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Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 49(3), pp 358–371 October 2018.
© The National University of Singapore, 2018 doi:10.1017/S0022463418000309
Introduction
Imagined laboratories: Colonial and national
racialisations in Island Southeast Asia
Warwick Anderson and Ricardo Roque
The nature of human difference in Southeast Asia continues to excite scientific
research and speculation, as it has for centuries. Only now scientists are more likely
to describe humanity in the region in terms of population genetics than rigid racial
typologies. They base their analyses on variations in nucleic acid arrays rather than
skin colour, hair texture, morphology, blood groups, and languages. Their themes
tend to diversity and shared connections, not the older absolutist styles of taxonomy,
category, or breed. Their studies often are oriented toward the deep past, especially the
prehistory of human origins and migrations, or toward contemporary biomedical
opportunities, shifting away from research that might consolidate racial regimes useful in population management and state orders. Even so, nationalist talk of the
‘Filipino genome’ and the ‘Indonesian genome’ persists: recently a scientist has proposed, for example, that his ‘genetic data resource will protect and empower the
Filipino people’.1 Generally, though, contemporary genetic research into human difference in Southeast Asia follows a dispersive logic, a complex patterning that no
nation-state or region can contain, an intricate diffusion respecting no boundaries,
not even Wallace’s biogeographical line. It has become a project consistent with global
imperatives. Thus the ‘detailed palimpsest of Indonesian genetic diversity’, according
to recent investigators, ‘is a direct outcome of the region’s complex history of immigration, transitory migrants, and populations that have endured in situ since the
region’s first settlement’.2 Scientists continue to tell us who we really are, or were,
or even might be — but in new modes and with odd inflections. In this special
issue of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (JSEAS), we bring together articles
that outline a critical history — an elucidative archaeology — of a century and
more of such research into human difference in Island Southeast Asia, revealing
This special issue brings together papers originally presented at the panel ‘Colonial and National
Racializations in Southeast Asia’ as part of the 7th EuroSEAS meeting in Lisbon, in July 2013. We are
grateful to James Dunk for extensive research assistance. The Australian Research Council provided
research support (FL110100243).
1 Frederick C. Delfin, ‘The population history of the Philippines: A genetic overview’, Philippine Studies:
Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 63, 4 (2015): 471.
2 Meryanne K. Tumonggor, Tatiana M. Karafet, Brian Hallmark, J. Stephen Lansing, Herawati Sudoyo,
Michael F. Hammer and Murray P. Cox, ‘The Indonesian Archipelago: An ancient genetic highway linking Asia and the Pacific’, Journal of Human Genetics 58, 3 (2013): 165.
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IMAGINED LABORATORIES
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the entanglement of scientific investigations with colonialism, nationalism, regionalism, and their contraries.
Scholarly awareness of the significance of these entanglements has been little
more than embryonic in Southeast Asian Studies in the last two decades. ‘An important aspect of the power imbalance [between colonisers and the colonised],’ historian
Carl Trocki stated in the Cambridge History of Southeast Asia of 1999, ‘was that
Europeans imposed their own perceptions of race and ethnicity upon Southeast
Asian society.’3 And yet it is remarkable how little attention this issue has received.
Surprisingly, most historians of Southeast Asia have been loath to consider critically
theories and practices of racialisation in the region.4 Often, race appears as a ‘given’ in
our histories, a natural composite or group formation that required management and
insight (as in the expression ‘race relations’). How racial imagery came to coalesce
around certain figures, how they were made to do colonial and national work in
the region, generally has escaped historical scrutiny. While their pattern can appear
vividly real, if frequently contested, the fabric of these racial imaginaries, clumsily
knitted together from threads of biology, prejudice, and mundane politics, has been
spared extensive critical analysis — at least until the last decade or so. Now we are
beginning, it seems, to appreciate that imagined races have contributed as much to
the invention of modern Southeast Asia as those fabled imagined communities.5 It
is timely, then, to bring together here five articles that further illuminate the racialised
dimensions of colony and nation in the region.
Despite a few notable exceptions, historians of Southeast Asia have come relatively late to critical studies of ‘race’. During the past three decades, there has been
increasing interest elsewhere in how the production and circulation of racial science
might frame — perhaps sometimes construct or even deconstruct — colonial and
national regimes. Several endeavours in imperial history, postcolonial studies, cultural
anthropology, and the history of science and medicine have indicated that racial
frames were fashioned in connection with modes of colonial governmentality, the
establishment of nation-states, and the formation of modern social and cultural identities and hierarchies. Concepts and taxonomies of human difference, alloyed with
varied forms of ‘racism’ — sometimes blending class, gender, indigenous constructs,
labour relations, and other sociocultural assumptions — have helped to constitute and
rationalise nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western colonial regimes. This ‘racialized politics of classification’, in Ann L. Stoler’s words, also pervaded the mechanics
3 Carl A. Trocki, ‘Political structures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, in The Cambridge
History of Southeast Asia, ed. Nicholas Tarling, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
p. 107.
4 The relevance of ‘race’ as ‘ethnic’ marker in the post-colonial history of Indonesia is treated dismissively in the entry for ‘Race’ in Robert Cribb and Audrey Kahin, Historical Dictionary of Indonesia
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2004), pp. 362–4.
