Abstract
‘What do you really want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?’ was a question asked of the anthropologist Karl Weule by more than a few of his fellow passengers on board a ship bound for the German colony that is today Tanzania, in 1906. At least this was what Weule himself recalled after he returned from a journey during which he was caught up, and participated in, the counterinsurgency operations that followed one of the greatest anti-colonial uprisings that Africa had ever seen, the Maji Maji uprising. One elegant woman, Weule wrote, demanded: ‘And what do you want, Herr Professor, from all these tribes? Simply to collect for your museum in Leipzig? Or does the anthropology of today also have other, higher goals?’ Anthropology did indeed, Weule explained, have ‘other, higher goals’: ‘The museum you speak of, my dearest, exists out in reality, as even the most hard-hearted Philistine would have to admit. ... But how will anthropology be able to assert its much-contested status as a science, when it knows nothing higher and better than simply to bring together bows, arrows, spears, and thousands of other things? This collecting and preserving is really just ... the elementary branch of our work. The other, higher part is the study [Aufnahme] of mental culture [geistige Kulturbesitzes].’
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Notes
This chapter is a shortened version of Andrew Zimmerman, ‘ “What do you really want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?” Counterinsurgency and the Science Effect in Colonial Tanzania’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48 (2006), pp. 419–61. The longer version contains more extensive discussions of the primary and secondary literature I relied on in this essay.
The German colony did not include the island of Zanzibar, as Tanzania does today, but did include the Sultanates that are today Rwanda and Burundi.
Karl Weule, Negerleben in Ostafrika: Ergebnisse einer ethnologischen Forschungsreise (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1908), pp. 15–21.
I treat the history of German anthropology in the age before fieldwork in Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Suggestive in this regard is the discussion of Kant, Copernicus, and Kuhn in Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, Sabu Kohso, trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 29–44.
Such latent ideology is what Louis Althusser called ‘the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists’, in ‘Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists’ (orig. 1967), in Gregory Elliot, (ed.), Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster et al. (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 69–165.
Awarding the Nobel Prize similarly acknowledges the active role of subjects in scientific knowledge, although the prize committee has aroused less ire than has science studies.
For an excellent example, see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
See Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink, ‘Introduction: Locating the Colonial Subjects of Anthropology’, in idem, (eds), Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 1–52.
Important for my thinking about the field have been the works of Bruno Latour, especially The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
See George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Timothy Mitchell, ‘Society, Economy, and the State Effect’, in George Steinmetz (ed.), State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 76–97, p. 91.
Juhani Koponen, Development for Exploitation: German Colonial Policies in Mainland Tanzania, 1884–1914 (Helsinki: Tiedekirja, 1994).
Frederick D. Lugard, The Rise of Our East African Empire, 2 vols (1893) (London: Frank Cass, 1968), I, pp. 389, 402–3.
For a survey of the literature on this topic, see Anton Markmiller, ‘Die Erziehung des Negers zur Arbeit’. Wie die koloniale Pädagogik afrikanische Gesellschaften in die Abhängigkeit führte (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1995).
Booker T. Washington collaborated with German colonists in Togo directly, sending Tuskegee students and faculty member to set up a cotton school in that colony. See Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)
Zimmerman, ‘A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the Transnational Origins of African Cotton Growers’, American Historical Review, 110 (2005), pp. 1362–98.
Zache to GEA Government, 23 Jan. 1900, sent by the Governor of East Africa to the Colonial Section of the Foreign Office, 27 June 1900, BArch, R1001/220, Bl. 12–83.
Zache to GEA Government, 23 Jan. 1900.
Ibid.
On Mataka and the history of the Yao, see Edward A. Alpers, ‘Trade, State, and Society among the Yao in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of African History, 10 (1969), pp. 405–20.
On Southwestern Tanzania in this period, see Felicitas Becker, ‘A Social History of Southeast Tanzania, ca. 1890–1950’ (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 2001).
Contract between Mataka and Bezirksamtmann Zache, 20 Sept. 1900, BArch, R1001/220, Bl. 102–4.
Götzen, Denkschrift über die Ursachen des Aufstandes in Deutsch-Ostafrika 1905, 26 Dec. 1905, printed for the German Reichstag, BArch, R1001/724, Bl. 30–35. The official report was sent by Götzen to the Colonial Section of the Foreign Office, 10 Nov. 1905, BArch, R1001/723, Bl. 149–53.
