DESPITE THE TERRORS OF TYPOLOGIES The Importance of Understanding Categories of Difference and Identity1 Paul James University of Western Sydney, Australia contradiction difference genocide identity ontology typologies violence 1 With thanks to Liz Conor for her astute editing, and to the anonymous reviewers for Interventions, one of whom developed a Understanding how the identity of a Hutu person is different from a Tutsi and why nearly a million people were murdered in the name of this difference is not handled adequately in the current literature. Drawing on parts of the world as different as Rwanda and Sri Lanka, this essay takes up this theme through three main arguments. Firstly, categorizations about identity, even when hardened into ugly typologies by processes of colonization or state formation, are always full of tensions and contradictions. Secondly, negotiating ontological difference is foundational to what it means to be human. We cannot simply hope for the end of such negotiation and wish away categories of identity such as nation, ethnicity, religion and tribe. These categories are not the problem, so much as the ways in which difference is negotiated, instrumentalized and shoved into typologies of hierarchical status. Negotiating the terms of identity through categories of difference is fundamental to questions of power, meaning, violence and creative social practice. Thirdly, while processes of categorization are part of the human condition, modern processes of typologizing serve all too often to reconstitute and destructively distort older layered forms of identity. This is the source of practices as diverse as racism, chauvinism and genocide. Sometimes tensions between ontological formations can be positive, but all interventions, 2015 Vol. 17, No. 2, 174–195, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2014.993332 © 2014 Taylor & Francis DESPITE THE TERRORS OF TYPOLOGIES 175 ........................... Paul James heartfelt response that sent me back with renewed vigour to rewriting and clarifying concepts. This essay is an attempt to do what I failed to achieve in Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism (James 2006) –that is, systematically define the differences between different dominant ontological formations. too often instrumental use of these tensions in the contemporary world has led to aggressive violence and defensive mayhem. Running beneath all these arguments is the methodological proposition that, in order to get past either ‘clash of cultures’ descriptions or ‘flows of difference’ analyses, it is useful to develop a systemic understanding of ontological formations and their difficult intersection. How is a Hutu person different from a Tutsi? What is the cultural basis for the difference between the Sinhalese and the Tamils? Why are Bosnians Muslim and Serbs Orthodox? The implicit and lived categories of identity that lie behind these questions have had alternatively glorious and vexatious, and sometimes even terrifying consequences across modern history. Being identified as Tutsi or Jew was the basis for intense periods of ethnic genocide. At the same time, categories of identity are the basis of human life and crucial to living with others across the complex boundaries of difference. Who is an Aboriginal person? What does it mean to be black? Identity is foundational to social life, and it is that which makes it a terrain of colonization, cultural management and contestation. It also makes it basic to questions of ontological security. Identities are not simply cultural inventions – though of course they can be culturally fabricated, managed, distorted and reduced to simplistic typologies. The first argument of this essay is that categorizations about identity, even when codified and hardened into clear typologies by processes of colonization, state formation or general modernizing processes, are always full of tensions and contradictions. Sometimes these contradictions are destructive, but they can also be creative and positive. In this essay, while I will elaborate mostly on the destructive side of such tensions, there are significant cases of careful translation and positive reconciliation across ontological difference. From the designation of nineteenth-century Haitian identity – dénomination générique de noirs – which defined ‘black’ in such a way that it also included the white mothers of Haitians, to the Yolgnu concept of ganma, which refers to the estuary merging of the salt waters (modern knowledge) and the fresh inland waters (Yolgnu customary knowledge), practices of creative engagement across ontological difference have been important to the human condition. Negotiating ontological difference is foundational to what it means to be human. This is the second argument of this essay. Such ontological differences go much deeper than the projections of liberal multicultural pluralism. The problem is that, with the dominance of modern ways of handling these questions of difference, destructive examples have come to outweigh the positive. While this is mostly a theoretical essay, a few key examples – in particular Sri Lanka and Rwanda – are used to give some sense of the complexity of the i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 ........................... 176 process that I want to explore. The process of making the Sinhalese version of Sri Lankan identity occurred in manifold and overlapping ways. This ranged, on the one hand, from the activities of colonial administrators, philologists and census-takers to postcolonial activities including rituals of state or definitions of the right pathway for national development. However, through, and despite, all of this top-down cultural management, being Sinhalese became part of the bottom-up life-worlds of people, linking old traditional religions and modern state-building. It was lived in their everyday practices and meanings, and contributed to making a contradictory traditional–modern ethnocratic state. In other words, the typologizing processes effected by the modern state and the modern national economy, and always framed in relation to other states and the capitalist globalizing market in general, became the context, not the singular cause, for local communities to project their political fate into a contested but common territory. It also became the basis for a twenty-five-year internal war. It was not the cause of the war, but it was the basis for the conflict-ridden ideological claims about difference. The remarkable thing about Sri Lanka and many other places in the postcolonial South is how much the connection between modern national identities and traditional religious cosmologies continues to shift and shimmer between commonsense understandings and intensely defended ‘truths’. This is at a time when nationalisms in Western Europe and North America have been slowly losing their cosmological intensity. Despite the continuing neo-traditional rhetoric of religion in the United States, the ontological tensions between the modern and traditional are not as abiding as in Sri Lanka or Rwanda. By the time that the US nation-state had proclaimed itself One Nation under God, their supreme deity had become a white melting-pot assimilationist. By comparison, most Sri Lankans or Rwandans inside the country or in the extended diaspora communities, overtly religious or not, tend to identify themselves through reference to these cosmological truths about essential and deep ethnic difference. The contestation is, for the most part, conducted over the political consequences of these truths rather than the fact of the different identities themselves. As an extension of the first two arguments, a parallel methodological proposition lies at the heart of this essay. It suggests that in order to understand the complexity of identity formation, we need to rethink how we understand social life. Instead of great divides such as posited by the classical (and still current) anthropological distinction between the modern and the premodern (or ‘traditional’), this essay argues for a levels-in-tension methodology that takes very careful cognizance of the intersection of ontological formations in all social formations. Instead of surface-ofswirling-difference argument associated with the metaphor of rhyzomic DESPITE THE TERRORS OF TYPOLOGIES 177 ........................... Paul