Methods and Nations

Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject

Michael J. Shapiro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135943400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Methods and Nations critiques one of the primary deployments of twentieth-century social science: comparative politics whose major focus has been "nation-building" in the "Third World, " often attempting to universalize and render self-evident its own practices. International relations theorists, unable to resist the "cognitive imperialism" of a state-centric social science, have allowed themselves to become colonized. Michael Shapiro seeks to bring recognition to forms of political expression-alternative modes of intelligibility for things, people, and spaces-that have existed on the margins of the nationhood practices of states and the complicit nation-sustaining conceits of social science.

CHAPTER 1

Social Science, ªComparative Politics,º and Inequality

Introduction: Biopolitical Conceits and the Colonization of Hawaii

Colonial thugs with their bible and drugs—snitches, dopers, religious interlopers. The mission to seize secure ka aina pa’a i ka [the land and thus the nation] native pure…

Skippy Ioane

As the contemporary music of Native Hawaiian activist Skippy Ioane suggests, colonialism in Hawai’i is, for some, a live issue. But its recognition remains fugitive for many because colonialism is not easily accessible within the dominant neoliberal discourse on the rights and privileges of individuals. The initial colonizing of Hawai’i was a “century-long project driven first by merchants and missionaries, then by the demands of whale fishery, and ultimately and most powerfully by the expansion of capitalist agriculture in the plantation production of sugar.”¹ Among the most significant consequences for the native population was the displacement of Hawaiian commoners from the lands held on the basis of ancient grants bestowed by Hawaiian chiefs. Along with the spiritual and material consequences attached to the land grab was an altered context for the connections between culture and political economy. The colonial encounter favored interpretations of sexual, working, and citizen bodies that comported with an imposed, capitalist economic hierarchy, blessed by a supportive, expansion-oriented religious organization.

Although there is a growing body of work on the implications of the Euro American colonizing of Hawai’i, especially from the points of view of culture and economy, the primary focus here is on the role of the nascent discipline of political science, whose initial deployment in Hawaii provided an ideational legitimation for the displacement of the Hawaiian political order and one of whose major products (along with the other social sciences) in Hawai’i and elsewhere, has been the warranting of forms of political and cultural domination under the guise of objective analysis.

In order specifically to contest the historical role political science has played in Hawaii and generally to provide a narrative of the parallels between social science and political domination, I begin with a critique of a (highly schematic) trajectory of discourses on political inquiry, nation building and equality/inequality, throughout the twentieth century, to which the primary contributions have been from American social science. I then work toward an ethico-political sensibility, presenting an approach to inequality that challenges the predicates of state-centric discourses on rights and equality before the law and end by making a case for critical translation as a method to displace an empiricist comparative political analysis. The historical section is instrumental to the sections on equality and translation, because my critique of a historical trajectory of social science discourse is focused especially on the traditional practice of a “comparative politics” within which the inequalities visited on nations without states are legitimated. As a disciplinary focus, comparative politics was invented by those who, regarding themselves as prophets, approached the problem of difference in a way well summarized by Caribbean writer Edward Glissant: “‘I can acknowledge your difference and continue to think it is harmful to you. I can think that my strength lies in the Voyage (I am making History) and that your difference is motionless and silent.’”²

Glissant’s words capture particularly well the perspective of one of the founders of modern comparative politics, Daniel Lerner, whose mid twentieth-century writings receive extended treatment later in this chap-ter. Here, the Hawai’i portion of the narrative continues with an examination of an earlier version of political science, which made its debut on the Hawaiian scene in an exchange of letters between Sanford Dole and John W.Burgess, near the end of the nineteenth century. Dole, the head of the provisional government of Hawaii and leader of the coup that overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy, wrote to ask Burgess, dean of the political science faculty at Columbia University (and a widely acknowledged founder of American political science), about the form Hawai’i’s new government should take, if he and his cronies were to dominate the new political order. Although Dole’s letter was somewhat elliptical, couched as it was in the rhetoric of good government, Burgess got the gist of the inquiry. After reviewing the information Dole conveyed about the Hawaiian ethnoscape, he wrote: “I understand your problem to be the construction of a constitution which will place the government in the hands of the Teutons [read whites], and preserve it there, at least for the present.” Being wholly sympathetic to Dole’s et al. problem—he was of the view that “the Teuton really dominates the world by his superior political genius”³—Burgess responded with suggestions about how to impose voting qualifications and governance structures that would politically disqualify a substantial portion of Hawaii’s non-white population (“Teutons” numbered only 4,533 out of a total population of 89,990, of which 40,622 were Hawaiians and part Hawaiians).⁴