See also Haber (Dar es Salaam) to Götzen, 9 Sept. 1905, BArch, R1001/726, Bl. 80–90.
Götzen, Denkschrift über die Ursachen des Aufstandes in Deutsch-Ostafrika 1905, 26 Dec. 1905, printed for the German Reichstag, BArch, R1001/724, Bl. 30–35.
Haber (Dar es Salaam) to Götzen, 9 Sept. 1905, BArch, R1001/726, Bl. 80–90.
For an account of the concentration of power, knowledge, and control in laboratories, see Bruno Latour, ‘Give Me a Laboratory and I’ll Raise the World’, in Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay (eds), Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science (London: Sage Publications, 1983), pp. 115–40.
See especially the circular by Governor Rechenberg to all administrators, 15 Feb. 1909, BArch, R1001/701, Bl. 150–54.
Thaddeus Sunseri, Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002), pp. 55–56.
Johanna Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 71–73.
Winterfeld, ‘Bericht der zur Erforschung der Ursachen des Aufstands eingesetzten Kommission’, 4 Nov. 1905, BArch, R1001/723, Bl. 91–101. Sent with Götzen to Colonial Section of the Foreign Office, 15 Mar. 1906, BArch, R1001/726, Bl. 80.
Runderlass an sämtliche Bezirksämter, Bezirks-Nebenämter, Militär-Stationen und Militär-Posten, 15 Nov. 1905, BArch, R1001/724, Bl. 118.
Haber to Colonial Section of the Foreign Office, 16 July 1906, BArch, R1001/724, Bl. 115–17.
Karl Weule, Negerleben in Ostafrika, p. 80.
On this plague of pigs, and much more, see Thaddeus Sunseri, ‘Famine and Wild Pigs: Gender Struggles and the Outbreak of the Maji Maji War in Uzaramo (Tanzania)’, Journal of African History, 38 (1997), pp. 235–59.
On the use of slavery in German East Africa, including the practice of purchasing slaves free, see Thaddeus Sunseri, ‘Slave Ransoming in German East Africa, 1885–1922’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 26 (1993), pp. 481–511. For a report by a firm that used the practice of slave ransoming to make up for labour shortages after Maji Maji, see ‘Geschäftsbericht der Lindi-Handels und Pflanzungs-Gesellschaft mb.H. zu Coblenz über das Jahr 1906’, BArch, R8024/111.
Ludwig Kindt, Lindi-Handels u. Pflanzungs-Gesellschaft, Coblenz, to Dernburg, 15 Sept. 1906 (copy), BArch, R1001/523, Bl. 9–10.
For the founding of the Lindi-Kilindi Company, including the plans to use government connections to recruit labour, see the minutes of their founding meeting in Berlin, 4 Mar. 1908, BArch, R1001/549, Bl. 4–6; and B. C. Ewerbeck to Reichskolonialamt, 15 Mar. 1908, BArch, R1001/549, Bl. 2–3. On the especially plentiful labour supplies of the Lindi-Kilindi Company, see its annual reports of 1909–1912, BArch, R1001/549, Bl. 58–59, 61–62, 66–67, 69.
Hans Meyer et al., ‘Denkschrift der Landeskundlichen Kommission des Kolonialrates über eine einheitliche landeskundliche Erforschung der Deutschen Schutzgebiete’, 16 Oct. 1905, sent by the Colonial Section of the Foreign Office to the Governor of German East Africa, 16 Dec. 1905, TNA, G8/4, Bd. 1, pp. 1–15.
Karl Weule, ‘Ziele und Arbeiten einer ethnographischen Forschungsexpedition in den Süden des abflusslosen Gebietes von Deutsch-Ostafrika’, BArch, R1001/5637, Bl. 16–20.
Hans Meyer to Colonial Section, Foreign Office, 4 Apr. 1906, BArch, R1001/5637, Bl. 4–5
Weule (in Lindi) to Hans Meyer, 9 July 1906, BArch, R1001/5637, Bl. 59–62.
Weule (in Newala) to Meyer, 7 Oct. 1906 (copy), BArch, R1001/5637, Bl. 84–98.