James 2 The 2010 National Festival of Aluth Avurudu was held under his own patronage. The ceremony was once celebrated in the Kandyan Kingdom as a festival under the patronage of the traditional kings. He had thus taken on the mantle of a Kandyan king. At the same time, intensely modern means of communication such as the World Wide Web, YouTube and Facebook are used by semi-official outlets to promote the president’s traditional image. See, for example, the Orlanka face-book page at http://www. facebook.com/pages/ Onlanka/ 389026719740. Onlanka.com is owned by M. T. Udaya Arunakantha. The site has been online since 26 January 2004. relations posited by some postmodernist writers, this essay argues for a depth analysis. Using Sri Lanka and Rwanda as diverse examples, the essay will argue that the intensely defended truths that divide identities and accentuate differences are exacerbated by the tensions inherent in the uneven coming together of different ontological formations – the customary (including the tribal), the traditional, the modern and the postmodern. The essay will define and elaborate on these terms shortly. The exacerbation of categories of difference–identity is of course not unique to these places, but those places that have fought recent wars in the name of difference provide intensified examples. Types of identity are both highly contested at the level of detail and interpretation, and truly believed at their foundations. Nationalism in Sri Lanka, Bosnia and Rwanda is, as with all nationalisms, very modern. It is projected through a form of cultural management, which would suggest that it should be open to self-conscious ‘seeing through’. However, it also draws on traditional cosmologies such as the Bosnian Muslim cosmology of identity in Allah, as well as, in some cases, tribal mythologies and animated presences – particularly relevant to understanding modern Rwanda. This uneven intersection of the customary tribal, the traditional, the modern and the postmodern has often been self-consciously managed – even if in very different ways. Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapakse, like many political leaders in South and Southeast Asia, clothes himself in traditional garb with living religious meaning while at the same time presiding over an intensifying modern (neoliberal) economy. Images on current street posters in Sri Lanka, and online recordings of President Rajapakse circulating the globe, show him wearing a traditional white shirt, sarong and a red sash. He is dressed accordingly when he is anointed in the National Festival of Aluth Avurudu, and he dresses that way when he makes pronouncements about rationalizing modern issues such as GDP growth and financial investment.2 His image management even draws on the possibilities of the relativizing of image politics made possible by postmodern reflexivity, but for the most part it involves the naturalizing of traditional dress code (as content) through modern signification (as form). This is not to imply that culture is something that can be taken on and off like a sarong or suit. Nor is the question of whether it is a suit or sarong the key point of distinction that makes the difference. Rwanda’s unelected president Paul Kagame always dresses in a western suit and tie rather than customary dress. However, just as with Mahinda Rajapakse, his is also a practice of modern cultural management. Having said that, neither practice is an instance of simple ‘cultural invention’. When Rajapakse and Kagame get up in the morning and get dressed for work they are bringing together divergent ontological reference points for similar political purposes. Kagame i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 178 ........................... has the problem of being a Tutsi person, leading a country that has around 90 per cent of the population as Bahutu. He is so obviously known as Tutsi that his discursive emphasis on national unity and official suit-wearing globalized modernism has to be symbolically foregrounded as central to Rwanda’s ruling political culture. Here, for the purpose of our analysis, culture is defined as a social domain that emphasizes the practices, discourses and material expressions which, over time, express the continuities and discontinuities of social meaning of a life held-in-common. In other words culture is ‘how and why we do things around here’. The ‘how’ is how we practise materially, the ‘why’ emphasizes the meanings, the ‘we’ refers to the specificity of a life held-in-common, and ‘around here’ specifies the spatial and also, by implication, the temporal particularity of culture. Questions of power are ever-present in the cultural domain in relation to contested outcomes over social meaning, and categorization and the making of typologies are central. Understanding what happened in Rwanda across the course of the twentieth century, leading to the period of genocide and beyond, entails, I suggest, looking at the way in which customary tribal processes of communal identity were simultaneously remade as neo-traditional sources of political authority and institutionalized as modern legitimized castes of power. In short, as part of the global extension of colonialism to Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the very nature of tribal difference in Rwanda was reconstituted. Although in relative terms nineteenth-century Rwanda was linguistically and culturally interconnected – and this makes the explanation apparently harder because the region had much in common with a European traditional kingdom – it was nevertheless divided into three main sub-tribal groupings: the majority Bahutu, the Batutsi, officially a minority of 9 per cent of the total population before the massacre, and a tiny group called the Batwa. Understanding the relevance of this unremarkable constitution of identity for the future genocide involves understanding how the complex nature of cultural division was hardened into a modern typological matrix. Herein lies the third substantive argument of this essay. While processes of categorization are part of the human condition, modern processes of typologizing serve all too often to reconstitute and destructively distort older layered forms of identity. They harden those older processes of categorization into codified taxonomies of difference. Differences thus gain a redoubled intensity. The precolonial polity, or at least one layer of it, was from the end of the eighteenth century a highly centralized kingdom based upon the semisacredness of its leaders – thus layering the traditional over the tribal– customary. Only in the nineteenth century, through intensifying colonial intervention as the identities of pastoralist and Tutsi became taxonomically synonymous, did this become a double domination: pastoral aristocracy over DESPITE THE TERRORS OF TYPOLOGIES 179 ........................... Paul James 3 On the complications of using the terminology of caste and class in relation to the Batutsi, see LeMarchand (1970). agriculturalists; and ethnic-identified Batutsi over Bahutu (and Twa). Even then a customary process called kwihutura qualified the boundary between Batutsi and Bahutu. It allowed the possibility through accrual of pastoral wealth of leaving behind Hutuness and becoming a Tutsi person. With formal colonization, identity became both less variable and more vexatious. Gradually under German, and then Belgian, rule, Tutsi identity, associated with both customary–tribal and traditional–cosmological power, and Hutu identity associated with contingent subjection on both these grounds, were made into two sides of a strict modern caste-like division.3 Type-confirming censuses were organized, type-based identification cards were issued, and the traditional–customary structures of chiefdom were used by the Belgians as the apparatus of a savage, mediated, modern administration. Expressed in more general terms, modernization brought about the fixing of separate tribal identities, as both sides, colonial and native, thus called upon the subjectivity of customary continuity for very different reasons and distorted the basis of its older meanings. As Mahmood Mamdani subtly argues, the colonial state depended on this meshing of the modern and traditional: ‘these powers were justified as “customary”, and “custom” was proclaimed by the very authority