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RUTHERFORD, 2009

Submitted by Jonah S Rubin on Sun, 2009-02-01 14:47

Sympathy, State Building, and the Experience of Empire

Danilyn Rutherford<mce:script type=


Danilyn F. Rutherford


Links to Relevant CA lists: History & Historiography, Culture/Theory, Southeast Asia

 

Supplemental Page Created by: Michal Ran-Rubin and Jonah S Rubin

Editors’ Overview

In the February 2009 issue of Cultural Anthropology, Danilyn Rutherford explores Dutch state building in Western New Guinea to understand how sentiment and affective control are key to governance -- how empire “is an affair of the heart, as well as the head.” To do this, Rutherford experiments with ideas from a somewhat unlikely source, the eighteenth century empiricist philosopher, David Hume. 

“Hume’s discussion of sympathy offers grounds for a more materialist approach to the analysis of empire than has been the norm,” Rutherford argues.  “An official must sympathize with his subjects to invent the artifices that shape their inferences, and hence their sentiments and inclinations… [His] task was not simply to make inferences about the Papuans but to make the Papuans infer,” she writes.  To grasp how this task was carried out and achieved, she says, we must focus on the real time interactions that made up colonial practice.  

As a materialist concept, Rutherford explains, sympathy “tracks the intricate pathways through which encounters with objects and others give rise to feelings and thoughts. In its insistence on the passionate roots of reasoning, Hume’s discussion provides the basis for an enriched understanding of the relationship between affect and empire. State-building becomes an affair of the heart in the head, and the head in the heart.”

Danilyn Rutherford is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Cultural Anthropology has published many essays on postcolonialism. See Anand Pandian's essay "Pastoral Power in the Postcolony: On the Biopolitics of the Criminal Animal in South India" (2008), Liam Buckley's "Objects of Love and Decay: Colonial Photographs in a Postcolonial Archive" (2005), Ana Maria Alonso's "Conforming Disconformity: "Mestizaje," Hybridity, and the Aesthetics of Mexican Nationalism" (2004), and Deborah A. Thomas' essay "Democratizing Dance: Institutional Transformation and Hegemonic Re-Ordering in Postcolonial Jamaica" (2002).

Featured Segment: An Interview with the Danilyn F. Rutheford

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Suggested Supplemental Readings

Hume, David 1962. A Treastie of Human Nature. D.G.C. Manabb, ed. Cleveland, OH: Meridian.

Deleuze, Gilles 1991 [1953]. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay in Hume’s Theory of Human Nature.  Constatin V. Boudas, trans. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Questions for Classroom Discussion

  1. What does Rutherford mean by the term ‘sympathy’?  How is it different from empathy?
  2. How does Rutherford’s description of the work of building a colonial empire change our views of what colonialism was and how it worked on the ground?  Does our view of what colonialism was change if we look at how officials such as de Bruyn and van Eechoud did and wrote rather than seeing colonialism as an encounter between a State and a population of natives?
  3. At the end of the essay, Rutherford challenges anthropologists to consider the links between anthropological research and colonial empire-building.  Using the example of de Bryan, discuss how the two are similar and dissimilar, and what this implies for the practice of anthropology.
  4. In her reflections on the role of sympathy in ethnographic practice, Rutherford concludes that "anthropology is more empirical than social sciences that take positivism as their creed". What then does this tell us about the experience of fieldwork, the importance of sympathy, and the links between affective sensibilities and empirical observations?


    Author's Biography and Other Works by the Danilyn F. Rutherford

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Other Essays on Affect and Emotion Published in Cultural Anthropology
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Other Essays About Indonesia publised by Cultural Anthropology
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