“While the conversation is on one level important we also need to localise our discussions in order to illustrate the conduits, persons, institutions, history that acted and are the mechanisms of incorporation in the expansion of capitalism. “

I think that you are dead on here, and I hope that what is coming in the very next essay (too long to call them posts anymore) will hopefully match that.

I especially appreciate your bringing in Aime Césaire. In my next online effort I want to focus particularly on theories developed by the colonized themselves, and not have them just in the background as we see in essays such as this one.

thanks for these insightful discussions as things wind down.

For me I think the crucial element of the debate is this comment you make: “that all of these “things” are really one single phenomenon — I call it “incorporation”, Wallerstein uses a phrase instead: “the expansion of the capitalist world system.””

In a similar vein Aime Césaire said there was/and is hardly a “post-colonial” moment and such themes are part of the ideological framework of capitalist society and its hierarchical ethos for social groupings and structure typical of modernity.

I like Césaire’s take on such things because he professed ‘anti-colonialism.’ For anti-colonial scholars colonialism was most accurately a process of proletarisation, imposing ideas and practices of inequality, assimilated by coloniser and colonised, and their generations to come. Anti-colonial texts hence are not accommodating. They stress difference, inequality and the destruction of colonial ideology and influence even still today. There essence is against colonialism. It is anti-Eurocentric political knowledge and experience, at times violently so. Anti-colonial theory therefore is anti-capitalism, which it understands as an extension of colonialism.

As such i think such a perspective would tell us we have to be careful of the mystification of labels and debates about colonialism, imperialism, post, decolonialising anthropology etc.. While the conversation is on one level important we also need to localise our discussions in order to illustrate the conduits, persons, institutions, history that acted and are the mechanisms of incorporation in the expansion of capitalism. When we do that it is clear that colonialism and capitalism are eerily the same thing. built on the same exclusionary, racialised logic. The binary may no longer be strictly between black and white or foreigner and local – if it ever were that simple – but instead those with wealth and those without. The logic of racism lives on; the logic of inclusion and exclusion, of domination and subordination, continues in a binary of wealth . And every government in the world knows it

I’m glad we cleared that up because I tend consider things at a face-t0-face level. When you say “one’s own sphere” I think of two people in a room and wonder where one person’s sphere stops and the other begins. Those specific interactions are still important to consider, BUT, the idea of who ‘owns’ and ‘controls’ makes the crucial connection (conceptually) to broader systems and spheres of influence that serve as a context for face-to-face interactions.

My problem is with this plethora of terms — sometimes the wide choice allows one to draw very particular distinctions, but other times the phenomena and the concepts that refer to them seem to melt into one another and cause confusion. My view is that all of these “things” are really one single phenomenon — I call it “incorporation”, Wallerstein uses a phrase instead: “the expansion of the capitalist world system.” In Wallerstein’s case, he really does emphasize that, so that “imperialism” and “colonialism” are largely subordinated and subsumed within his model…not separate “chapters” nor separate phenomena and terms.

Many thanks Stacie, I am very grateful for your commentary. It makes me feel guilty too, because I have fallen behind in my reading and commenting on THE PRISM. Anyway, soon I can look forward to a long vacation from blogging, and I will be visiting The Prism and devoting the attention to it that it deserves.

Like you said, they don’t make sense until related to their fundamental goals. Colonialism and imperialism seem to have domination/exploitation built into their meanings, but I’m not sure about incorporationism. Incorporating others into one’s sphere isn’t necessarily a bad thing, or is it?

Marriage, for instance… they call it “a union between a man and a woman.” Maybe a man wants to incorporate a woman in marriage for purposes of domination. Two other people getting married might have completely different goals, but they’re still considered to be forming some kind of union.

OR is the key point that the sphere other people are being incorporated into is primarily OWNED and CONTROLLED by you, not the other person being incorporated? … incorporating others into one’s own sphere… ?

Many thanks again.

I meant “sphere” to be deliberately ambiguous and open, to include such things as a geopolitical sphere, to bring others into orbit around oneself, to create a “backyard” out of other nations, to identify other societies (or parts of them) as vital to one’s national interests, or “simply” to enlist certain zones into the expanding capitalist world economy, especially during its period of expansion from the 1400s to the late 1800s.

“Neither imperialism nor colonialism make sense by themselves, until one relates them to their fundamental premises, ideals, and goals: to make use of others by various means of exploitation, drafting others into one’s sphere in order to extract from them whatever is valued.”

What is “one’s sphere”?