sanctioned by the colonial power as “customary”. This tautology was crystallized in the legal institutions’ (Mamdani 1996, 12). Here, however, Mamdani is treating the customary and traditional as the same thing, counterposed to the modern. I want to avoid this usual anthropological dualism between the modern and premodern – present even in an author who is otherwise so sophisticated – and say that nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century colonial power depended upon a contradictory overlaying of at least three layers of social relations: modern, traditional and customary–tribal. The point remains a parallel one to that made by Mamdani, at least in principle, but it has different explanatory power when it comes to understanding the genocide period. With the coming of democracy, the Bahutu, now a modern tribe–caste–class, looked at the same time to embodied expressions of their ‘essential’ difference – smaller stature, shorter noses and so on (Louis 1963) –as if they were still embedded in tribal relations lifted into a traditional cosmology. Potentially countermanding traditional overlays, such as through Christianity with its different sense of cosmological universalism from Rwandan cosmologies, qualified this process, but also gave it a self-conscious poignancy. In the context of competing ontologies, Catholic training that ‘we are all equal in the site of God’ was translated by Hutu youths into a very different conception: ‘they, the Batutsi, must not be human.’ Thus, when we came to the genocidal period, at one level the Batutsi and the Bahutu continued to treat themselves as part of an unstable tribal formation in the old way, with identifiable pathways for crossing genealogical differences, and at the same time as utterly different i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 ........................... 180 ethnic groups (in the modern sense). Modern democracy, underscored by Catholic Hutu-directed egalitarianism, meant a decreasing capacity to proclaim this ‘essential’ embodied difference, but it also held the life-blood of its alternative. The contradiction between these levels, and the tension between two forms of traditionalism, I would argue, intensified the need to distinguish difference by other means, including brutal assault upon the bodies of the other. Why, for example, would a Hutu killer push a sharpened bamboo stick through the anus of a slain Batutsi and up into his or her brain. Arjun Appadurai provides a thought-provoking attempt to answer this question: The question is, how can forms of identity and identification of such a scope – ethnic labels that are abstract containers for the identities of thousands, often millions of people – become transformed into instruments of the most brutally intimate forms of violence? One clue to the way in which these large numerical abstractions inspire grotesque forms of bodily violence is that these forms of violence – forms that I have called vivisectionist – offer temporary ways to render these abstractions graspable, to make these large numbers sensuous, to make labels that are potentially overwhelming, for a moment, personal. To put it in a sanitized manner, the most horrible forms of ethnocidal violence are mechanisms for producing persons out of what are otherwise diffuse large-scale labels that have effects but no locations. (Appadurai 1999, 318–319) The argument being presented in this essay encompasses both this interpretation and the opposite. Labels, taxonomies and modes of categorization are not so simple. It was not a simple process of attempting to humanize modern abstractions that fuelled the violence. More saliently, it was a messy, contradictory and uneven attempt symbolically to dehumanize those who are not so simply and stably different as the modern taxonomies would suggest. The Tutsi became crafty anus–brain connected crossers of boundaries. They could never simply be cockroaches or non-humans. They had to be produced as such. What Appadurai’s analysis misses are the different levels of analysis necessary to understanding such a complex process as modern genocide. Abstract maps of embodied difference are ways of generalizing from the particularities of persons, but that does not mean that sharpened bamboo sticks serve to produce persons out of these generalized maps. To the contrary, at least in my argument, the bamboo sticks served symbolically as a means of carrying through the process of dehumanizing and objectifying others. This was not despite, but rather because of, the contradictions involved in actually killing persons face to face. These contradictions DESPITE THE TERRORS OF TYPOLOGIES 181 ........................... Paul James 4 Here it is important to note that the critique is directed at postmodern understandings of difference and not necessarily at all poststructuralist methods of deconstruction. It is directed firmly at understandings of identity as plural when this is simply understood as rhyzomic and surface-based. Certainly, all identity is contingent and plural, but once this is said, the nature of that contingency needs to be investigated carefully across the different layers of social embedding. Identity is not all on the surface. intensify as murderers are confronted by the repeated flesh-and-blood concreteness of particular deaths. Sometimes the deaths were based on dislike and opportunism, sometimes rage, sometimes fear, but the ontological context was much bigger than this. They bleed like us; they die like us. Having killed them, how then can we truly show the ugliness and evil of their Otherness? To understand this complexity, we need systematic categories of analysis as well as generalizing concepts of identity and difference (hence, the parallel methodological argument developed in this essay). The issues are not straightforward. Typologies have long been a problematic part of modern categorizing processes, but such categories, including simple typologies, are crucial in doing deep social research as long as their explanatory limits are recognized. The key problem is what typological analysis tends to claim for itself. To be blunt, categorical research cannot be reduced to typographical description or even typology critique. The worthwhile task of identifying dominant social formations, categories of identity and difference, and historical instances of attributing types to complex differences between people, breaks down into reproducing cultural stereotypes if all it achieves is a descriptive resonance. Typology critique becomes effectively useless if all it does is say that the types are constructed. It even becomes dangerous when it makes a normative claim that we should flatten out the terms of difference into ‘cultural inventions’, suggesting that the people who identify as Hutu, Tutsi, Sinhalese, Tamil, Bosnian Muslim or Serbian Orthodox could simply leave behind their given types to become liberal cosmopolitans like the ‘rest of us’. Thus, for all its problems, unless we want to move to a modern liberal or postmodern plural flattening of difference,4 we need to work through the complexity of categorization and social typologies. And to do this, analytical categories of difference are required. This essay, while acknowledging the various problems associated with describing dominant typologies, explores one approach to categorical analysis that attempts to get past these problems. Without understanding fundamental categories of difference and identity, we arguably flatten the world into a modern set of types or a postmodern swirl of competing pluralized differences. The people who live those categorical differences will continue to act upon them and social critics will continue ineffectively to ask ‘Why?’ Attributing one-dimensional answers to a multidimensional process will never answer that question. It is not even enough to say that we are experiencing intensifying hybridity. Hybridity has always been part of the human condition. The question returns: what forms does hybridity take? i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 ........................... 