blackness are transformed into spaces of white leisure and capitalization. Far from being exceptional or removed from wider modes of racialization, the remaking of the Miami river and the containerization of the breakbulk cargo fit, here, within a wider U.S. semiotics of race and racialization.
The ways that maritime journeys are both framed by and at times complicate racial and legal hierarchies is a theme that resonates with Jan C. Jansen’s essay, “‘A Sanctuary to Crime’? Enslaved Fugitives, Antislavery, and the Law in the Caribbean, 1819–1833.” Through a focus on maritime or intercolonial marronage, Jansen notes how in the 1820s and 1830s the British Caribbean turned into an unlike refuge and a legal grey zone, where hundreds of enslaved men and women fled from French, Danish, and Dutch Caribbean colonies. Key to sustaining this unlikely sanctuary were everyday encounters between fugitives and low-level officials. These encounters also led to far-reaching and often uncontrollable actions throughout and across various European empires on the nature of imperial and colonial law and the boundaries of freedom and slavery.
Encounters across multiple legal regimes take on a special salience in Mandana E. Limbert’s piece, “Homeland Is Where the Soul Resides: Travel Prayer, Passports, and Nation in the Western Indian Ocean.” Juxtaposing early twentieth-century Omani religious discourses about travel and prayer with the European imperial regime of the passport, Limbert asks how multiple regimes imagine and create ideas of home and belonging and the ruptures and continuities across these regimes. In examining these notions of homeland, this article also challenges an assumption that British imperial rule imposed territorial order on a realm of unfettered mobility. Instead, the article deftly shows how divergent discourses about mobility and homeland, as uneven as they are, also stand as relations to each other, sometimes as oppositional and sometimes as encompassing, and never static or isolated. Finally, decisions to leave were seldom only economic, but always also ethical and political. These are legal questions as well as urgent political questions, whose legacies continue to resonate to this day.