5 See, for example, Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Rethinking colonial categories’, Comparative Studies in Society
and History 13, 1 (1989): 134–61; ‘Making empire respectable: The politics of race and sexual morality
in 20th-century colonial cultures’, American Ethnologist 16, 4 (1989): 634–60; and ‘Sexual affronts and
racial frontiers: European identities and the cultural politics of exclusion in colonial Southeast Asia’,
Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, 3 (1992): 514–51. See also Warwick Anderson,
Colonial pathologies: Race, hygiene, and American tropical medicine in the Philippines (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006).
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and machinations of colonial rule in Southeast Asia.6 Race categories were central to
colonial interaction: they formed a ‘dynamic, contextual, contested, and contingent
field of power’ that, as Paul A. Kramer observes, both presumed and enabled, and
was produced and reconfigured by, the dynamics of empire in the Philippines.7
Racialisation additionally has marked the rise of Southeast Asian anticolonial
movements and modern nationalisms and ethnic identities.8 Indeed, colonial and
anticolonial visions of nation, race, and government often displayed more affinities
than any party was prepared to recognise.9 The categories of ‘Malay’ and
‘Malayness’ offer an example: they were the object of intense racialisation in colonial
discourse during the nineteenth century, and later reappeared in nationalist discourses to create a core sense of ethnic community. Historians have studied how
these categories’ meanings were shaped, and how they influenced the formation of
modern selves and the imagination of national communities in Southeast Asia.10
Similarly, the lowland/upland divide and the politics of representation of mountain
peoples have become important themes in the past decade or so.11 The complex
links between these aspects of colonialism, nation- and state-building, and the epistemologies of biology and race are now beginning to be acknowledged.12 Studies of
6 Ann L. Stoler, Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), p. 8. See also Jean Gelman Taylor, The social world of Batavia:
European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); and Frances
Gouda, Dutch culture overseas: Colonial practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900–1942 (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 1995).
7 Paul A. Kramer, The blood of government: Race, empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 2–3. See also Warwick Anderson, ‘Racial conceptions
in the global south’, Isis 105 (2014): 782–92.
8 ‘The underlying racial basis of anti-colonial movements’, Paul Kratoska and Ben Batson summarise,
‘produced a heightened awareness of ethnic identities’. ‘Nationalism and modernist reform’, in Tarling,
The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol. 2, p. 313.
9 See Penny Edwards, Cambodge: The cultivation of a nation, 1860–1945 (Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 2007).
10 Anthony Milner, The invention of politics in colonial Malaya: Contesting nationalism and the expansion of the public sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Adrian Vickers, ‘“Malay identity”: Modernity, invented tradition, and forms of knowledge’, Review of Indonesian and Malaysian
Affairs 31, 1 (1997): 173–211; Anthony Reid, ‘Understanding Melayu (Malay) as a source of diverse modern identities’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 32, 3 (2001): 295–313; Anthony Milner, ‘Afterword: A
history of Malay ethnicity’, in Contesting Malayness: Malay identity across boundaries, ed. Timothy
P. Barnard (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2004), pp. 241–57; Robert E. Elson, ‘“Constructing
the nation”: Ethnicity, race, modernity, and citizenship in early Indonesian thought’, Asian Ethnicity 6
(2005): 145–60; and Joel S. Kahn, Other Malays: Nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the modern
Malay World (Singapore: NUS Press, 2006).
11 Hjorleifur Jonsson, Mien relations: Mountain people and state control in Thailand (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2005); James C. Scott, The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of
upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Ricardo Roque, ‘Mountains and
black races: Anthropology’s heterotopias in colonial East Timor’, Journal of Pacific History 47, 3
(2012): 263–82; and the essays recently collected in Oliver Tappe, ed., ‘Frictions and fictions:
Intercultural encounters and frontier imaginaries in upland Southeast Asia’, special issue, Asia Pacific
Journal of Anthropology 16, 4 (2015).
12 For example, Anderson, Colonial pathologies; Kramer, The blood of government. Recent collections
include Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, eds., ‘Race, place and civilization: Colonial encounters
and governance in Greater Oceania’, special issue, Journal of Pacific History 47, 3 (2012); and
Christina Skott, ed., ‘Europe and the Malay world’, special issue, Indonesia and the Malay World 42,
123 (2014). See also Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, eds., Foreign bodies: Oceania and the science
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particular national and colonial histories of physical and racial anthropology in the
region have also appeared recently.13 Yet the wider significance of twentieth-century
racial science has yet to be explored and brought together within a broader comparative frame.
The current special issue of JSEAS aims at further investigating these connections,
bridging case studies that explore histories of race, science, colonialism, and nationalism in Island, or Maritime, Southeast Asia. We consider this region as a privileged
space in which to situate and compare racial sciences and their interactions with colonial and national histories. During the nineteenth- and twentieth-century, as we demonstrate here, Island Southeast Asia became a critical field site for racial analysis in the
biological and human sciences. Indeed, the very distinction of this archipelago as a
separate region in the world map is entangled in racial ethnology. At the same
time, this distinctive assemblage of peoples and places endured a plurality of
European colonial and imperial powers, including Portugal, France, the
Netherlands, Germany, Britain, Spain, Japan, and the United States; it experienced
a devastating world war, European decolonisation, Indonesian national and regional
expansionism, and the rise of island claims for independence.