182 Categorical Analysis: Defining Different Ontological Formations Categorical analysis, as used here, turns on defining different ontological formations, defined through the ways in which basic categories of existence are lived spatially, temporally, corporeally, performatively and epistemologically. Each of these terms is important. They are the categories of human life. They summarize the very different ways in which we live in time and space as embodied persons, performing sociality and knowing in different ways what it means to do so. As used in this essay, ontological formations or ‘ways of being’ are not treated as ideal types. Neither are they understood as standalone formations, at least not across the period since humans first encountered each other as culturally bounded groups and began to interconnect their mythological explanations. Ontological formations are treated as formations-in-dominance. In the contemporary world they are coexistent and therefore co-temporal (James 2006). Secondly, the names that I will use for these formations – the customary, the traditional, the modern and the postmodern – are well-used conventional concepts. Certainly, these are terms that sometimes cause discomfort, particularly for some theorists who dislike any kind of categorizing because of its usual modern inflections. These critics are right that it is important to avoid the deeply problematic and uncomfortably lazy ‘Great Divide’ between modern and premodern ways of life, a problem that anthropology as a discipline is largely yet to escape. However, rather than inventing neologisms, the approach reworks well-worn concepts, seeking to redefine them in terms of their ontological bases and their lived relations. Thirdly, rather than defining such a formation in temporal distinction to other formations – that is, rather than reductively using an epochal term such as premodern to designate all that has come before the modern, thus treating the modern as the master category to define all others – ontological formations are defined both comparatively and for themselves. In other words, a particular formation is defined in terms of its own valences rather than what is conventionally said to come before or after. This approach attempts in this way to leave behind the usual problematic uses of the prefixes pre, proto and post. Ontological formations cannot in these terms be simply treated as four great epochs fading into each other. Epochs can only be provisionally designated as the time and space of an ontological dominant; not as homogenizing singularities. In the world today, even as that world is dominated globally by the modern – sometimes called ‘late modernity’ – these formations coexist in many different ways across different global–local spaces. Fourthly, the approach suggests that the dominance of different ontological formations gives rise to different ways of making typologies. For example, the form of typology inherent in the traditional Great Chain of DESPITE THE TERRORS OF TYPOLOGIES 183 ........................... Paul James Being is very different from the early modern cataloguing of nature in Linnaeus’ eighteenth-century Systema Naturae, even though both included angels. The Great Chain of Being took God to be the basis of taxonomic difference and interconnection. The Linnaean taxonomy, while still embedded in its traditional roots, took systematic natural difference to be fundamental to being. In turn, both of these are very different from the late-modern mapping of the human genome, which treats abstracted entities called DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid molecules inferred from shadow pictures in electron microscopes, as the basis of living difference. In one sense, they are all abstract taxonomies of nature, distant cousins in common purpose across the centuries, attempting to organize our understanding of the relationship between things. However, their commanding orientations are very different. This leads to a fifth proposition. In order to distinguish between different formations we need a notion of valences or orientations – ways in which different categories of being are lived. This last point will become clearer in a moment, but first a little contextualization. How Do Other Writers Talk about Formations of Being? Most writers who address the question of ontological formations begin with the question of ‘the modern’ and they tend to turn it into the name for a historically demarcated epoch – ‘modernity’, ‘postmodernity’. Fredric Jameson and David Harvey, for example, provide beautiful book-length evocations of the phenomena, but give us no direct or ontologically grounded definitions. A bevy of other relevant books either define the terms loosely and phenomenally – for example, sometimes the modern is equated to increased speed and expansion, begging questions about how fast or extended social life has to be to be modern. And sometimes writers defer the task with sophisticated self-consciousness. It is amazing how, for all the centrality and common use of the concept of ‘the modern’, how little and how badly it is defined. The most direct definition of the classical discussions is Jean-François Lyotard’s. ‘I will use the term modern’, he says, ‘to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative’ (1986, xxiii). Hence, he says, ‘I define the postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives’ (1986, xxiv). Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth (2011) does something of the same thing when she calls the emergent postmodern condition ‘the discursive condition’. For all of the force of these two writers, chosen here because they are evocative theorists, their interconnected definitions of the modern/postmodern, reduce i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 184 ........................... the difference between the formations to the means of enquiry – one mode of practice. By comparison, this essay works across a range of modes of practice – specifically, production, exchange, communication, organization and enquiry. Lyotard’s definition goes deeper into the black hole of troubled theory and doubly reduces the meaning of the modern, implicitly suggesting that metanarratives are confined to the modern. To the contrary, it is easy to show that other kinds of enquiry, including traditional science, otherwise known as the ‘premodern’ sciences and sometimes called magic, alchemy or sorcery, also appeal to meta-narratives about the order of things. In the same way, we can say that all cultures develop typologies, but at different levels of abstraction. In terms of the engaged theory presented here, these typologies can be described as ontologically different kinds of meta-narratives. But they are meta-narratives nevertheless. The difference is that traditional sciences are drawn together as sacred cosmologies and the modern sciences drawn together as immanent universalities. A further problem with Lyotard’s definitions is that they limit the defining of a complex formation to a single ontological category. He is only interested in the nature of knowledge – epistemology. What about other ontologies such as differences in how temporality or embodiment are lived? As our examples of Rwanda and Sri Lanka have already indicated, when it comes to producing typologies of different kinds of person, the category of embodiment is crucial. Equally, performativity – the performing of the meaning of those bodies – is, as we have seen, devastatingly critical. Whether it is through bamboo sticks or white sarongs, performing ontological difference is done for the living as much as for the dead. To summarize the discussion thus far, ontological formations are understood in terms of socially specific categories of being: temporality, spatiality, corporeality, performativity and epistemology. These lived categories intersect unevenly across various modes of practice and integration. In other words, rather than defining formations in terms of each other or beginning with the modern as the starting point or master epoch – with the past relegated wanly to a singular ‘premodern’ and the future projected as an end-of-the-modern ‘postmodern’ –the levels method defines each of these life-forms in terms of their orientation to a changing and unevenly combining set of categories. These categories are lived in foundationally different ways across different settings of the human condition. In this kind of engaged theory, when such ontological categories come together as patterned, sustained relations, they are provisionally called ontological formations. When, in a particular