Technology and Colonial Experience in Dutch New Guinea

FAIN: FA-54476-09

Danilyn Rutherford
Regents of the University of California, Santa Cruz (Chicago, IL 60637-5418)

The book I am writing takes a fresh look at the relationship between colonialism and technology. I offer an analysis of colonial expansion that stresses its agents' dependence not just on their own equipment but on the "natives" and their technologies, as well. I am tracking the fantasies and frustrations spawned by this dependence in the record of state-building in western New Guinea, a far frontier of the Netherlands Indies. Drawing on science and technology studies, colonial studies, and recent scholarship on affect and cognition, I provide an analysis of the colonial encounter in this "Stone Age" region that stresses the irreducibly material, impassioned character of the processes involved. My findings reveal how encounters with technology fed the investments that provided an impetus for an empire to expand. There is no sharp boundary between mastery and dependence, when it comes to the lived experience of colonialism. The same is true of technology, as my book will also show.

Associated Products

Living, As It Were, in the Stone Age (Article)
Title: Living, As It Were, in the Stone Age
Author: Danilyn Rutherford
Abstract: Danilyn Rutherford reflects on the myth that the Papuan inhabitants of western New Guinea are still living in the Stone Age. She suggests how this assumption has shaped the territory's history, not to mention the research of scholars like herself. Her current research is showing how the Stone Age fantasy stems from Dutch officials' experiences of intimacy and vulnerability while attempting to extend colonial rule in the highlands. The case of West Papua invites us to tell a new story about colonialism: one that begins with weakness, not strength.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://cip.cornell.edu/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&handle=seap.indo/1370968382
Primary URL Description: Indonesia journal website
Secondary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/509620/summary
Secondary URL Description: Project Muse
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Indonesia 95 (April)
Publisher: Cornell Southeast Asia Program

Kinky Empiricism (Article)
Title: Kinky Empiricism
Author: Danilyn Rutherford
Abstract: In this article, which takes James Clifford and George Marcus’s Writing Culture as its starting point, I make the case for a kinky kind of empiricism that builds on the singular power of anthropological ways of knowing the world. Kinky empiricism takes established forms to an extreme and turns back to reflect on its own conditions of possibility. At the same time, it deploys methods that create obligations, obligations that compel those who seek knowledge to put themselves on the line by making truth claims that they know will intervene within the settings and among the people they describe. I begin to make this argument by way of a close rereading of moments in Writing Culture. I then turn to David Hume’s writings on empiricism, which, I suggest, offer the ingredients for an empiricism that is both skeptical and ethical because it includes among its objects of inquiry the apparatuses through which reality is known. I end by exploring dangers and possibilities associated with kinky empiricism by juxtaposing a moment from my research on state building in Dutch New Guinea with the approach taken in Philippe Bourgois and Jeffrey Schonberg’s groundbreaking study, Righteous Dopefiend. In rereading Writing Culture, I find the ingredients of a more affirmative stance toward anthropology than is usually associated with Writing Culture—one premised on the need for what Michel-Rolph Trouillot once called “an epistemology and semiology of all anthropologists have done and can do.”
Year: 2012
Primary URL: https://culanth.org/articles/open_access#article_1
Primary URL Description: Cultural Anthropology Website
Secondary URL: http://evols.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10524/23620
Secondary URL Description: Manoa Share CA
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Cultural Anthropology 27 (3)
Publisher: Duke University Press

Demonstrating the Stone Age in Dutch New Guinea (Book Section)
Title: Demonstrating the Stone Age in Dutch New Guinea
Author: Danilyn Rutherford
Abstract: This article is part of a larger project in which I exploring how the Stone Age was made in Dutch New Guinea by examining the relationship between affect and technology. I focus on the experience of influential individuals: officials who promoted the policy that led to the “primitive” territory’s continued colonization following World War II. These officials began their careers leading expeditions into the territory’s interior in the 1930s. In doing so, they found themselves unsettled by their dependence on local people and their technologies, along with the assemblage of equipment, supplies, and personnel that made up what I have called the “trekking machine.” Daily life on these journeys blurred the boundaries between colonizers and colonized, not to mention New Guinea’s erstwhile rulers and their tools. The technological performances I explore in this paper intervene to redraw a sharp line. By demonstrating the power of instruments ranging from gramophones to rifles to airplanes, Dutch officials sought to augment and define their own agency, which they associated with the modern world. These demonstrations went hand in hand with encounters in which they sought to put Papuan technologies on display – and display Papuans as both caught in the past and uncannily capable of progress, albeit only with the tutelage of benevolent Dutch masters. Predictably, these demonstrations often backfired. But as significant as their failure are the forces that led to the staging of these dramas of inter-temporal encounter – and fed the image of New Guinea as caught in another time.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p315331/pdf/2.-Demonstrating-the-Stone-Age-in-Dutch-New-Guinea.pdf
Primary URL Description: ANU e-book
Secondary URL: https://books.google.com/books?id=aL-UCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30&dq=Demonstrating+the+Stone+Age&source=bl&ots=58y737FF5R&sig=UM2IcaiIprn1Ju5N-AZdt_Y6hJo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwipiPmZjoDOAhVO0GMKHZX7BsgQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=Demonstrating%20the%20Stone%20Age&
Secondary URL Description: Google Books
Access Model: Open Access
Publisher: Australian National University Press
Book Title: From "Stone Age" to "Real-Time": Exploring Papuan Temporalities, Mobilities, and Religiosoities
ISBN: 9781925022438

Sympathy, State-Building, and the Experience of Empire (Article)
Title: Sympathy, State-Building, and the Experience of Empire
Author: Danilyn Rutherford
Abstract: What is the role of sympathy in imperial state building? In this essay, inspired by the empiricist philosopher David Hume and the anthropologist Nancy Munn, I develop a materialist concept of sympathy in an effort to cast new light on the expansion of colonial rule. I deploy this concept in an analysis of reports written just before WWII by officials charged with extending the Netherlands Indies government's reach within western New Guinea. Along with gifts and outright acts of coercion, these officials made sympathy into a central component of their practices. Instead of avoiding the natives' gaze, they sought out more or less intimate moments of identification with their subjects; they tried to adopt the Papuans' perspective to reform Papuan ways. In teasing out the causal force of sympathy, as these officials viewed it, I make causal claims of my own about the impact of this experience of empire on the Netherlands' subsequent policy in New Guinea. In doing so, I advocate an approach to anthropological analysis that is empirical, if not empiricist, one that insists on the power of circumstances to shape the imagination, and the power of the imagination to shape the world.
Year: 2009
Primary URL: https://culanth.org/articles/100-sympathy-state-building-and-the-experience-of
Primary URL Description: Cultural Anthropology Website
Secondary URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.00025.x/full
Secondary URL Description: Wiley Blackwell
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Cultural Anthropology 24 (1)
Publisher: Duke University Press

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