Burgess’s responses partake of the same rhetorical dissimulation as Dole’s queries. His partisan racial and ethnic tropes are presented in the discourse of good governance, which foregrounds such crotchets as the virtues of a“strong presidency.” And, as was the case throughout Burgess’s intellectual and pedagogical career, part of his rationale for preserving structures of white dominance was what he regarded as the unquestionable value of stability, which he believed was to be achieved by the consolidation of the European state form of political organization. According to Burgess, “the national state is…the most modern and the most complete solution of the whole problem of political organization which the world has yet produced.” Coupled with his practical and metaphysical commitment to state-controlled nation building, was Burgess’s biopolitical agenda. Appended to his remark about the state as “the most complete solution…to political order” is the phrase, “and the fact that it is a creation of Teutonic political genius stamps the Teutonic nations as the political nations par excellence.” This biopolitical observation carries with it a legitimating corollary; Burgess was of the opinion that the historical warranting of the Teuton’s “political genius”…“authorizes them…to assume the leadership in the establishment and administration of states”⁵

Biopolitical conceits as well as notions about governmental forms were thus integral aspects of political science’s contribution to the colonization of Hawai’i. Now that Hawaiians are involved in movements aimed at decolonizing their ancestral lands (in the case of the more radical movements) or recovering “ceded lands” (in the case of less radical ones),⁶ another version of biopolitics is being articulated to discredit their claims. More than a century after the Dole-Burgess exchange, and after the subsequent political suppression and economic degradation experienced by the Hawaiian people, who first lost their government and then lost their lands to the depredations of a coalition of economic predators and politically collusive white American leaders, another Burgess, H.William, a lawyer involved in suits that oppose any form of Native Hawaiian legal entitlement, participated in a much less congenial conversation. In an exchange with Haunani-Kay Trask, a Hawaiian academic and activist committed to the restoration of Hawaiian sovereignty, Burgess argued against a bill before the American Congress (S.B. 2889 and H.R. 4904) that would lend federal recognition and a measure of self-governance to Native Hawaiians. Invoking the Fourteenth Amendment, Burgess asserts that the bill would allow the federal government to violate the Equal Protection Clause by funding “racially defined ‘Native Hawaiians.”⁷ He added that it would create a “new tribe out of thin air.”⁸

Significantly, Trask’s remarks are dominated by historical rather than legal tropes. And, when she does refers to law, it is to international rather than U.S. law. Instead of invoking the U.S. Constitution, she refers to a “continuing assault on Native Hawaiian entitlements and institutions,” which began with the missionary descendants (those involved in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy), and to the violence associated with the founding of the U.S. as a “white country.”⁹ Crucially, instead of referring to Hawaiians as a “race,” she identifies them as a nation, whose nationhood was stolen.¹⁰ This discursive gesture reorients the spatial predicates of the issue. For Trask, a critique of U.S.- Hawaiian relationships is a critique of U.S. foreign policy. Because there has been no space for such gestures within the post-John Burgess period in which American social and political science has been institutionalized, it’s necessary to return to that period, which witnessed the emergence of American social science, in order to open a discursive space within which to treat more elaborately the implications of the Burgess-Trask encounter for thinking about territorial control, bodies, and inequality.

