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Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment by David Scott

Article  in  Oceania; a journal devoted to the study of the native peoples of Australia, New Guinea, and the Islands of the Pacific · January 2007
DOI: 10.2307/40495567

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Review
Reviewed Work(s): Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment by
David Scott
Review by: Emma Kowal
Source: Oceania, Vol. 77, No. 3 (Nov., 2007), pp. 374-375
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Oceania Publications, University of Sydney
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Reviews

heuristic pretending; concepts with a very broad base protection of the British Navy. Great Britain finally
of acceptance and understanding in Western society, and reluctantly accepted the Cooks as a Protectorate.
like "politics", "law", "rights" and "property" were It is very hard to make exploiting the Cooks
applied to the collective usage of tribal peoples, with pay: true for multinationals as well as historical colo-
a sort of "as if attached to them.' The Siikalas go on: nial powers. Lack of natural resources provides a
"The analogical pairing of dissimilar phenomena in kind of protection from globalisation much as it pro-
this kind of scholarly practice is in fact based on sup- vided a kind of protection from imperialism. (Mis-
posed and unobservable features.' (p. 36). Instead, sionaries were another matter.)
classifications are to be established 'on the ground'. Transportation costs, lack of water, poor beach
In Chapter One, the Siikalas provide a literature and swimming facilities preclude mass tourism. Air
review, devoting more attention to the problem of New Zealand now has one, rather than two, flights
anthropological bias. They attempt to cover too much into Rarotonga from Los Angeles every week.
material in a brief space and end up 'cherry picking' Ecology, like history and economics, is ignored.
or setting up straw anthropologists. They appear to The islands in the Cooks group, like other small
choose an 'ideal type' (or target) from each theoreti- island communities, have firm regulations enforced
cal perspective and ignore divisions within these per- by sometimes draconian penalties to conserve vital
spectives. It provides a good bibliography but a poor resources. The majority of the world's peoples,
discussion of issues in the two fields. regardless of their technological status, blithely use
For example, they refer to 'cross-cultural analy- up whatever is available and move on - behaviour
sis' and use the same term for two different prob- the New Zealand Maori adopted when settling on a
lems: an anthropologist interpreting another culture large land mass. Any comparison of New Zealand
in terms of his/her own (p. 16) and the process of and Cook Islands Maori needs to at least allude to
comparing and analysing different cultures. They are these different resources.
only very superficially the same. In summary, some of the articles are less suc-
Cross-cultural analysis involves very different cessful than others, but I think the book demonstrates
sorts of methodological and theoretical problems. the value of the Siikalas' theoretical approach -
Categories and definitions must be independent of which is original and attempts to do something worth
any individual culture and each individual culture doing.
must be capable of being mapped onto the anthropol- Wenonah Lyon
ogist's proposed model. Different theoretical perspec- University of Kent
tives can be used to provide successful studies using
data from different cultures/societies. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of
The concluding two sections of the book are Colonial Enlightenment.
most concerned with cross-cultural analysis. In the
section titled 'Metaphors for Society', where the By David Scott
author examines geneologies, Jukka Siikala deals Durham NC: Duke University Press,
most impressively with genealogical material in legit- 2005.
imating existing hierarchical relations. Among other Pp:279
topics, he discusses the elder/younger sibling classifi-
US $22.95 paper
cation. He establishes a series of oppositions which
he uses in his analysis of migration, political hierar- Have you noticed these days that happy endings are
chy and the control of land and people. If you ever few and far between? The latest book from anthro-
need to demonstrate the importance of geneologies to pologist and political theorist David Scott would sug-
your students, this article does so. gest that the postcolonial era from the 1960s on has
The final section of the book is much less suc-
seen the exhaustion of happy endings, both as narra-
cessful. Discussions of colonialism, the State, the tive devices and historical events.
global economy, need to be much more firmly Scott is based at Columbia University and is a
grounded in factual material. Siikala ignores the native-born ethnographer of Jamaica. His ambitious
specificity of the history of the Cook Islands and dis- monograph Conscripts of Modernity addresses the
cusses 'colonialism' 'global economy' and 'oppres- problem of colonial and postcolonial histories that
sion' as global phenomena. The South Pacific is not draw on a narrative of 'anti-colonial romance', where
Africa or Asia. Oppression, most certainly, but of a oppression is resisted in a long struggle that ends in
different sort.
emancipation. The collapse of socialism and the epi-
Rarotonga's first continuous contact with the demic of failed postcolonial states has left us without
West came with the arrival of missionaries, who also hope for the future, and the anti-colonial perspective
brought disease. A major part of the population of of most postcolonial theorists is no longer useful for
Rarotonga died as a result. The remaining population our complex globalised world.
converted to Christianity. Disease played a major role His goal is not to argue that the anti-colonial
in the history of the South Pacific - comparable to the romance narrative was wrongly-conceived or poorly
effects of disease in parts of central America. executed (although he may concur with those asser-
Later, the Cooks repeatedly petitioned Great tions), but that the temporal structure of the romance
Britain for Protectorate status. "Blackbirders", narrative has passed its expiry date. Scott's concept
slavers, were a constant threat and people wanted the of 'temporal horizons' draws on historical theorist

