By the beginning of the nineteenth century a wide cross-section of British society had strongly correlated the notions of ‘civilization’ and ‘true religion’ with the accurate measurement and profitable use of time. Their specific experience of time, however, was not a human universal but a cultural construct, deeply embedded within the clock-governed milieu of industrial-capitalist and Christian society. Consequently, in the British colonies, the portrayal of indigenous societies as being ‘time-less’ (i.e.: culturally lacking regularity, order and uniformity) came to operate as a means of constructing an inferior, ‘irregular other’. By way of two case-studies – located in the 19th-century British settler-colonies of Victoria (Australia) and the Cape Colony (South Africa) – this thesis documents the manner in which nineteenth-century British missionary and settler-colonial discourse constructed the notion of ‘time-less’ indigenous cultures. Such apparent inferiority, this thesis argues, bolstered the depiction of indigenous societies as culturally inadequate – a representation that helped to rationalize and justify settler-colonialism’s claims upon indigenous land. / The negative portrayals of ‘Aboriginal time’ and ‘African time’ also helped to cast these societies as particularly in need of temporal reform. Indeed the latter were considered to be not only out of place but also ‘out of time’ within the timescape of Christian/capitalist rituals and routines. This study highlights some of the everyday means by which British settler-colonists and Protestant missionaries sought to reform the time-orientation and rhythms of indigenous societies. The evidence provided suggests that cultural colonization in the British settler-colonies was configured – to a greater extent than previous understandings allow – by an attack on non-capitalist and non-Christian attitudes to time. Christianizing and ‘civilizing’ meant imposing – coercively and ideologically – the temporal rituals and routines of British middle-class society. / Although the universalizing will of nineteenth-century European cultural expansion was reflected in its attempt to impose a specifically western view of time upon the world, the process of temporal colonization was neither homogeneous throughout the colonies, nor uncontested by indigenous societies. On the one hand, settler-colonialism’s diverging economic objectives in the Cape and Victoria – shaped as they were by economic land/labour requirements, demographics, and localized visions of race – defined the various manners in which Europeans viewed, and sought to colonize ‘indigenous time’. On the other hand, indigenous people in both settings often successfully managed either to defy the imposition of clock-governed culture, to establish compromises between the new and old rhythms, or to exploit the temporal discourses of their self-styled reformers. This suggests that time in the colonial context may be seen as a two-edged sword: not only as an instrument of colonial power, but also as a medium for anti-colonial resistance. / By analysing the discursive constructions of a temporal other, and by documenting the everyday struggles over the dominant tempo of society, this thesis highlights time’s central role in the colonial encounter and seeks to further our understandings of the process and implications of settler-colonization and Christianization.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/245242 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Nanni, Giordano |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Restricted Access: Abstract and Citation Only |
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