Weule to Meyer, 7 Oct. 1906.
On Knudsen in the Maji Maji uprising, see Ewerbeck (in Lindi) to GEA Government, 19 Sept. 1905 (copy), BArch, R1001/723, Bl. 56–57. On the police commando, see Weule to Hans Meyer, 9 July 1906.
Weule to Meyer, 30 Nov. 1906, BArch, R1001/5637, BL. 76–82.
Karl Weule, Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse meiner ethnographische Forschungsreise in den Südosten Deutsch-Ostafrikas, Ergänzungsheft der Mitteilungen aus den Deutschen Schutzgebieten, vol. 1 (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1908), p. 5.
Weule to Meyer, 7 Oct. 1906.
Karl Weule, ‘Ostafrikanische Eingeborenen-Zeichnungen: Psychologische Einblicke in die Künstlerseele des Negers’, Ipek: Jahrbuch für Prähistoirsche und Ethnographische Kunst 2 (1926), pp. 87–127, 105.
Karl Weule and Fritz Jäger, ‘Zweiter Bericht über die landeskundlichen Expeditionen der Herrn Dr. Fritz Jäger und Prof. Dr. Karl Weule in Deutsch-Ostafrika’, Mitteilungen von Forschungsreisenden und Gelehrten aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten, 20 (1907), pp. 106–14.
See Becker, ‘A Social History of Southeast Tanzania’.
Weule, Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse, p. 140.
See ibid., pp. 139–46.
Ibid., p. 140.
Ibid., p. 143.
Ibid., p. 143.
Weule, Negerleben, p. 511.
Foreign Office, Colonial Division to Luschan, 7 May 1906, Archiv des Museums für Völkerkunde, Berlin (MfV), IB78, 1009/06.
Luschan to the Director of the Colonial Section of the Foreign Office, 15 Mar. 1907; Luschan to the Director of the Colonial Section of the Foreign Office, 12 Apr. 1907; Colonial Section of the Foreign Office to Luschan, 18 Apr. 1907 MfV, IB 78, 308/07; Luschan to the Secretary of the Imperial Colonial Office, 3 June 1907; Luschan to Wilhelm Foy, Director of the anthropology museum in Cologne, 13 July 1907; Luschan, Memo, 30 July 1907; Luschan, Memo, 30 July 1907.
See, for example, Felix von Luschan, ‘Ziele und Wege der Völkerkunde in den deutschen Schutzgebieten’, Verhandlungen des Deutschen Kolonialkongresses 1902 zu Berlin am 10. und 11. Oktober 1902 (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1902), pp. 163–74. Luschan still regarded anthropology as salvaging the remnants of natural peoples, but also recognized that these natural peoples were undergoing historical changes.
Lacan has argued that surplus enjoyment is the general form of which surplus value, as described by Marx, is an example. Since, for Lacan, the essence of the superego is the command to enjoy, that is, that enjoyment is the essence of modern coercion, it makes sense in the present context to use the term ‘surplus discipline’. See especially the explication of Lacan’s seventeenth seminar offered by Mark Bracher, ‘On the Psychological and Social Functions of Language: Lacan’s Theory of the Four Discourses’, in Mark Bracher, Marshall W. Alcorn, Ronald J. Corthell, and Françoise Massardier-Kenney (eds), Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society (New York: New York University Press, 1994), pp. 107–28.
‘The state is that human community, which, inside a specific area – this area belongs to the characterization [of the state] – successfully claims a monopoly over legitimate physical violence [Gewaltsamkeit].’ Max Weber, ‘Politik als Beruf’ (1919), in Johannes Winckelmann (ed.), Gesammelte Politische Schriften, 3d ed. (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1971), pp. 505–60, 506.
Jeremy Bentham was perhaps the first to recognize the identity of laboratory, factory, and state in his ‘Panopticon, or, the Inspection House’, in John Bowring (ed.), The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4 (reprint, New York: Russel and Russel, 1962[1843]), pp. 37–172.
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Zimmerman, A. (2012). ‘What Do You Really Want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?’ Counterinsurgency and the Science Effect in Colonial Tanzania. In: Roque, R., Wagner, K.A. (eds) Engaging Colonial Knowledge. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230360075_12
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