time and place, an ontological formation becomes a social dominant, then that time and place can tentatively, and only provisionally, be characterized as an epoch in terms of such a dominant set of orientations or valences. DESPITE THE TERRORS OF TYPOLOGIES 185 ........................... Paul James The next sections of the essay seek to elaborate a method for understanding four different ontological formations: tribal–customary relations, traditional relations, modern relations and postmodern relations. The essay is structured by elaborating each concept in turn, although, as will soon become obvious, the examples used will require all of the concepts to do some work before all of them are defined in detail. The Customary as an Ontological Formation The customary tribal as a formation is defined by the way that analogical, genealogical and mythological valences come to constitute different social practices – production, exchange, communication, organization and enquiry – in relation to basic categories of existence: time, space, embodiment, performance and knowledge. Here the term ‘valence’ comes from the Latin valentia, meaning strength or capacity. It comes via the field of chemistry, in which from the nineteenth century it has been used to refer to the ‘combining power of an element’. More recently it has been used in psychology to express an orientation. Here it is used to suggest a social orientation. The three defining valences have been chosen because they arguably give a minimal sense of the complexity of tribal formations. They have overlapping consequences, but they can be analytically distinguished. An orientation to an analogical valence has its primary embedding in the relation between the natural and the social, or what is more poetically known in the literature as the ‘nature–culture’ contradiction. Here the social and the natural are treated as analogical to each other. There is no sense that the social has been lifted out as a separate sphere of life. A genealogical valence is primarily grounded in the relation between birth, becoming and mortality. It emphasizes embodied relations and their consequences for ongoing connection even after death. The third customary valence, the mythological, is primarily expressed in the relation between social practice and oral expressions of what that practice means – stories and images. Stories become mythologies that create and reproduce meaning. Speaking broadly, these valences are foundational for the human condition, even today – albeit overlaid and reconstituted by more abstracted valences. Configured tightly together as socially dominant, these three valences are the basis for an ontological formation, provisionally called ‘the customary’ or ‘the tribal’. Expressed the other way around, having sets of social practices being oriented in terms of just one or other valence does not necessarily make for a customary way of life. Thinking or acting analogously about persons as linked to animals for a specific purpose, for example, even if it qualifies i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 186 ........................... 5 The qualification to this analysis is that we are already seeing a traditional reframing of the story in the understanding of Kigwa, the first king. We thus need the other categories of analysis before we have been able to instance the first set. 6 On the performative importance of milk in Rwandan tribal society, including gift exchange and marriage ceremonies, see Maquet (1961). andropocentric modernism, does not necessarily make one tribal. But when analogical, genealogical and mythological relations come together as a dominant formation constituting the way in which people live, they constitute a powerful framing of customary tribal life. Within a tribally constituted way of life understood in terms of the primacy of such valences, time, for example, moves analogically with nature linked to diurnal patterns, seasons, years, but it is also embodied in lifestages and life-times through genealogical rituals and cycles, and it is expressed in mythological sequences, severally connecting past and present, though without those connections expressing something singular beyond themselves. In such a setting the transcendental and immanent are not phenomenonally distinguishable, though at times of intensified meaning and rites of passage a sense of the sacred is lifted into relief. In one often-cited Rwandan myth of origin, milk provides an analogical basis for understanding embodied identity and difference. Kigwa, who had descended from heaven to become the first king of the Rwandans, had three sons, a genealogically understood set of relations, from whom to choose his successor: Gatwa, Gahutu and Gatutsi. One night he gave them each a container of milk to protect. When dawn came it was clear that only Gatutsi had stayed awake. Gahutu had fallen asleep and spilt his milk – he was thus destined to be always a serf. Gatwa, having drunk his milk, was naturally to be a pariah (LeMarchand 1970, 33). Thus we have a mythological story, expressed through analogy and genealogy, explaining the reality of a tribal–traditional community–polity.5 These are persons and categories-of-persons, not types. This hierarchy was to last until Rwandan independence, when the traditional metaphor and modern reality of spilt blood became much more important than that of spilt milk – and the categories were abstracted as types.6 The power of the Tutsi, once a royal category within an integrated tribal–traditional formation, and Hutu, once persons of the land in that same formation, were lifted out and reversed by the coming of modern democratic majority rule. Gatwa, Gahutu and Gatutsi became the names applied to three ‘tribes’ in Rwanda – and tension filled the land. Then, in 1994, the terror of typologies reached its culmination after a period of linking the Batutsi to cockroaches – that is, through modern racism using tribal analogy, objectifying the Batutsi as ‘the cockroaches that have to be crushed’. There is one paradox in this process that bears careful repeating. Modern processes of colonial invasion, administration and typologizing separated out these three ‘tribes’ from a previously integrated customary formation. Colonial life turned customary tribal relations into (modernized) tribes. Prior to the colonial takeover, Tutsi and Hutu were part of one integrated tribal formation with named processes for moving between the identity of being Tutsi or being Hutu. After colonialization, a modern constructivist DESPITE THE TERRORS OF TYPOLOGIES 187 ........................... Paul James valence overlayed older formations and fundamentally changed the meaning of these identities. The Traditional as an Ontological Formation The traditional is defined by the way in which analogical, genealogical and mythological valences are drawn into a cosmological and metaphorical reframing of different social practices – production, exchange, communication, organization and enquiry – in relation to the basic categories of existence: time, space and so on. In societies dominated by traditional ways of life, the secondary valences of the cosmological and metaphorical tended (and tend) to be lived in conjunction with each other. It is only possible philosophically to separate out or define the terms of these valences of social life; and it is to this end that traditional and early modern philosophers have been devoted for centuries. The traditional, as I am using the concept, is quite different from what modernists appropriate as ‘tradition’. Only modernists invent traditions. In the modern sense, a ‘tradition’ is a regularized event that gains its power through intense regularized calendrical repetition. By contrast, traditionalism as described here is embracing and more broadly constitutive. Traditional events, as opposed to modern traditions, are meaningful in relation to the world around. They are repeated for themselves; they do not gain meaning simply because they are repeated. In nineteenth-century Rwanda, King Rujugira institutionalized the integrating cosmology of Ryang’ombe, Lord of the Spirits, into the royal court and set up army corporations with enduring institutional identity based around this myth. However, it is important to note how creatively this was originally conceived. The Bahutu control the original myth of