Sex and Song

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Firpo
Keyword(s):  
Sex Workers ◽  
The State ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
State Regulations ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Illegal Activities ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
State Restrictions

In the late nineteenth century, the French colonial government legalized prostitution in French-controlled areas of Tonkin. Although the colonial state tolerated prostitution, state regulations forced sex workers to register with the state and limited sex workers’ profits, mobility, and freedom. Consequently, a black market for clandestine unregistered prostitution developed, enabling workers to evade state restrictions. This article asserts that during the inter-war years (1920–1945) unregistered sex workers used Ả Đào music houses as fronts for clandestine prostitution. The colonial state attempted to curb illegal activities in various ways, but clandestine prostitutes easily evaded the state. By the late colonial era, Ả Đào music’s association with prostitution had damaged its reputation.

Locating the politics of a Sierra Leonean chiefdom

Africa ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 558-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Fanthorpe
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Sierra Leonean ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Breeding Grounds ◽  
Primary Means

The chiefdoms of Sierra Leone are institutions of colonial origin but nevertheless continue to serve as local government units in the post-colonial state. The prevailing view among scholars is that these institutions have little basis in indigenous political culture, and have furthermore become breeding grounds of political corruption. This view has tended to elide anthropological analysis of internal chiefdom politics. However, it is argued in this article that such conclusions are premature. With reference to the Biriwa Limba chiefdom of northern Sierra Leone, it is shown that historical precedent, in many cases relating to prominent political figures of the late nineteenth century, continues to serve as a primary means of ordering local rights in land, settlement and political representation. This phenomenon is not a product of innate conservatism but emerges rather as a pragmatic response to the persistent failure of successive Sierra Leone administrations to extend modern measures of citizenship to the bulk of the rural populace. Rights and properties have become progressively localised in villages originally registered for tax collection in the early colonial era. Here one finds one of the most telling legacies of the British policy of indirect rule in post-colonial Sierra Leone.

Expulsion of “Undesirable” Chinese from the Philippines, 1883–1898

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-178
Author(s):  
Jely A. Galang (贾杰理)
Keyword(s):  
The Philippines ◽  
The State ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Undocumented Migrants ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Economic Context ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Political Security ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Colonial Government

Abstract “Undesirable” Chinese – vagrants, undocumented migrants, pickpockets, beggars, drunkards, idlers and the “suspicious” – were considered “dangerous” by the Spanish colonial government because they posed a threat to the financial and political security of the Philippines. Mostly belonging to the laboring classes, these unemployed and marginally employed individuals were arrested, prosecuted and punished for violating policies relating to registration, taxation and migration. While other forms of discipline and punishment were meted out to these “minor” offenders, the state deemed it necessary to expel them from the colony. This paper explores why and how “undesirable” Chinese were expelled from the Philippines between 1883, when the first expulsion order was issued, and 1898, when Spanish rule ended. Set in the broader political and socio-economic context of the late nineteenth century, it examines the actors, institutions and processes involved in banishing these offenders to China. Using previously underutilized archival materials, it interrogates the relations that emerged among various entities such as the state, the leaders of the Chinese community in Manila, private businesspeople, and Chinese “criminals” in terms of the expulsion process.

scholarly journals Introduction

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrice Ladwig ◽  
Ricardo Roque
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Strategic Policy ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Colonial Government

Engaging critically with literature on mimesis, colonialism, and the state in anthropology and history, this introduction argues for an approach to mimesis and imitation as constitutive of the state and its forms of rule and governmentality in the context of late European colonialism. It explores how the colonial state attempted to administer, control, and integrate its indigenous subjects through mimetic policies of governance, while examining how indigenous polities adopted imitative practices in order to establish reciprocal ties with, or to resist the presence of, the colonial state. In introducing this special issue, three main themes will be addressed: mimesis as a strategic policy of colonial government, as an object of colonial regulation, and, finally, as a creative indigenous appropriation of external forms of state power.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 187-194
Author(s):  
Christina Elizabeth Firpo
Keyword(s):  
Informal Economy ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Black Market ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Unintended Effects ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Vietnamese Women ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
The Government

This chapter concludes that Tonkin's flourishing black market for sex during the interwar years owed its success in large part to French colonial rule. Colonial rule gave rise to sites of tension — economic disparity, an urban–rural divide, an uneven distribution of colonial law, and cultural shifts — and it was within them that the black market thrived. The colonial state's blind spots allowed this market to flourish. For one thing, colonial officials miscalculated the unintended effects of their strictly regulated “tolerance” system. In marginalizing certain colonized populations — in this case impoverished Vietnamese women — the French colonial state lost much of its ability to monitor and control them. Despite numerous regulations and ordinances, as well as exhaustive policing efforts, sex workers easily sidestepped the reach of the government and found ways to make money in an informal economy. The chapter also states that the stories of the women and girls in this book reveal a close relationship between choice and coercion. Taken individually, it is tempting to reduce these people's experiences to a binary of either agency or victimhood. But placing their stories within the context of larger historical trends such as mass poverty, migration, and cultural change reveals that this binary is misleading.