The articles here cover the late period of European colonisation, from the 1870s
to the 1950s, while suggesting links and connections with subsequent national histories. They encompass a variety of Southeast Asian island settings — Luzon, Timor,
Bali, Kisar — and of European imperial histories — Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish,
North American, and German. Florentino Rodao tracks the amplification of racial
theories in the writings of Spanish settlers, the so-called peninsulares, in late
nineteenth-century Philippines, then a Spanish colony on the eve of its nationalist
revolution of 1896–98. These writers rejected miscegenation and celebrated their
own social and biological superiority. Rodao reads this hardening of the settlers’ racial
theories in the context of a continuing struggle for social and political power in the
colony, with the peninsulares in opposition to the creole and mestizo Filipino elites,
the insulares. Focusing also on the Philippines’ late-colonial period, then under
American rule, Francis Gealogo analyses how the colonial state evaluated, categorised,
and essentialised the racial otherness of the Filipino ‘native’, often through the census
and prison surveys. Fenneke Sysling examines the history of the islands of Bali and
Lombok as imagined laboratories for the study of ‘primitive’ human races, in the
work of Dutch physical anthropologist J.P. Kleiweg de Zwaan in the 1930s. Sysling
reveals the distinct forms of de Zwaan’s racial ideas and practices locally, during fieldwork in Bali, and their mobilisation later in Europe. Ricardo Roque investigates the
of race, 1750–1880 (Canberra: ANU ePress, 2008). An earlier sociological analysis is Charles Hirschman,
‘The making of race in colonial Malaya: Political economy and racial ideology’, Sociological Forum 1, 2
(1986): 330–61.
13 Ricardo Roque, Headhunting and colonialism: Anthropology and the circulation of human skulls in
the Portuguese Empire, 1870–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010); Hilary Howes, The race question in
Oceania: A.B. Meyer and Otto Finsch between metropolitan theory and field experience, 1865–1914
(Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang, 2013); Sandra Khor Manickam, Taming the wild: Aborigines and racial
knowledge in colonial Malaya (Singapore: NUS Press, 2015); Christina Elizabeth Firpo, The uprooted:
Race, children, and imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i
Press, 2016); and Fenneke Sysling, Racial science and human diversity in colonial Indonesia
(Singapore: NUS Press, 2016).
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racialisation of East Timor and its relationship with the figuring out of colonial territories in the first half of the twentieth-century. Roque follows the work of
Portuguese physical anthropologist António Mendes Correia to reveal the strong
links between racial geography and colonial borders in the association of
‘Portuguese Timor’ with a particular ‘Malayan’ type. Finally, Hans Pols and
Warwick Anderson examine the history and impact of research on race mixing and
human hybridity conducted by the German anthropologist Ernst Rodenwaldt in
the 1920s on the secluded island of Kisar, in what is now eastern Indonesia. Using
the Mestizos of Kisar, a presumed lost white tribe, as a case study, Rodenwaldt
made an influential argument on the benefits of race mixing, a view he subsequently
recanted, conveniently, in favour of Nazi ideology. Intriguingly, his racial studies seem
to have an afterlife among the contemporary Kisarese diaspora.
Modes of racialisation
This collection of articles explores how one might become racialised by others, or
racialise oneself, in a variety of Southeast Asian settings — such processes included
the production of pure or originary identities as well as mixed or hybrid identities.
We understand racialisation as a means by which ‘race’ and its technical and conceptual paraphernalia get insinuated creatively into the imaginaries of identity, difference,
inequality, and ancestry — and come to permeate the interstices between these seductive categories. Accordingly, racialisation constituted a crucial feature of colonial and
national biopolitics in the last two centuries, whether in Southeast Asia or elsewhere.
Race sciences were a key component of the process, but ‘scientific’ components never
exhausted the content and meaning of racial ordering. Racialisation was a broader,
eclectic set of activities, adapted and contested at multiple sites, a mundane ordering
or disrupting of identities and social relationships. Thus race interweaved scientific,
social, moral, and political ideas and practices; it articulated biological views of
human relations that often intersected or meshed with — or contradicted — other
ways of expressing difference, such as family, gender and class.
Notwithstanding their specific geographies and approaches, the articles here
share this broad focus. Together, they make visible again the watermark of science
in the dynamics of racialisation in Island Southeast Asia, during and after the colonial
period. They demonstrate that racialisation took — and continues to take — mutable
and multiple manifestations that often connect, perhaps more than differentiate, colonial and national periods. At an analytical level, we can distil from this plurality of
manifestations at least three ‘modes of racialisation’ of others and of self in
Southeast Asian histories.
The first mode was oriented toward determining Indigenous or autochthonous
forms of identity, diversity and ancestry. Native-oriented racialisations encompass
taxonomic and genealogical reports of affinities and differences between peoples perceived to be originary figures in the archipelago — while these framings usually
express depreciative othering, they also can become re-inflected as self-empowering
claims to autochthony and purity. Conventionally, such formulations proliferated
as taxonomies of ‘primitive’, or purely ‘aboriginal’ Southeast Asian race types and
ancestries, often framed within debates about their proper spatial location and geographical distribution. Concurrent and cognate practices emerged within colonial
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IMAGINED LABORATORIES
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administrative structures and bureaucracies with a view to the government of wild,
even ‘savage’, native others. As such, this mode of racialisation also prevailed in surveys, questionnaires and other knowledge technologies developed by colonial authorities with regard to those perceived to belong to races outside, or on the margins of,
‘civilisation’. Later, such racialisation processes took on new vigour, and acquired different values. Colonial-crafted ‘native’ categories could be re-fashioned to articulate
positive claims of pure, originary, Indigenous identities, for example. States might
resort to racialised categories either to enhance self-perceptions of national community, or to articulate domestic alterity and thereby generate mechanisms of governing
and controlling internal ethnic ‘others’.