Ryang’ombe about a small man who eats whole oxen. To push the point home, those persons with little or no modern power until the coming of democracy in twentieth-century Rwanda ‘owned’ the myth of the dominant Tutsi king. Certainly, the king – Tutsi by traditional identity not modern ethnicity – draws the ritual into the fuller cosmology. But in keeping with the earlier discussion of the tribal–traditional meaning of the connections across Tutsi–Hutu difference, the king is not allowed to take part in the ritual or even know its full meaning (Newbury 1991). This is not so dissimilar to the way in which traditional Jews in Jerusalem sometimes depended on Arabs to open their synagogues on the Shabbat because they were not allowed by Jewish law to do so themselves. With an orientation towards the cosmological, the basic categories of the human condition were and are abstracted in relation to a something else, both immanent and beyond (with the emphasis on the beyond): God, i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 188 ........................... Nature, Form or Being, etc. With an orientation towards the metaphorical, foundational relations were and are abstracted in relation to something enclosing and beyond (with the emphasis on the enclosing): the City of Man, the body politic, the civitas or the res publica Christiana. Through these processes, human relations to Being are often given metaphoric social resonance: Ryang’ombe, Lord of the Spirits, the singular King on the day of judgement; the threefold person of Father, Son and Holy Ghost; or in Sri Lankan Hinduism, the threefold Lords (Trimurti), their wives (Tridevi) and their avatars. This is living metaphor. It is not a process of type-making as we moderns know it. Though there is a strong traditional tendency to order, codify, list and make taxonomies, these cannot be given one-to-one correspondence with modern taxonomies. The difference is that traditional typologies bring together identity and difference in social frames that are evidence of the Something Else, both beyond and in the world. Modern taxonomies are things in order, ordered in relation to their codified selves, based on a rational constructed epistemology. In settings of colonial and other encounters, prior valences are often reconstituted over time. The reconstitution of analogical valences through more abstract metaphorical modes of relating, for example, is not a straightforward process to describe. It is most readily understood through examining the change in the dominant mode of communication from orality to writing that characterizes one aspect of the shift from tribalism to traditionalism, mythology to cosmology. Writing potentially carries forward all the sounds and performativity of orality through written emphasis and rhythm, and through subsequent translation – reading aloud, theatre and mimesis – but it leaves something unfulfilled. It adds an abstract layer of increasingly codified language, lifting meaning out of its immediate embodied context and opening it to wider connections, but it leaves an indeterminate space (Ong 1982). In particular, it opens up a spreading space between voice and text. The more one enters that space to structure the possible spreading meanings, the more it requires ontological work – and so generations upon generations of philosophers, political theorists, literary interpreters and theologians have been at work. Stories, once meaningful because they were told in the presence of others by animating storytellers, now have to be narrated in projected times, just as they give meaning to time (Ricoeur 1984). Just as crucially, because written texts are available for transporting across time, abstracted from their human scribes, they take on new possibilities. And it is this lifting out of meaning from embodied, analogical time and space that gives writing its magical, sometimes sacred, power. In the beginning of narrating the Jews and Christians was the Word. Logos. Or from a different tradition, at the beginning of the narration of ‘Sri Lanka’ was the Mahavamsa, the Great Genealogy. DESPITE THE TERRORS OF TYPOLOGIES 189 ........................... Paul James 7 See, for example, http://www. thelankainfo.com/srilanka/46-history-ofsri-lanka.html (accessed 10 April 2013). The continuing relevance of cosmological frames, even as they are reconstituted in modern settings, helps explain the intensity of violence and counter-violence. In the case of Sri Lanka there are two contested cosmologies. Just as Rwanda where two cosmologies meet – a local creed and a colonizing Christian creed – the Sinhalese and Tamil in Sri Lanka have foundationally different understandings of the social–sacred whole. For the Sinhalese Sri Lankans, perhaps the most important written text used to explain themselves to themselves is a manuscript called the Mahavamsa. Theravada Buddhist monks compiled it in the sixth century. Like all cosmologies, it links various oral mythologies into a single sweeping chronicle. There is one particular story from Mahavamsa still told to Sinhalese children across the world about the origins of Sri Lanka – the story of Vijaya, the heroic colonizer of the island. The story is well known by Sinhalese people, and, while it now resides as a background feature of their sense of their history rather than as an explicit argument, it has a natural fit with the Sinhalese right to rule and their claim to be the first sovereign people of the island.7 One day, Prince Vijaya, son of an Indo-Aryan king in North India, carelessly ran over a calf with his carriage and killed it. He was exiled to an uncivilized island below south India – Sri Lanka. He arrived with a retinue on the day of the Buddha’s nirvana. They settled the island, faced by two tribes: the Yaksha tribe, deformed fierce cannibals; and the Naga tribe, serpent worshippers. Vijaya fell in love with the Yaksha leader’s daughter, Kuveni, a demon worshipper, and she helped him defeat the tribes. However, in order for him to become a king his father ordered that he marry an IndoAryan princess. Prince Vijaya banished Kuveni and their two children, a boy and a girl. (After that the cannibals and idol worshippers disappear from the story and that boy and girl commit incest to became the Indigenous people of Sri Lanka.) Prince Vijaya prospered and he united the island. At this point in the narrative, the modern narrator usually digresses to bring in some scratchy nineteenth-century philology. The Sinhalese language is said to be derived from the Indo-Aryan language of Sanskrit, one of the oldest languages in history. In the middle of the nineteenth century, around the time that anthropologists started to measure the size of people’s brains, the linguistic process was connected to racial types. Sinhalese was linked to the associated claim that an ethnic community carried the language south to Sri Lanka. Sinhalese today is thus seen as a dialect of Sanskrit. Sinha means Lion, Le means blood (royal blood). This is why, says our narrator, the Sinhalese people are a very proud race; they carry a royal blood-line with a rich history. Going back to the original story, when Vijaya’s royal clan needed more princes they brought them down from the South of India, the Chola Kingdom. These were the Dravidians, the first Tamils in Sri Lanka. And i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 190 ........................... there you have it in the modern interpretation. For modern nationalist interpreters, the Sinhalese are thus first people, and they invited the first Tamils down to Sri Lanka when they needed them. That is, the colonizing Sinhalese are so important to Sri Lanka that they even begin the genealogy of the indigenous people, leaving beyond the demons and cannibals. For the original Theravada monks who wrote down the genealogies, however, ethnicity is never mentioned. They are connecting a genealogy, a lineage of persons, through metaphorical duration. Sinha does mean Lion and Le does mean blood, and as such the kings were Sinhala because they were royalty; not because they were ethnically Sinhalese. This parallels the process, a continent away, where the Batutsi were royal Batutsi because they were connected to cows; not because a Tutsi person was ethnically superior to a Hutu person. Using the nature of ‘time’ as our example again, we can see how the process of traditionally framing meaning and practice is broad and encompassing. For Theravada Buddhist scribes, time would have had no independent or separate reality; it exists only relationally (Prasad 1996). For traditional Christians and Muslims alike, the times of the past, present and future become cosmologically interrelated though an Omni-temporal Being, with the past becoming a foretelling of what is to come, mediated through the present. Linking this to writing in the biblical tradition, the centrepoint of time is God’s word. Ecclesiastes 3.1 provides a classic rendition: ‘To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die.’ The older analogical sense of seasonal time features in the first phrase, but immediately it is reframed by the cosmological understanding of ‘under heaven’. This is close to what different lineages of writers, including Benedict Anderson and Giorgio Agamben, both via Walter Benjamin and all steeped in the Jewish/Christian traditions, too narrowly call ‘Messianic time’. This concept does not work for our purposes for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is only one aspect of traditional Christian/Jewish time. As, for example, Agamben writes that Paul’s term for ‘Messianic time’ in the first century is ho nym kairos, the time of what is now remaining: as one type of time distinguished from chronological time (ordinary time) and eschatological or apocalyptic time, the time of the anticipated sacred end (2005, 61). The nearly self-evident point here is that all of these types of time are for Paul created by God. The definition of the traditional used in this essay rests on this more embracing sense of time as the given immanent/transcendental location of all being, including all times, ordinary and revelatory. Secondly, the concept needs to be relevant to other traditions beyond the Abrahamic religions and their proclamation of an actual or possible Messiah. Tamil Hinduism is culturally different in a multitude of ways from Christianity and Judaism, but at the level of discussing basic categories DESPITE THE TERRORS OF TYPOLOGIES 191 ........................... Paul James of existence we find fundamental convergences. Redolent of the way in which the Christian God is present ‘in the beginning’, so also Krishna is time: ‘I am time, bringing about the destruction of the world.’ Hindu time, linked to creation, preservation and destruction, moves through unfolding cycles – ages – both repeating themselves and open to change through the play (lilãì) of multiple deities and the activities of humans (Lipner 1994; Kloetzli and Hiltebeitel 2004). In traditional Islamic theology there are numerous writings, charts and diagrams linking days of the week with letters of the alphabet and divine names of Allah (Yousef 2008). Traditional life is full of taxonomies that order different types of things, but it is always done in relation to each being part of a larger whole. These taxonomies are not just contingent ways of ordering the world where the order exists in the things themselves. That is the modern way. The Modern as an Ontological Formation The modern is defined by the way in which prior valences of social life – analogical, genealogical, mythological, cosmological and metaphorical relations – are reconstituted through a constructivist reframing of social practices in relation to basic categories of existence common to all humans, including temporality and performativity. In constructivist terms, these basic categories of human existence become the terrain of different projects to be made and remade, to be thought and rethought anew. Bodies, landscapes, genome systems, aesthetic principles and political systems become projects for construction, including taxonomy-making, stereotyping and reconstruction. From the rise of the divided public self in eighteenth-century Europe (Sennett 1996) to the globalized autonomous self of the twenty-first century, even the self became an object of projected construction. Other writers have suggested related themes for the basis of their definitions of the modern. In one of his takes on a definition, Zygmunt Bauman makes order and reflexivity central to its meaning: ‘We can think of modernity as of a time when order – of the world, of the human habitat, of the human self, and of the connection between all three – is reflected upon … conscious of being a conscious practice’ (1991, 5). In another take he says it is ordering in itself: ‘We can say that the existence is modern in as far as it forks into order and chaos. The existence is modern in as far as it contains the alternative of order and chaos. Indeed: order and chaos, full stop’ (1991, 6). This approach has the same problems that we found for Lyotard: ordering, like the telling of meta-narratives, is not especially more important to the modern condition than to prior formations. In another definition, Bauman says that it is the process of designing-of-itself that distinguishes the i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 192 ........................... modern: ‘The existence is modern insofar as it is guided by the urge of designing what otherwise would not be there: designing of itself’ (1991, 7). Each of these partial and cross-cutting definitions is within a couple of pages of each other in a single book, and he is not playing a game or forgetting what he wrote in the previous pages. It illustrates the difficulty of defining something so basic. Of Bauman’s many attempts the last definition is the one that comes closest to working. Given that, as we have already shown, ordering and classification have been part of the human condition since long before the dominance of the modern, they cannot be made the basis of a definition of this new way of seeing and encountering in the world. But confining designing-of-itself to the modern is also questionable (Fry 2012). To find a way around this problem the (tertiary) valence of constructivism has been chosen to give a sense of the ontological shift that occurs with the coming of modern practices and ideas. It is not perfect – Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth (2011) alternatively suggests that neutrality is the basic valence of the modern. But the concept of ‘constructivism’ avoids the impression of a ‘neutral’ stripping of modern ontologies of their many ideological consequences. In this sense the modern involves a relatively reflexive, restless drive to construct and remake the world, nature and ourselves because we feel we have no choice but to act upon what we, and the world, should look like. Going back to our example of temporality, time in traditional senses was (is) often described metaphorically – it travels like an arrow, it is spaced like knots on a long string, and it flows like a river, all understood in terms of something beyond itself, God, Nature and the Cosmos. But in modernity (that is, in places and times when the modern is dominant) time becomes ‘its own’ construction. The emergence of such a level of temporality leads us in two simultaneous directions: the first is subjectivism, for example, as expressed by Immanuel Kant, for whom time was the foundation of all experience. The second is objectivism, expressed by Isaac Newton in 1687 as giving the possibility of ‘Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, [flowing] equally without relation to anything external’ (Kern 1983, 11). Both converged on the notion of time as time-in-itself, natural with a small ‘n’, and unable to be defined beyond itself. This broad process affects all ontological categories and dethrones both of the dominant entities that once gave them meaning: God and Nature, Being and Nothingness. Time becomes the medium of passing or lost moments, mapped day by day onto empty calendrical grids. This is the form of temporality that allows for creative historicity. It sensitizes politics. It is the history that becomes contested. It is the process that leaves the space for reflection upon ‘historical time’ as it is measured (tautologously) across time and space. However, it is also the kind of empty DESPITE THE TERRORS OF TYPOLOGIES 193 ........................... Paul James time that sees dictators, authoritarians, democrats and machete-wielders trying to construct history in their image, filling the grid-spaces in the calendar of empty history with their visions of