Colonial State As A Social Field
To begin with, for rhetorical analysis I have chosen the article by Steinmetz “The colonial state as a social field: Ethnographic capital and native policy in the German overseas empire before 1914”. (2008) This text is a cultural artifact because it reflects on the issue of colonialism that affected culture and social institutions of the German colonies, while documenting and interpreting historical evidence. What is more, this text is a cultural artifact because it shows the understandings of power in colonial societies by applying concept of social field.
What is more, the text explores a lot of cultural meanings such as colonialization, its forms, native policy. To specify, the main point of the article is that colonizers were capable of running a colony as autonomous field in which they had primary positions due to the ethnographic capital. To put it in other way, the boundaries of the state were formed by all the knowledge about native people, their traditions and customs. That is why colonizers were trying to lead native policy. The last was a tool for keeping colonized population in the discourse, familiar for the colonizers, because outside of this discourse they had no symbolic power over native populations. So, employing the concept of field for colonial state, the author stresses the importance of the symbolic capital which was transformed by the colonizers into ideology of enlightenment and emancipation of “the uncivilized”.
However, such an approach to the colonial state is rather deterministic one as long as it does not account on the change of strategies of power operation and misrepresents the colony as a stable entity of codified bodies of native people. The matter is that the power was not established in the colony at one glance as well as its legitimacy was sure to change in the view of the colonized depending on the plausibility of colonial ideology and actions of colonizers. While the article shows the field of colonial state as an equilibrium that leaves no space for social agency. This view violates the principle of dualism of structure and agency, articulated by Giddens, (Baber, 1991) according to which structure and agency are usually in the process of constant mutual influence. Applying this principle to the colonial state, it can be said that ethnographic knowledge was structuring the field of the state only partly because the colonized were capable of the so-called mimicry.
In addition, the audience of the text is consisted of people who are interested in the ways in which empires were establishing their power in the colonized countries as well as techniques with which different types of capital in the colony as a social field were created, accumulated and used by the colonizers. What is more, the texts is also written for the people who are ready to exercise critical thinking as long as the very presentation of the colony as a field needs clarification. The matter is that the author could benefit …