A second mode of racialisation put emphasis on the theme of race mixing,
métissage, or hybridity. This comes to the surface in debates about autochthonous
racial diversity, with reference to the mixing of originary types, such as between
Malay and Papuan (or Austronesian), for example. It can also emerge in relation to
Asian peoples considered to be foreign to Southeast Asian nativist assumptions, as
in the case of Chinese immigrants and mestizos.14 In late colonial contexts, however,
it is principally in reference to relations between European ‘whites’ and Southeast
Asian ‘natives’ that mestizo racialisation appears as an expression of dramatic scientific,
social, political, and governmental anxiety. Concerns with the presumed dangers of
transgressive race mixing found their way into racial theories and into the machinery
of colonial government. At the same time, hybrid populations might be reinterpreted as
providing human resources for development and modernisation. Mixing could be seen
as a problem for colonial order; conversely, mixing could also be flagged as a potential
accelerator of the civilising process, even a promoter of national awakening. Over time
these racialised terminologies and narratives came to represent a powerful resource, at
least among some groups, for positive self-perceptions of mixedness in Southeast Asia.
Intersecting with issues of race mixing, a third modality of racialisation can be
distinguished that focused on the trope of whiteness. In the colonial period, this flexible, polysemous identity often appeared in close connection with strategic claims to
authority and social status. Thus many white scientists and white colonial officials
concentrated on the categorisation, segregation, and surveillance of (real, or perceived) white ancestry and purity. In these contexts, claims to whiteness typically
expressed ‘boundary strategies’ among settlers and colonists, including the creation
and protection of a biologised sense of an imperilled imperial white self — a classic
boundary object, or subject. Such valuable whiteness has been ‘the most sensitive
marker or tracer of social stress and anxiety in settler nations and colonies’, a shifting
category within local fields of power, status, and class hierarchies.15 Yet, whiteness can
also be observed beyond exclusive European claims. The idealisation of whiteness
could mobilise forms of racialisation from within Indigenous cultural repertoires,
including certain Southeast Asian visions.16
14 See Chee Kiong-Tong, Identity and ethnic relations in Southeast Asia: Racializing Chineseness
(New York: Springer, 2010).
15 Warwick Anderson, ‘Traveling white’, in Re-orienting whiteness, ed. Kat Ellinghaus, Jane Carey and
Leigh Boucher (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 66.
16 For example, L. Ayu Saraswati, Seeing beauty, sensing race in transnational Indonesia (Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013).
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Racial categories — be they native, mestizo, foreign (including white) in character —
acquired different meanings in historical usage and geographical context, whether
pejorative and discriminatory, or self-empowering and positive. These conceptual operations always were contingent; they could take a variety of concrete historical and political
manifestations; they might relate to one another in any number of ways. Here we seek
to make legible some of the local specificities of processes of racialisation in Island
Southeast Asia. First, we will offer a brief historical overview of some themes in the
history of race science in the region. Then we introduce the articles assembled here, highlighting connections with the modes of racialisation we have outlined.
The ‘Malay Archipelago’ as racialised site
From a look at a globe or a map of the Eastern hemisphere, we shall perceive between
Asia and Australia a number of large and small islands forming a connected group distinct from those great masses of land, and having little connection with either of them.
[…] It is inhabited by a peculiar and interesting race of mankind — the Malay, found
nowhere beyond the limits of this insular tract, which has hence been named the
Malay Archipelago.
Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, p. 1.
The islands of Southeast Asia, the vast and diverse archipelagic world between
mainland Asia and Australia and the Pacific, have played an important role in staging
race since the late-eighteenth century. They first came into prominence in natural history and scientific research in the aftermath of French and British maritime exploration in the Pacific in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. European
racial categories — such as the ethnonyms ‘Papuan’ or ‘Malayan’ — had roots in
early-modern Iberian accounts and in situated asseverations of regional otherness.17
Yet only in the later nineteenth century did such categories become part of a coherent
ethnological language, proclaimed as scientific, and centred on biologised ideas of race
and hierarchical visions of civilisation. During the nineteenth century, European maps
and geographical descriptions of Oceania displayed and confirmed such racialised
notions of human difference. As historian Bronwen Douglas notes, attempts at
describing and partitioning the wide ‘Oceanic area’ as a geographical unit were ‘inherently racialized’.18 In this context, a multiplicity of terms, different and competing,
was used for consolidating or partitioning Island Southeast Asia as both a geographical and ethnological entity. There was no fixed or agreed term by which it could be
described until at least the 1860s.19 Many savants resorted to ‘East Indies’, following
17 J.H.F. Sollewijn Gelpke, ‘On the origin of the name Papua’, Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- en
Volkenkunde 149, 2 (1993): 318–32.