self-splendour. Constructing the modern world takes on some of its most destructive and violent characteristics when it intersects in a distorted and unreflexive way with traditional ontologies of embodiment emphasizing transcendental purity (lifted out of the traditional connection to immanence) and traditional epistemologies emphasizing Truth with a capital ‘T’ (leaving behind traditional awe of the unknown). This provides meaningful background to Michael Mann’s discussion of genocide as a modern phenomenon, but it takes it one step further. Instead of Mann’s lament – ‘Thus, unfortunately for us, murderous ethnic cleansing is not primitive or alien. It belongs to our civilization and to us’ (Mann 2005, 3) –it has been argued here that it is more the unreflexive impact of modern practices and subjectivities in ugly conjunction with forms of neo-traditionalization that brought us the worst instances of ethnic cleansing. Modern/traditional ontologies of temporality and embodiment can be handled creatively or destructively. In the case of the successful slave rebellion in postcolonial Haiti in the late eighteenth century, being black was creatively defined as the basis of a new nation. The constitution of 1801 had designated all citizens of Haiti as French, but by the time of independence being black was singled out, from this time on, as the overriding designation of Haitian identity: dénomination générique de noirs. Into this definition of ‘black’ were also added white mothers of Haitians, as well as German and Polish soldiers who defected from Napoleon’s troops (Gulick 2006). At the other extreme of that possible range is how Adolf Hitler handled the question of being a Jew. Jews were for him more than an identifiable type. The identity of the Jew changed across history and insidiously sought domination through its various devious projections. What was consistent was the way in which the blood of the Jews thinned that of the Germans: The adulteration of the blood and racial deterioration conditioned thereby are the only causes that account for the decline of ancient civilizations: for it is never by war that nations are ruined, but by the loss of their powers of resistance, which are exclusively a characteristic of pure racial blood. (Hitler 2010, 254) Here blood is given the metaphorical power of an enclosing cosmology (reversing the usual form of traditional cosmologies) and in the holocaust that followed a modern railway system, a modern bureaucratic apparatus, and a modern military machine combined with a subjective neo-traditionalization to clear their blood-lines from history. In Rwanda, leaving aside the additional complicating layer of customary tribalism, something similar i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 194 ........................... happened. The 1994 genocide began in the city of Kigali, not with machetes, but with machine guns and systematic killings. Garbage trucks organized by local officials were used to clear bodies from the street. It was part of what Linda Melvern (2004) calls a ‘genocide bureaucracy’. The leader of this bureaucracy was Jean Kambanda, a man who was educated by Christian missionaries, studied economics in Brussels, and worked in insurance and banking. The Postmodern as an Ontological Formation The postmodern is not an escape from the modern. It is not a temporal stage in history that one enters to leave Hitler and Kambanda behind. Postmodern ways of life take all the wonders and horrors of the human condition into itself, even as it reframes social relations in terms of contested relative standpoints. This is, on the one hand, the kind of relativism that avoids singular standpoints. It provides a critique of the modern that is crucial. But on the other hand it fragments the possibility of politically projecting other worlds – and this is what gives it no purchase on long-term politics. The postmodern is thus defined by the way in which prior valences of social life – analogical, genealogical, mythological, cosmological, metaphorical and constructivist valences – are reconstituted through a relativist reframing of social practices in relation to basic categories of existence common to all humans. In these terms, basic categories of the human are all open for deconstruction. In postmodern politics, for example, projections of alternatives are constantly relativized and displaced in favour of constant deconstruction. It is no coincidence that the genre of modern utopia is now treated as anachronistic in all but a couple of discrete fields. Thus the strength of the postmodern – that it relativizes the certainties of the modern – is not so absolute. In any case, it should be added that modern constructivism continually undermines its own certainties, albeit in favour of new ones. Instead of developing an extended treatment of the postmodern, there is sufficient in that brief definition now to proceed to a simple conclusion about the consequences of all of the foregoing discussion for the politics of types and typologies. Conclusion Against those who suggest that even talking about typologies is dangerous, this essay has argued that it is politically important to explore different DESPITE THE TERRORS OF TYPOLOGIES 195 ........................... Paul James dominant typologies. We need to know the uses to which they are put and it is important to understand the power that inheres in their reproduction. There are profound political consequences in the ways in which types and typologies act to simplify identity and difference. However, that is not enough. My argument about this exploration is that without some kind of categorical analysis we are destined to stay on the surface of things and meanings. Complex and thick descriptions will be developed, but power will seem to inhere in the manipulation of identity rather than in the more complex social layering of identity and difference. Exposing the implications of dominant typologies, and developing ideal-type analyses as both methodologies and ideologically projected realities, requires something much more. And part of that ‘much more’ is recognizing the part played by the way in which we as humans constantly enact patterns of intersecting, entangling, and uneven ontological formations. R e f e ren c e s Agamben, Giorgio 2005. The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Appadurai, Arjun 1999. ‘Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization.’ In Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure, ed. B. Meyer and P. Geschiere, 305–324. Oxford: Blackwell. Bauman, Zygmunt 1991. Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity. Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. 2011. History in the Discursive Condition: Reconsidering the Tools of Thought. London: Routledge. Fry, Tony. 2012. Becoming Human by Design. London: Berg. Gulick, Ann W. 2006. ‘We are Not the People: The 1805 Haitian Constitution’s Challenge to Legibility in the Age of Revolution.’ American Literature 78 (4): 799–820. Hitler, Adolf. 2010. Mein Kampf. Memphis: Bottom of the Hill Publishing. James, Paul. 2006. Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In. London: Sage. Kern, Stephen. 1983. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kloetzli, Randy, and Alf Hiltebeitel. 2004. ‘Kãla.’ In The Hindu World, edited by Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby, 553–586. New York: Routledge. LeMarchand, René. 1970. Rwanda and Burundi. London: Pall Mall Press. Lipner, Julius. 1994. Hindus: Their Religion, Beliefs and Practices. London: Routledge. Louis, W. Roger. 1963. Ruanda-Urundi: 1884–1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1986. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. ‘From Conquest to Consent as the Basis of State Formation: Reflections on Rwanda.’ New Left Review 216: 3–36. Mann, Michael. 2005. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maquet, Jacques J. 1961. The Premise of Inequality in Ruanda. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Melvern, Linda. 2004. Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide. London: Verso. Newbury, David. 1991. Kings and Clans: Ijwi Island and the Lake Kivu Rift, 1780–1840. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ong, Walter J. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen. 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