The latter history type is itself divided:
- Those countries where a colonial population created the subsequent sovereign political state.
- Those countries where the colonial authorities left leaving behind a minority continuing ex-colonial population and it was their political forces who created a new state.
So the first white settler states (Green, Troup, 1999, 277), a static even misleading term (Green, Troup, 1999, 278), like the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, have a minority indigenous population who wish to recover their history. The second have a colonial past restored to the ethnic lines yet via the creation of often artificial colonial boundaries and cutting through ethnic geographical boundaries between states. The boundaries produce eventually the new state (unless there is war and/ or population movement). Boundaries in geography have come to signify self-determination and for many in this process they should contain some sort of ethnic definition with its cultural identity (Rapport, Overing, 2000, 101).
Countries with a minority indigenous population have a debate whether only those ethnic peoples from the original population can recover their history (Green, Troup, 1999, 282). For others to do their history is, in a sense, to continue the colonialisation, on top of the fact that the newer population retains its dominating presence. From a position of power in European ethnic lines and continued subjugation over the natives, there became negotiation over land and artefacts in museums issues between the populations. This has been fuelled by revisions among historians and cultural anthropologists. So this history draws on anthropological methodology and folk history and it is extremely difficult to find many written records (Green, Troup, 1999, 283). It is also problematic politically and practically with a hunter gatherer existence over vast lands reduced to reservations, or increasing mixing of once clearer ethnic groups where people make decisions about their ethnic lines. Some genetic work about patrilineal and matrilineal origins is often contrary or contradictory to an ethnic definition, or illustrate the realities of sexual behaviour between colonists and the actual attractions and powerlessness of the indigenous servants and slaves.
The main argument against this historiography is that it views indigenous cultures as frozen and static, and even mirrors what the colonialists did:
The imagery of the 'pure' primitive goes deep, and thus has political weight today... We have the bureaucrats of Brussels promoting with perhaps the best of intentions the idea of 'the indigenous community'a dutiful salvage job for the world of nation-states. The United Nations document, 'Article 21', calls for all nation-states to conserve the shared values, the united cultures, of their respective indigenous peoples. The understanding espoused is that natives live in homogeneous communities, the members of which share identical views of the world... (Rapport, Overing, 2000, 368)
This opens up continuing questions of primitivism and "an aggressive act of essentializing" (Rapport, Overing, 2000, 369) in its community stress compared with Western individualism. This is labelling and fixing native cultures in their past.
The hot topic of postcolonial history has indeed been that of essentialism (see Green, Troup, 1999, 282). It arose in analysing how Europeans understood the other oriental: their essential characteristics. It also arises with indigenous history, that there is recoverable only by descendants the folk history of that ethnic group. Some of this claim lies in understanding the language (Green, Troup, 1999, 282): the metaphors, metanomies, synerdoches an ironies of ethnic cultural speech. It is an emic approach meaning knowledge held by an insider to that culture. This matches the debate in anthropology where valid representation is said to be limited to coming from a home environment (Rapport, Overing, 2000, 20). The opposition to essentialism is poststructuralism or other forms of radical and structural (e.g. Marxist anti-imperialist analysis). This is part of an etic approach, the perspectives of cultural outsiders (who may, nevertheless, wish to draw on culture).
On the whole those countries who produced a state from its majority indigenous ethnic lines produce a Subaltern (after Gramsci - see Green, Troup, 1999, 283) studies (Green, Troup, 1999, 281) history not concerned with essentialism. A main example is India (Green, Troup, 1999, 283). Anyone (because these are generally etic in stance) can write these histories, and a methodology can be a poststructuralist analysis of colonialists' texts turning their biases back on to themselves and producing a value based history of the once colonised. These people can be anyone down the social scale, for whatever reason.
Some look from the inside, in an emic sense, rejecting grand narrative explanations that reduce people to systems within colonisation, whilst seeking a Subaltern etic analysis.
Some Personalities:
§ Dipesh Chakrabarty (in 1990s): The way forward for postcolonial history is by engaging with the meaning of the nation state. He has rejected the approaches of indigenous history, rejecting modernity, or analysing one culture as relative to others. History itself should be open and transparent and realise its own contribution to oppression. He showed that the British left India but left behind their intellectual thought including modernisation. (Green, Troup, 1999, 284)
§ Arif Dirlik (in 1990s): The oriental/ European debate was a binary structural difference evident in the descriptions of colonial writing; all such binary oppositions should be dropped in favour of a more complex and diverse view. (281)
§ Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937): A social theorist, communist and once revolutionary who founded the Italian Communist Party with Palmiro Togliatti in 1921. Subaltern ideas take much from his writings. For him, these classes were connected with civil society through formed under materialist conditions. Subaltern classes have mentalities and ideologies that can involve them in active as well as passive connection to dominant politics, in a complex relationship of dominance and resistance. Economic forces change (eg to the global) and set up means of ideological control and generating civil society but also resistance by subaltern classes. Ideas remain very important: spontaneous revolution has roots in consciousness. Gramsci moved well away from the principles of Bolshevism to looking to a majority of workers to take the step of revolution rather than a vanguard minority. He favoured openness and application of his consensual communism to complex western societies. Intellectuals have to relate to the feelings and passions of the masses.
§ Ranajit Guha (in 1980s): Subaltern historian. He wanted to recover peasant consciousness from documents about 117 uprisings. So he was overlapping with indigenous method. He has used a poststructural approach with a transfer of asymmetric values from ruler to ruled by even reversing them. (Green, Troup, 1999, 283)
§ Lilikala Kame'eleihiwa (in 1990s): She proposes that only an emic cultural insider can fully understand native population histories through a home linguistic appreciation. She studied indigenous Hawaiians losing common rights in 1848 to property as allowed by the chiefs. Hawaiians must recover the meanings of cherishing the land, everyone has their proper place and the proper place for everone dividing the sexes and following the chiefs. These principles should be restored so that Hawaiians live in pono or balance. so this is certainly history with a manifesto aimed at restoring the understanding of tradition and those older elites associated. (281-282)
§ Howard Pederson (in 1990s): Banjo Woorunmurra asked this historian to write about Bunuba resistance using the methods of oral history and analysing colonial records. Yet he turned down writing from an Aboriginal perspective becuse he could not get into the layers of meaning they understood, and which Western narrative could not convey. (284-285)
§ Edward Said (in 1970s and 1980s): Western writers in politics, history, literature and anthropology created this myth of the oriental, the other, in its oldest colonies, so different from the upstanding European. He contradicts himself saying that this construction was certainly not based on reality and yet colonial powers acted upon it to subjugate local populations. (279-281)
§ Gyan Prakash (in 1990s): He stated that two poles of postcolonial history are subaltern and indigenous. Before the British left India it was right for Indian history to suggest that positive Indian experiences had indigenous sources. (281)
§ Henrietta Whiteman (in 1980s): Cheyenne history was studied from an emic perspective, expressed through its myth, and it can probably never join American history because Cheyenne history is holistic, human, personal and sacred (296) held in oral accounts. This history intends to keep the Earth Grandmother alive going back 25000 to 40000 years. (Hall in Green, Troup, 1999, 288-296)
See:
Green, A., Troup, K. (eds) (1999), The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 253-262.
Whiteman, H. (1987), 'White Buffalo Woman' in Martin, C. (1987), The American Indian and the Problem of History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, in Green, Troup, 1999, 288-296.
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