18 Bronwen Douglas, Science, voyages, and encounters in Oceania, 1511–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2014). On the history of early classifications of Oceanic peoples, including French Dumont d’Urville’s
famous Melanesia/Polynesia/Micronesia divide, see Nicholas Thomas, ‘The force of ethnology:
Origins and significance of the Melanesia/Polynesia division’, Current Anthropology 30, 1 (1989): 27–
41. See also Rainer F. Buschmann, Anthropology’s global histories: The ethnographic frontier in
German New Guinea, 1870–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 4–6.
19 On this historical uncertainty on geographical naming, leading also to the designation ‘Indonesia’,
see Russell Jones, ‘Earl, Logan, and “Indonesia”’, Archipel 6, 6 (1973): 93–118.
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IMAGINED LABORATORIES
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Dutch colonial terminology. French scholars preferred to include the islands within
more encompassing geographical definitions, like Oceania, or Malaisie. Loyal to former early-modern understandings, Spanish writers preferred to view Southeast Asian
islands through a trans-Pacific lens, thereby seeing a so-called ‘Spanish Lake’.20
In Britain, terms evoking the specific geography of the region were popular. Thus ethnologists like James C. Prichard, John Crawfurd, and George W. Earl in the earlynineteenth century referred confidently to the ‘Indian Islands’, or the ‘Indian’ or
‘East-Indian Archipelago’, terms to which the qualifier ‘Malay’ might be attached,
invoking the ‘Malay Archipelago’.
Increasingly during the nineteenth century, the Malay Archipelago was construed
as an anthropological region, and its many islands were configured as unique naturemade ‘laboratories’ for the study of racial difference.21 Of course, the preface ‘Malay’
itself indicated a preoccupation with the region’s racial distinction. The region was
‘Malay’, British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace observed, because that peculiar
‘race of mankind’ could be ‘found nowhere beyond this insular tract’.22 From the
1870s onwards, it became the most common term for designating the region, thanks
largely to the inter-colonial impact of Wallace’s book, The Malay Archipelago (1869).
A meticulous description of his journeys in the archipelago, the monograph eventually became renowned for its contribution to the theory of evolution. But contemporary readers of this work found themselves equally fascinated by his observations and
deductions on race.23 Wallace proposed a dualistic racial classification of the archipelago, a division between two ‘natural human races’ — Malayan and Papuan — divided
by a biogeographical line in the east. Wallace’s ethnological line was highly debated
and contested. It became an obligatory point of passage for discussions on ‘native
races’ and the anthropogeography of the archipelago for another century and more,
a path to be traced and retraced. Wallace’s writings triggered a long-amplitude, transnational wave of racial and sociocultural field research in the archipelago — as
Roque’s study in this issue shows in relation to Timorese ethnology, one example
among many of the intellectual detritus washed up on island shores. At the turn of
the twentieth century, the popularity of Wallace’s findings contributed greatly to
establishing the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific as a dominant ‘area’ for
research in physical anthropology.24 As Sysling’s article indicates, anthropometric
20 Oskar H.K. Spate, The Spanish Lake (Canberra: ANU Press, 1979); and Rainer F. Buschmann,
Iberian visions of the Pacific Ocean, 1507–1899 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014).
21 For critical studies of the notion of ‘island laboratories’, see Roy MacLeod and Philip F. Rehbock,
eds., Darwin’s laboratory: Evolutionary theory and natural history in the Pacific (Honolulu: University
of Hawai‘i Press, 1994); Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith, eds., Islands in history and representation
(New York: Routledge, 2003); Warwick Anderson, ‘Racial hybridity, physical anthropology, and
human biology in the colonial laboratories of the United States’, Current Anthropology 53, S5 (2012):
S95-S207; and Sujit Sivasundaram, Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the bounds of an Indian Ocean colony
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
22 Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago: The land of the orang-utan, and the bird of paradise.
A narrative of travel, with studies of man and nature (London: Macmillan, 1869), p. 1.
23 See Jane R. Camerini, ‘Evolution, biogeography, and maps: An early history of Wallace’s Line’, Isis 84
(1993): 700–727; Jeremy Vetter, ‘Wallace’s other line: Human biogeography and field practice in the eastern colonial tropics’, Journal of the History of Biology 39, 1 (2006): 89–123; Roque, Headhunting and colonialism, pp. 153–9.
24 Chris Ballard, ‘“Oceanic negroes”: Early British anthropology of Papuans, 1820–1869’, in Douglas
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fieldworkers continued to follow in Wallace’s wake, elaborating on his taxonomic
sketches, adumbrating ‘native types’ well into the twentieth century.
Alongside research on the distinctiveness of ‘native races’ in the Malay Archipelago
has gone a scientific preoccupation with the crossing of race types and the formation
of human ‘hybrids’. Hybridity had emerged as an ethnological problem in European
natural history and comparative anatomy in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth
centuries. For much of this period, speculation on the relative fertility of hybrids
served as a proxy for attribution of ‘monstrosity’ and ‘degeneracy’ to mixed progeny,
though incapacity to reproduce declined in importance as a criterion as mixed populations proliferated, and as polygenism, which posited separate racial creations, lost
credibility. Some self-styled experts continued to wonder whether human hybrids suffered a mismatch of parts, rendering them defective and maladjusted.25 And yet there
were always others who looked instead for hybrid vigour, for reproductive improvements among previously inbred populations. Race mixing might offer a means to
elevate particularly degraded groups — even if the miscegenated offspring did not
meet the standard of the supposedly superior parental type, they might represent
an improvement on the primitive parental stock. Mixed-race populations could
appear transgressive and challenging to the existing order, an affront especially to
colonial categories; or they might be viewed as needy and discomposed but obliging
products of migratory humans — marginal men, as the sociologists came to call them
— and thus potentially useful colonial functionaries. What the European scientist saw
depended on what he expected to find — and there always seemed to be plenty of
ways to confirm expectations in the Malay Archipelago.
