魔鬼的笔迹(二)——前殖民话语,人种/族类见解和跨文化认同在德国殖民过程中的作用

"The Devil's Handwriting": Precolonial Discourse,Ethnographic Acuity and Cross-Identification in German Colonialism

This paper seeks to overcome the split between discourse-based and economic/materialist approaches to the explanation of colonialism.The author tracks the formation of"native policy" which was at the core of modern colonial rule,in the German colonies of Samoa,Qingdao/Jiaozhou,and Southwest Africa.Economic forces and international military aims do not explain the variation among the very different native policies that emerge in these colonies.Their true determinants are a combination of three factors: precolonial racial/ethnographic discourse;colonial officials’ competition with one another through claims of superior ethnographic knowledge;and the degree and nature of colonizers’ imaginative identification with images of the colonized(Sinophilia, for example).Economic interests shaped the annexation of some colonies,such as Southwest Africa,and geopolitical interests shaped the German decision to retreat from a colonial stance vis-à-vis China and to engage in a less direct politics of"cultural imperialism" in the years leading up to World War One.The effects of economic interests on the ongoing production of colonial native policy are always mediated by the details of European ethnographic representations.

This paper seeks to overcome the split between discourse-based and economic/materialist approaches to the explanation of colonialism. The author tracks the formation of “native policy” which was at the core of modern colonial rule, in the German colonies of Samoa, Qingdao/Jiaozhou, and Southwest Africa. Economic forces and international military aims do not explain the variation among the very different native policies that emerge in these colonies. Their true determinants are a combination of three factors： precolonial racial/ethnographic discourse; colonial officials＇ competition with one another through claims of superior ethnographic knowledge; and the degree and nature of colonizers＇ imaginative identification with images of the colonized （Sinophilia, for example）. Economic interests shaped the annexation of some colonies, such as Southwest Africa, and geopolitical interests shaped the German decision to retreat from a colonial stance vis-d-vis China and to engage in a less direct politics of “cultural imperialism” in the years leading up to World War One. The effects of economic interests on the ongoing production of colonial native policy are always mediated by the details of European ethnographic representations.