Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
*Colonialism and *nationalism
Beginning in the eighteenth century, European powers began investing directly in the production of cash crops, with the Dutch instituting forced coffee cultivation in western Java and the Spanish enacting a tobacco monopoly in the Philippines. Plantation production of sugar, tobacco, rubber and palm oil grew apace in the nineteenth century under conditions described by Stoler in Sumatra (1985) and Geertz in Java (1963). Colonial powers began to train native bureaucrats to staff a more intrusive state, and tax collection was rationalized to the point where peasants were made to bear more of the risk of bad harvests, leading to frequent outbreaks of peasant rebellion. These rebellions were analysed by many American political scientists in the wake of the Vietnam War. Many of them employed anthropological methods, with the best example being the work by Scott on the effects of the ‘green revolution’ on a Malaysian village (1985). Ileto takes a more cultural and symbolic approach to revolution, and to nationalism, in the Philippines (1979).
THOMAS GIBSON
Further reading
Barton, R.F. (1919) Ifugao Law, Berkeley: University of California Publications in American Anthropology and Ethnology
Carsten, J. and S.Hugh-Jones (eds) (1995) About the House, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Coedés, G. (1968 [1944]) The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, Honolulu: East-West Center
Conklin, H. (1957) Hanunoo Agriculture, Rome: F.A.O.
——(1980) Ethnographic Atlas of Ifugao, New Haven: Yale University Press
Dove, M. (1985) ‘The Argroecological Mythology of the Javanese’, Indonesia 39:1–36
Errington, S.
(1989) Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm, Princeton: Princeton University Press
Geertz, C. (1960) The Religion of Java, Chicago: Chicago University Press
——(1963) Agricultural Involution, Berkeley: University of California Press
Gibson, T. (1986) Sacrifice and Sharing in the Philippine Highlands, London: Athlone Press
Gullick, J. (1958) Indigenous Political Systems of Western Malaya, London: Athlone Press
Heine-Geldern, R. (1943) ‘Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia’, The Far Eastern Quarterly 2:15–30
Ileto, R. (1979) Pasyon and Revolution, Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press
Leach, E. (1954) Political Systems of Highland Burma, London: Athlone
McKinley, R. (1981) ‘Cain and Abel on the Malay Peninsula’ in M.Marshall (ed.) Siblingship in Oceania, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Murdock, G. (ed.) (1960) Social Structure in Southeast Asia, New York: MacMillan
Rosaldo, M. (1980) Knowledge and Passion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Scott, J. (1985) Weapons of the Weak, New Haven: Yale University Press
Stoler, A. (1985) Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979, New Haven: Yale University Press
Tambiah, S.J. (1970) Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in Northeastern Thailand, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
——(1976) World Conqueror and World Renouncer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
van Wouden, F.A.E. (1968 [1935]) Types of Social Structure in Eastern Indonesia, The Hague: Nijhoff
This is the complete article, containing 426 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
View More Summaries on Neocolonialism