Race mixing in the archipelago came to assume two distinct, though related, variants in scientific and bureaucratic reveries. On the one hand, miscegenation could
present a tricky challenge to the taxonomic project of Southeast Asian racial regimes,
confusing the boundaries between ostensibly pure types. The ambiguous or exiguous
connection of some islanders to existing categories prompted the disturbing possibility of new racial forms and genealogies. The presence of ‘intermediate’ or ‘mixed-race’
autochthonous populations challenged the taxonomy of originary and stable, even
fixed, types.26 This was at the core of discussions of those peoples — like the
Timorese, as in Roque’s article — who seemed to inhabit an ambivalent classificatory
space, between yellow (or Malayan, or Asian) and black (or Papuan/Austronesian, or
and Ballard, Foreign bodies, pp. 157–201. On the Oceanic phase of anthropology see James Urry, ‘Making
sense of diversity and complexity: The ethnological context and consequences of the Torres Strait
Expedition and the Oceanic phase in British anthropology, 1890–1935’, in Cambridge and the Torres
Strait: Centenary essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition, ed. Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 201–33; and Buschmann, Anthropology’s global histories, pp. 154–70.
25 Robert J.C. Young, Colonial desire: Hybridity in theory, culture, and race (New York: Routledge,
1995). See also Claude Blanckaert, ‘Of monstrous métis? Hybridity, fear of miscegenation, and patriotism
from Buffon to Paul Broca’, in The color of liberty: Histories of race in France, ed. Sue Peabody and Tyler
Stovall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 42–70. See Bronwen Douglas, ‘Confronting
“hybrids” in Oceania: Field experience, materiality and the science of race in France’, Revue d’Histoire
des Sciences Humaines 27 (2015): 27–63.
26 For early Iberian discourses on ‘purity of blood’ and mixing in Asia, see Max S. Hering Torres,
M. Elena Martinez and David Nirenberg, eds., Race and blood in the Iberian world (Berlin: LIT
Verlag, 2012).
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IMAGINED LABORATORIES
367
Melanesian) types. On the other hand, the problem of race mixing between supposedly ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ human races — most notably between white European
sojourners and Southeast Asian inhabitants — excited heated inquiry in the twentieth
century. In effect, this scientific research was a displacement of prurient colonial interest in sexual liaisons between ‘native’ women and white men. The viability and functionality of hybrid offspring, the destiny of children born from European and Asian
unions, and the dangers and opportunities such groups might pose to European
settlement and colonisation, were subjects of debate among ethnologists and comparative anatomists well into the twentieth century. Indeed, between the 1920s and
the 1930s, physical anthropological research on race mixing in Southeast Asia and
the Pacific was gaining momentum.27 The article by Pols and Anderson demonstrates
the extent to which the Malay Archipelago might be perceived internationally as a
pivotal site for race mixing studies in the inter-war period. Both adversaries and advocates of race mixing — the experts within science and the imperial bureaucracy —
could mobilise concepts of genealogical hybridity to disparate, or collusive, political
ends. Moreover, self-professed creoles or mestizos also could make use of racial theories, reframing and valorising these vital colonial abstractions so they might work for
them, as Rodao and Pols and Anderson describe here.
The scope of our historical critique
The articles in this issue examine a set of specific manifestations of these broad
historical trends. They allow us to deconstruct the ‘racial laboratories’ of Island
Southeast Asia, reframing these sites as platforms for critical historical investigation
of different modes of racialisation. The first two articles look at the racialisation of
‘native’ others as a knowledge practice that bears importantly on the biopolitics of
colonial governance. Set in the context of the Philippines in the early years of the
US occupation, Gealogo’s contribution describes racialisation as a multi-sited process
of othering and social control within the colonial administrative apparatus. From a
Foucauldian perspective, Gealogo argues that the ‘pejorative’ differentiation and typification of Filipino bodies and minds — whether as ‘insane’, ‘uncivilised’, ‘primitive’,
‘degenerate’, or ‘criminal’ — resulted from a conjoined series of institutional projects,
at once epistemic and governmental, in epidemiology, criminology, and population
statistics. Central to the finely tuned mechanism of classificatory control was the census, promulgated in 1903 by the US administration, and informed by anthropological
studies on alleged criminals at the infamous Bilibid Prison. The prison became a privileged laboratory of colonial population management and a test site for operationalising American racial categories, predicated on assumptions of Filipino degeneracy —
an exemplary site, an instructive miniature, very much like the Culion leper colony.28
‘Bilibid as a colonial penitentiary,’ Gealogo writes, ‘created the opportunity for the
construction of knowledge about Filipino “types” in a strongly racialised manner,
and allowed correlations to be made between the physical attributes of criminals
and the physical attributes of Filipinos.’
