How to produce a history of power and violence in a colonial context that is not reduced to the discourse of the State alone, but takes the full measure of the historicity of ethnographic and archival sources ? Mr. Naepels answers this question based on a long-term investigation in New Caledonia.
Michel Naepels’ latest book is not only an essential work in the field of studies on New Caledonia: it also and above all constitutes the masterful culmination of an anthropology of power and violence in a colonial and postcolonial situation conducted for twenty years, as well as a concrete proposal for the renewal of social science writing within a resolutely pragmatic horizon. In line with his previous work on the encounter between anthropology and history, Mr. Naepels gives us a fascinating work anchored in a unique terrain, Houaïlou: a rural commune in New Caledonia which, as we read, also appears, inseparably, as a Kanak and Oceanian social space and as a product of European imperialism and French colonization.
World systems and (post)colonial governmentality
If this work is undoubtedly destined to become a major reference in the new historiography of imperial encounters – from the same “ caliber » than the recent work of Romain Bertrand or Frederick Cooper – it is firstly because it is the fruit of extraordinarily meticulous investigative work undertaken since 1991 in the field, in archives and museums, a work whose scale and precision command respect. It is also because he manages to take up the challenge of a micro-political analysis which is never locked into the totalizing aporias of the classic monograph, any more than in the exemplification of global processes known elsewhere. From Houaïlou, Mr. Naepels develops “ descriptions of unique social scenes ” Who “ allow us to analyze the interweaving of several contexts in a given situation, to account for different rhythms and to show how a singular place is transformed by the flows that pass through it » (p. 15). Without ever losing sight of local conflicts, singular individuals (identified by name and located genealogically) and “ ordinary or marginal events » (p. 257), the author manages to grasp the way in which much broader dynamics play out in Houaïlou.
Mr. Naepels first describes the production of a globalized space which emerges in the middle of XIXe century at the intersection of two world-systems » moving and unstable – one Oceanian and the other European – and which will gradually take the name of “ Houaïlou » (chapter 1). It then addresses the modalities, issues and tensions of the deployment of colonial influence in Houaïlou – whose repressive techniques like the representations of indigenous society are very directly linked to the French experience in Algeria – from two points of entry : the multiple social uses of “ war stones » mercy seats between the second half of the XIXe century and the interwar period (wars, conversion to Christianity, ethnographic and museographic collecting) in chapter 2 ; and the trajectories of administrative leaders in an increasingly oppressive but also increasingly complex colonial order (military and health mobilizations, lineage competition, diversified power configurations between chiefs, gendarmes, missionaries and settlers) in chapter 3.
The question of leaving the colonial is addressed in the second part of the book. Chapter 4 places the accession of the Kanak to citizenship in 1946 in the perspective of a global attempt to construct new local social relations after the abolition of the indigenous regime, as evidenced by intense collective mobilizations carried out in all directions. by the same people in Houaïlou: partisan activism, creation of an agricultural cooperative, strengthening of “ advice from elders » to the detriment of chiefs, witch hunts, educational and religious commitment. The last two chapters finally look at the processes of production and foreclosure of violence which accompany the progressive emergence in Houaïlou of a “ new postcolonial governmentality » (p. 235) reorganizing the local socio-political field and weighing on bodies and minds since the 1980s. Chapter 5 analyzes the political emotions and subjective affects invested in violent action at the time of “ events » from 1984-1988, and during segmental conflicts linked to land reform. As for chapter 6, it examines various modalities of construction of collectives and political mobilizations in the context of decolonization opened by the Nouméa Accord (1998) – customary ceremonies, political party, clan war, “ customary land register “, collection of cultural heritage -, which all have in common to mobilize the discursive register of the “ custom » to control or on the contrary fuel violence: in other words, to “ ward off war ”, according to the central ambiguity of the book’s title.
Investigate and write
A recognized anthropologist, Mr. Naepels is also fully a historian given the quality of his archival research – just as thorough and meticulous as his field ethnography – and his handling of internal and external criticism of sources. ; so much so that his work seems to us to constitute a brilliant plea for the epistemological uniqueness of (or the) social science(s). In any case, this “ micrology » (p. 15) is intended to interest historians as well as anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists: not only by the spatial and temporal enlargements that it implements ; but also by his Foucauldian ambition to seize power through the practical logics of action and the processes of subjectivation – even in the “ infinitesimal mechanisms » (p. 11) – rather than just in the institutionalized discourse of the State.
Each of the six chapters can in fact also be read as a contextualized study of a key document, the intelligibility of which requires summoning other materials and mobilizing varied temporalities and scales of analysis. This is how excerpts from interviews on ancient wars (chapter 1) or recent clashes (chapters 5 and 6) collected in the context of land and customary claims of the 1990s-2000s take on meaning. ; the text “ Jopaipi » written in 1918 by the Kanak pastor Bwêêyöuu Ërijiyi in his interaction with the missionary Maurice Leenhardt, who has become a classic of oceanist anthropology (chapter 2) ; the personal notebooks of the big boss » Mèèjâ Néjâ and the Register of tribes and chiefs of the Native Affairs Service (chapter 3) ; or the list of those accused of witchcraft from Houaïlou given in 1955 to the ethnologist Jean Guiart (chapter 4).
From the presentation “ bully » of these documents, and in order to understand as finely as possible what they say about past and present social reality, Mr. Naepels solicits a large number of sources – which are also the tools of colonial control or manifestations of autonomy Kanak politics – whose historical journeys are traced in space and time: ship logs, administrative documents, missionary writings, maps and photographs, ethnological publications, Kanak objects from European museums, genealogical tables, collected stories and events observed during the ethnographic survey, etc. With constant attention to detail, he compares materials, crosses dates, evaluates the succession of generations and cross-references toponyms and surnames – a work for which his linguistic competence in Ajië, the language of Houaïlou, proves essential.
In the very process of his writing, Mr. Naepels therefore implements a systematic principle of exposition, contextualization and criticism of the documents produced: he constantly poses “ the question of what is visible of social relations in the sources available to us, of the forms of projection of reality onto documentary spaces (scriptural or interactional) to which empirical, ethnographic and historiographic investigation allows access » (p. 260). This narrative device allows the reader to follow step by step, with clarity and transparency, the way in which the author gradually develops his interpretative hypotheses, from the most probable to the most conjectural. This continuous effort to explain the conditions of production of the analysis is not only a guarantee of scientific rigor ; it is also a wonderful reading stimulus.
New looks
Many other innovative aspects of the work deserve further comment, notably the empirical demonstration according to which the Kanak shaped and used colonial devices for their own purposes as much as colonization categorized and subordinated them. We also think of the clearly established link between forms of political government and their processes of subjectivation in bodies and affects, which allows us to think about violence in a continuum ranging from intimate emotions to colonial war, through the entire range of family and domestic violence. Let us finally underline the decisive knowledge effects produced by the historicization of certain canonical objects of anthropology (custom, ceremonies, chiefdoms, councils of elders, cannibalism, witchcraft, propitiatory objects), at a time when the question of “ customary law » is hotly debated in New Caledonia.
Certain aspects of the social and political reality of Houaïlou could certainly have been explored in greater depth to “ complete the table »: for example the networks of relationships between certain settlers and certain Kanaks (neighborhood, work, matrimonial alliance, emotional intimacy, etc.), the internal divisions in the social world of the settlers, or even the mobilization of educational, professional and economic capital in the redefinition of local power relations. But apart from the fact that this research program would still require years of investigation, it would risk bordering on the illusion of monographic exhaustiveness. However, as Mr. Naepels rightly notes at the end of his introduction (p. 16), “ there are many other ways to tell this story “.