The Frustrations of Development: British Business and the Late Colonial State in Malaya, 1945–57

1997 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas J. White
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
Development Policies ◽  
Colonial Government

The article reassesses the economic role of the late colonial state in Malaya. It seeks to dispel the view that the colonial government served British business interests, and that broad-based development policies only followed independence in 1957. Rather the developmentalist orientation of the state began earlier in the 1940s, and was not fully in accordance with existing economic interests.

scholarly journals Sex work, containment and the new discourse of public health in French colonial Levant

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 330-346
Author(s):  
Pascale N. Graham
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Health Knowledge ◽  
Venereal Disease ◽  
Commercial Sex Work ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Sex Work Policy ◽  
French Colonial

AbstractThis article addresses how French academics, doctors and state bureaucrats formulated sex work as a pathology, an area of inquiry that had to be studied in the interest of public safety. French colonisation in the Levant extended the reach of this ‘expertise’ from the metropole to Lebanon under the guise of public health. Knowledge produced by academics was used to buttress colonial state policy, which demanded that sex workers be contained to protect society against medical contagion. No longer drawing conclusions based on speculation, the medical establishment asserted its authority by harnessing modern advances in science and uniting them with extensive observation. ‘Empirical facts’ replaced ‘opinions’, as doctors forged new approaches to studying and containing venereal disease. They accomplished this through the use of statistics and new methods of diagnosing and treating maladies. Their novel approach was used to treat sex workers and to support commercial sex work policy both at home and abroad. Sex workers became the objects of scientific study and were consequently problematised by the state in medicalised terms.

Combating ‘Filth’: The temple, the state, and urbanization in late nineteenth-century Puri

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (06) ◽  
pp. 1849-1891
Author(s):  
UJAAN GHOSH
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
The State ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Infrastructural Development ◽  
Public Body ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Temple

AbstractThis article interrogates the urbanization of Puri at the time of the cholera epidemic in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the wake of the epidemic the colonial state took serious steps to reorder the urban landscape of the pilgrim town in general and Puri in particular. However, in Puri the narrative of infrastructural development is slightly complicated by the presence of the temple of Jagannath which acted as an alternative public body. Thus, on every occasion the colonial state had to negotiate with the temple in order to facilitate urban governance in Puri. As a result, I argue, Puri's urban landscape could only develop through interaction and negotiation between the temple and the state.

scholarly journals Colonial sugar production in the Spanish Philippines: Calamba and Negros compared

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filomeno V. Aguilar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The State ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sugar Production ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Enclave Economy

This article presents two modes of export-oriented sugar hacienda production in the late-nineteenth-century Spanish Philippines. The Hacienda de Calamba epitomised a large-scale estate under a religious corporation; it was an enclave economy reliant on local capital and technology. In contrast, Negros showcased a range of haciendas of varying sizes in a frontier setting involving different ethnicities and supported by capital and technology mediated directly by foreign merchant houses. In both locations sugar planters opposed the colonial state, but whereas leaseholders in Calamba, led by Rizal's family, became intentionally political in their resistance, in Negros planters engaged in a persistent and calibrated evasion of the state.

Disastrous Abundance in French Indochina, 1920s–1940s

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-182
Author(s):  
Diana S. Kim
Keyword(s):  
Financial Viability ◽  
Colonial Administration ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Accounting Practice ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Colonial Government

This chapter looks to Indochina in the 1920s, when the French colonial state was reporting comparably high shares of revenue from opium taxes to British Malaya. It identifies a very different set of concerns animating local administrators who misreported official revenue numbers while struggling to manage an opium monopoly that ran itself into bankruptcy. The chapter traces a process through which a minor accounting measure in 1925, originally designed to allow emergency liquidity for purchasing foreign opium, became an entrenched mechanism for artificially balancing the budget, which slowly accumulated into a crisis of overdrawn accounts and unpaid debts that threatened the financial viability of colonial government. These were known as the cessions fictives. While at first a minor accounting practice within the legal boundaries of colonial administration, these cessions fictives were repeated in following years and became an entrenched mechanism for balancing the colony's budget.

Legalizing Sex

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chaitanya Lakkimsetti
Keyword(s):  
Sex Workers ◽  
Sexual Minorities ◽  
Risk Groups ◽  
The State ◽  
Effective Response ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Aids Epidemic ◽  
Indian State ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Hiv Aids

Based on twenty months of ethnographic research, the book looks at the relationship between the HIV/AIDS epidemic and rights-based struggles of sexual minorities in contemporary India. Sex workers, gay men, and transgender people in India have become visible in the Indian public sphere since the mid-1980s, when AIDS became an issue in India. Whereas sexual minorities were previously stigmatized and criminalized because of the threat of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the Indian state started to fold these groups into national HIV/AIDS policies as “high-risk” groups for an effective response to the epidemic. The book argues that HIV/AIDS transformed the relationship between sexual minorities and the state from one focused on juridical exclusion to one focused on inclusion through biopower. The new relationship between the state and sexual minorities brought about by HIV/AIDS and the shared power communities felt with the state enabled them to demand rights and citizenship from the Indian state. In addition to paying attention to these transformations, the book also comparatively captures the rights-based struggles of sexual minorities in India who have successfully mobilized against a colonial era anti-sodomy law, successfully petitioned in the courts for recognition of gender identity, and stalled attempts to criminalize sexual labor. This book uniquely brings together the struggles of sex workers and transgender and gay groups that are often studied separately.

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