Strange alliance: Pygmies in the colonial imaginary
Strange alliance: Pygmies in the colonial imaginary
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DOI：
10.1080/00438240500510155
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发表时间：
2006-03-01
影响因子：
1.3
通讯作者：
Ballard, C
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Ballard, C
无论是在西方的想象中，还是在西方的科学中，俾格米人长期以来都是种族等级制度以及人类身体和社会进化的假定序列的一块锚。在19世纪末和20世纪初，西方在非洲、亚洲和太平洋地区的探索产生了一种可以被广泛称为殖民地的“俾格米神话”，它由一系列被认为是这个矮小的“种族”的特征组成，旅行者和都市科学家们都非常自信地阐述了这些特征。本文描述了种族主义诋毁的三个核心比喻-原始的、幼稚的和野蛮的-在描述俾格米人时被过度使用的方式。然而，俾格米人也被殖民地观察家招募到一个不太可能的联盟中，因为第三方试图将殖民征服非俾格米人的条件自然化。这种奇怪的联盟的动力是通过参考修正主义历史学家基思温德舒特最近在澳大利亚昆士兰州的热带雨林中重新发现的俾格米人的过去来考虑的。
Pygmies have long served, both in Western imagination and in Western science, as a sheet anchor for racial hierarchies and for putative sequences of human physical and social evolution. In the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western exploration in Africa, Asia and the Pacific generated what might broadly be termed a colonial 'Pygmy mythology', composed of a set of characteristics deemed diagnostic of this diminutive 'race', articulated with an exceptional degree of confidence by travellers and metropolitan scientists alike. This paper charts the manner in which the three central tropes of racist denigration - the primordial, the infantile and the bestial - have been applied to excess in the description of Pygmies. Yet Pygmies have also been enlisted by colonial observers in an unlikely alliance, as third-party foils in arguments that seek to naturalize the conditions of colonial subjugation of non-Pygmy others. The impetus for this strange alliance is considered through reference to the recent re-discovery by the revisionist historian, Keith Windschuttle, of a Pygmy past in the rainforests of Queensland, Australia.