27 Warwick Anderson, ‘Hybridity, race, and science: The voyage of the Zaca, 1934–35’, Isis 103 (2012):
229–53; Anderson, ‘Racial hybridity, physical anthropology, and human biology’.
28 Warwick Anderson, ‘Leprosy and citizenship’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 6 (1998):
707–30.
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WARWIC K ANDERSON AND RICARDO ROQUE
Complicities between colonial politics and scientific racial classification are also
revealed in Roque’s contribution. Rather than exploring such co-constitution and
abetment within particular administrative projects, his article looks at this biopolitical
mutualism as a contingent artefact that was already emergent in the technical, theoretical, and rhetorical elements of what passed for rigorous scientific and academic
classificatory work. Roque analyses the Timorese writings of Portuguese physical
anthropologist Mendes Correia between 1912 and 1945, showing us the links between
colonial boundary definition and maintenance in the Portuguese Empire and the
demarcation of race types and ethnological lines. An island divided between
Portuguese and Dutch powers, Timor epitomised the anxieties and the hopes of
ethnological reasoning in Oceania, becoming a paradigmatic example of the rewards
and perils of racialisation in the region. Mendes Correia’s Malayan anthropogeography corresponded closely with colonial constructs and frontiers, to the extent that his
racial science mapped perfectly onto the eastern part of Timor as a bounded possession of Portugal. Yet as Roque indicates, such conjunction, even duplication, cannot
be reduced to a colonial artefact, or waived away as a meretricious figment of empire.
Indeed, the science could also be harnessed successfully to later processes of nation
building, belying any simple colonial congruence. Thus colonial racialisation of others
could merge into the racialisation of the national self. After the end of Portuguese
colonial rule in 1975, those struggling for national identity and political autonomy
in Timor-Leste took up again the topic of their territory’s ethnic affinities. In opposing the Indonesian occupation, East Timorese political leaders came to reject any ethnic affiliation to Indonesia, asserting instead the affinity of their island people with
Papuan or Melanesian groups, those other compelling colonial constructs.
In her article, Sysling considers racial science and its taxonomy of ‘native races’
further west in the Malay Archipelago. Sysling follows the work of a prominent Dutch
physical anthropologist Kleiweg de Zwaan, who in 1939 endeavoured to discern and
define the ‘primitive’ and aboriginal types of the islands of Bali and Lombok. She
shows how de Zwaan’s field research depended upon colonial administrative networks. But her focus here is less on the interplay between de Zwaan’s field anthropometry and the practicalities of the colonial situation than on the distinct
meanings and values that accrued to his racialisation of Balinese both locally and
in the Netherlands. Racialisation, Sysling suggests, had different outcomes depending
on the setting in which it was communicated or mobilised: racial thought always was
part of a larger structure of sensibility. Fieldwork encounters could be moments of
learning and exchange as much as occasions of dominance and submission. In examining the fine texture of interaction in the field, Sysling shows that de Zwaan’s racialised practices could be appropriated or adapted by his erstwhile research subjects.
Sometimes there was a sort of unequal reciprocity in anthropometric encounters
on Bali and Lombok. In 1939, Balinese community leaders could use race categories
to their own ends, thus subverting or at least rechannelling the Dutch science that
degraded them. As Sysling explains, ‘the category of Bali-Aga was of both local
importance and of interest to the anthropologists — partly because of local claims
of Indigenous origin — so an individual Balinese could appropriate Western scientific
notions to strengthen his identity claims’.
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IMAGINED LABORATORIES
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The two articles by Rodao and by Pols and Anderson offer critical histories of
racialisation around the themes of hybridity and whiteness. These contributions
chart the relationships of scientific racial conceptions with the anxieties and identity
politics of white settler and sojourner communities. Rodao examines how Spanish and
Filipino intellectuals reappropriated and deployed racial theories in the context of
local struggles for power and prestige in the late-nineteenth-century Philippines. In
this period, according to Rodao, growing Spanish emigration to the Philippines led
to the establishment of a new Spanish-born coloniser community, the so-called peninsulares, which competed with creole and mestizo groups for social and political prominence, and used race to rationalise its position. Rodao analyses the racial thought of
peninsulares through the influential works of Antonio Cañamaque, Pablo Feced, and
Vicente Barrantes. He shows how peninsulares came to celebrate their whiteness,
expressed as pure European ancestry, and to disparage mixed-race competitors in
the colonial archipelago. Cosmopolitan Filipino nationalists, or ilustrados, also drew
from the Spanish racial well, though they pragmatically adulterated these scientific
speculations to their advantage.29
Pols and Anderson address further complexities of archipelagic racialisation in
their account of Rodenwaldt’s research on the ‘Mestizos of Kisar’. In the 1920s, the
German physical anthropologist — later a committed Nazi — decided to undertake
innovative field research among an impoverished and isolated mixed-race community
on the island of Kisar, in the far east of the Dutch East Indies. Visiting race experts in
the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries had regarded this Indo-European group
as a lost white tribe, an experiment in white settlement in the tropics, significant for
colonial settlement policies. Obsession with the once and future German Empire
shaped Rodenwaldt’s interest in the Kisarese-European community. He presented
his Kisar research as a case study in the consequences of miscegenation, as valuable
in assessing the capacities and proper status of mixed-race people in any empire,
whether Dutch or German. He came to regard mestizos as ideal colonial functionaries, superior to indigenous inhabitants, and socially marginal and therefore ripe for
exploitation. ‘In his biopolitical framing,’ write Pols and Anderson, ‘the island laboratory could be scaled up to cover every circumstance; it could be made relevant to any
condition of racial confusion or ambiguity.’ Sceptical of prevailing Dutch assumptions
of the biological degeneracy of mixed-race people in the Indies, Rodenwaldt’s research
emphasised the relative and moderate success of race mixing, at least in its supposed
elevation of the island’s original inhabitants. Later, when Rodenwaldt returned to
Germany and embraced Nazism, his positive findings proved an embarrassment to
him (until after the war when they could be used to achieve exoneration from war
crimes). The Kisar study continued to be seen internationally as a model for the scientific investigation of an increasingly mixed and impure developing world, an
acceptably positive evaluation of métissage in the modernising archipelago, and
beyond. Over time, Rodenwaldt’s colonial scientific racialisation of the Kisarese also
gained currency locally and among the islanders’ diaspora. Many descendants of
29 See also Anderson, Colonial pathologies; and Raquel A.G. Reyes, Love, passion, and patriotism:
Sexuality and the Philippine Propaganda Movement, 1882–1892 (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2008).