The Development of American Social and Political Science

John Burgess’s focus on political genius was short-lived within the discipline of political science. Public policy making, understood as a problem of rational political planning and management, displaced Burgess ethno-political conceits. Among those shaping this phase of the discipline in the early decades of the twentieth century was Burgess’s student, Charles Merriam, who had entered Colombia University in 1896 and was subsequently to carry on the legacy of Burgess’s shift from a juristic to a social science-oriented understanding of governance. During the period of his tutelage of the young Merriam, Burgess’s orientation toward political science had changed: “Despite his conservatism (a Hegelian-inspired metaphysics grafted onto the historical method), Burgess began to shift from a juristic formal political science to one that envisioned a synthesis of the social sciences.”¹¹

Merriam, an urban reformer, the first political scientist at the University of Chicago, a leader of the American Political Science Association, and a founder of the Social Science Research Council, was also a planner in President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. In the last role, he helped create “a historically distinct form of national planning to fit the American setting,” seen as a rapid movement toward an urban-industrial complex in need of a new form of (guided) liberalism. As a historian of the Roosevelt years puts it, “Merriam, an advocate of professional expertise in the making of public policy, sought to reformulate the American liberal tradition by professionalizing social science, using research in public-policy making.”¹²

Merriam’s approach to method is described in his “Progress Report of the Committee on Political Research,” in a 1923 issue of the American Political Science Review. Arguing that social science research has no partisan agenda, he suggests that it be evaluated on the basis of its “utility in the development of the more accurate study of social phenomena.”¹³ Among the subdisciplines Merriam singles out for their policy-relevant objectivity is political psychology, which, he notes, “has become an increasingly significant field for the student of government.”¹⁴ Without going into elaborate historical detail, it should be recalled that it was an American social psychology that modernization theorists often employed to discredit indigenous political initiatives in the decolonizing movements of the “Third World” and to counter the influence of communist and socialist movements. Social psychology, as Ellen Herman has pointed out, was a cold war weapon represented as objective science. For example, Leonard Doob, an exemplary cold war psychologist, one who “held tightly to the vision of an objective and nonjudgmental behavioral science” ascribed Third World impoverishment to the psychological deficits that abound in ‘uncivilized’ societies. He, like many of the “development theorists,” saw receptivity to revolutionary Marxist or socialist movements as an indication of rigid and dogmatic thinking.¹⁵

While Merriam’s primary concern was the American polity, the role of political science’s outward gaze during the cold war period is manifested in the dominant methods-oriented thinkers in the subdiscipline of comparative politics. Again, the Social Science Research Council is a major venue for political science’s role in legitimating power structures. As Timothy Mitchell observes, in the 1940s and 1950s, “[p]olitical science had to expand its boundaries to match the growth of postwar U.S. power, whose ambitions it would serve.”¹⁶ By 1955 the comparative politics committee of the SSRC, chaired by Gabriel Almond, sought to go beyond mere institutional analysis because “the basic problems of civic loyalty and political cohesion lie in large part outside of the formal government framework.” In a “memo,” written by Almond and his colleagues, Taylor Cole and Roy Macridis, they state (while claiming to champion “objective method”):

This memo arises from more urgent practical considerations. The survival of parliamentary and democratic institutions on the European continent is by no means to be taken for granted. The political communities of the major Western European countries—France, German, and Italy—are fragmented into exclusive ideological movements. Large bodies of opinion appear to be alienated from the West, politically apathetic, or actively recruited to communism.¹⁷

The writers go on to speak of the inability of a “legal-historical-philosophical approach to discover how serious these cleavages and alienations are.”¹⁸ Although the very idea of the “West” as a separate geographical area and as a separate thought-world is conceptually flawed, for want of a familiar and intelligible alternative, I too resort to it as a geographical/conceptual marker to identify European and American locations and perspectives throughout this investigation. Among other disciplines, a highly institutionalized “area studies” within the academy has made “the West” an almost irresistible discursive gesture.

Like the subdiscipline of comparative politics, the impetus to knowledge production in area studies, which also developed during the cold war and articulated the idioms of political science with those of other social science disciplines, partook of an undisguised, geopolitical partisanship. For example, an analysis of key area studies methods texts reveals that “just as t...