374

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 Reviews

Reinhart Koselleck's twin notions of the 'space of Tragedy is indeed the emerging emplotment of narra-
experience' and the 'horizon of expectation'. 'Experi- tives about Indigenous Australia, we must think
ence' in Koselleck's terms means the ways that the through its political limits and possibilities.
past is remembered in the present. 'Expectation' The monograph follows conceptually from his
refers to the anticipation of the non-yet-known future last book, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Post-
beyond the horizon. Histories are always written coloniality (1999), which outlined the limits of post-
within a particular space of experience and horizon of colonial criticism. Like that book, this one is theoreti-
expectation. Alongside Koselleck, Scott draws on cally sophisticated and ambitious. It is part of a
Hayden White's concept of 'mode of emplotment, broader reassessment (what might be called a 'second
which analyses how the meaning of a story is con- wave') of postcolonial theory begun this decade,
veyed within its narrative structure, to some degree unusual in this case in that it derives from Caribbean
independent of its content. history. Although its focus on theory and history may
Scott's arguments on narrative and the temporal be disconcerting to the general anthropological audi-
are illustrated primarily through a reconsideration of ence, Scott moves through his argument slowly, and
C.L.R. James' famous account of the Haitian revolu- the book's novel and powerful theoretical approach
tion and its hero Toussaint Louverture, The Black make it well worth the effort. It is a significant
Jacobins. Scott compares the first edition of the book achievement that contributes to the development of
in 1938 to the second edition in 1963. The first edi- new analytical models fit for a postcolonial world.
tion was 'the paradigmatic' anti-colonial history, Emma Kowal
written in a colonial present and looking toward a University of Melbourne
postcolonial future. He argues that James' addition of
seven paragraphs to the last chapter of the second
Mana Tuturu: Maori treasures and
edition suggests a shift from a romantic narrative to intellectual property rights
that of tragedy. Tragedy offers a mode of 'reorienting
of our understanding of the politics and ethics of the
By Barry Barclay.
postcolonial present.' In place of the comforting tele- Auckland: Auckland University Press.
ology of romance, tragedy does not promise a linear 2005.
movement toward a happy ending but emphasises Pp: vii + 268.
vulnerability, contingency and frailty. Price: NZ $42.
Tragedy, Scott argues, is a better mode with
which to think through the postcolonial present. It is Barry Barclay (Pakeha and Ngãti Apa) is an eminent
a better emplotment of the story of Toussaint Louver- Aotearoa New Zealand activist and writer, as well as
ture in the last years of his life, when he had to a director of several lyrical films including Ngãti
choose between aligning with France and tolerating (1987) and Tangata Whenua (1974). His book, Mana
slavery, or choosing freedom without a connection to Tuturu, seeks to examine the myriad issues and com-
'civilization' he felt Haiti sorely needed. Tragedy bet- plexities that arise when indigenous peoples' trea-
ter describes the position of modernity's 'conscripts',sures find themselves subjected to the imperatives of
neither wholly subservient to nor wholly in control of the commercial world. At the start of the book, Bar-
the forces shaping their lives. Put another way, clay wastes no time pointing out how he hopes read-
Scott's argument against Romance narratives is a ver-
ers will approach Mana Tuturu: as a hui or public
sion of Foucault's famous counsel to 'refuse the forum, where ideas are debated, people listen, images
"blackmail" of the Enlightenment', that is, to refuse
are shown, and plans proposed. Given the complex
to be for or against modernity, but 'seek instead tonature of the various topics he covers, Barclay has
cultivate an ethic more open to our ambiguous and gone against his usual filmmaking guidelines; instead
paradoxical (and at any rate permanent) relation of to attempting to force a linear narrative and a clear
the Enlightenment' (180). through-line from his material, he has chosen to be
The lessons of the book are pertinent to anthro-'like the kea, seeking out bright objects of fact or
pological writing as much as historical writing. Read-expression whenever I found them' (p. vii). As a
ing it, I had in mind contemporary writing on Indige- result his book is both wide-ranging and fascinating,
nous Australia. Here too, an anti-colonial narrative has
a structural and cerebral challenge to the reader, and
been dominant for some time. Paradigmatic 'self-seeks to show how '...law (and art) may be much
determination narratives', for example, constructcloser a to the very heart of the community than we
'space of experience' where the present has overcome often appreciate (p.3).
the oppression of the frontier and the mission, and look His topics, arrayed under the general rubric of
toward a 'horizon of expectation' of Indigenous auton- indigenous intellectual property rights, include imag-
omy. This Romance narrative is losing its explanatory ining what the arrival of Captain Cook to the shores
value: in Scott's terms, the questions we are asking of Aotearoa (New Zealand) might have looked like
had there been cameras on hand to record the event.
have changed, so these narratives so longer provide the
answers. As romance narratives rapidly lose their rele-
He then goes on to tackle the commercial manufac-
vance, we must be attentive to the narratives that sud-
ture and patenting of seed genetics and life forms, the
denly appear more salient to anthropologists and to the
current status of specific indigenous communities and
general public, and analyse the particular pasts and
their cultural goods, the protocols of archiving
futures they draw on to make meaning. Further, indigenous
if images, and the intricacies of various

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