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the Mestizos now refer proudly to his weighty tomes to confirm their ancestry and
assert their identity.
Racialised legacies
When John Smail, almost sixty years ago, advocated ‘autonomous’ or ‘domestic’
histories of Southeast Asia, he drew attention to the historical agency of local actors,
to the past and continuing cultural vitality of the region’s peoples. But he never
demanded we ignore the historical truths of colonialism and its aftermath. ‘The colonial relationship remains a theme of great importance for modern Southeast Asian
history,’ he wrote.30 The challenge is to craft histories of colonial science and racialisation that partake of domestic histories, recognising creative local agency and cultural
appropriation and adaptation. After all, even race science was never the possession
solely of Europeans: it could always be modified and adopted for a multitude of
local purposes. Nonetheless, the ‘voices’ of most of those racialised in one way or
another are now scarcely audible, often little more than faint whispers in authoritative
scientific texts and colonial archives. However, these ‘research subjects’, whether
engaged, hostile or indifferent, continue to haunt our readings, as a sort of spectral
presence disconcerting claims to expertise and control. There is no denying the ‘epistemic violence’ of colonial and national racialisations in Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, yet suppression was never absolute, acquiescence could never be assumed,
and island life might go on regardless.31 Some of the subjects we discuss here possess
no other historical presence, no archive to be mined — unlike cosmopolitan elites in
cities like Batavia and Manila. Access to their conceptual world, their sensibilities and
structures of feeling, may be limited in the texts we are studying — this enigmatic
presence, sadly, is often all we have.32 To dismiss the discourse of racialisation as
just another imperial artefact would silence the most ‘marginal’ of these people
altogether.
Concerning island sites often considered more peripheral than central, these preliminary and partial studies of the complex mosaic of racialisation in Southeast Asia
suggest that conceptions and formations of human difference are flexible and contingent, yielding to circumstances, and at the same time stubbornly persistent, durably
altering our impressions of ourselves and the world around us. Racialisation required
a certain cognitive repertoire, a biological mindset, but it drew strength and motive
power from deeper social and economic forces, felt by colonisers and the colonised,
by nationalists and internationalists. Few could resist the attraction of differentiating,
aggregating, and characterising human collectives, even though their typologies and
classifications were constantly under duress, always subject to contestation, distortion,
and adaptation.
30 John R.W. Smail, ‘On the possibility of an autonomous history of Southeast Asia’, Journal of
Southeast Asian History 2, 2 (1961): 101.
31 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in Marxism and the interpretation of cultures, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 271–313.
32 These issues are discussed more extensively in Ann Laura Stoler, Along the archival grain: Epistemic
anxieties and colonial common sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). See also Warwick
Anderson, ‘On the beach in the Marquesas: Weedy historicities and prosthetic futures’, in Pacific futures:
Past and present, ed. Warwick Anderson, Miranda Johnson and Barbara Brookes (Honolulu: University
of Hawai‘i Press, 2018).
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The critical historical study of racialisation in Southeast Asia, and inquiry more
generally into the constitutive biopolitics of the region, has hardly begun. We need
further comparative investigation of the relations of the artifice of race to the fabrication and reproduction of region, nation, caste, tribe, clan, and family across Asia and
the Pacific, and beyond.33 For a place once given over to racial speculation, the historical study of Southeast Asia’s biopolitical conceptions and formations is still regrettably meagre. Thus we hope our collection of articles provokes other contributions to
historicising the racial present in Southeast Asia.
33 Warwick Anderson and Hans Pols, ‘Scientific patriotism: Medical science and national selffashioning in Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, 1 (2012): 93–113. The critical study of the Chinese nationalist invocation of Peking Man is exemplary: see Barry Sautman, ‘Peking
Man and the politics of paleoanthropological nationalism in China’, Journal of Asian Studies 60, 1 (2001):
95–124; and Yinghong Cheng, ‘“Is Peking Man still our ancestor?”: Genetics, anthropology, and the politics of racial nationalism in China’, Journal of Asian Studies 76, 3 (2017): 575–602.
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