Colonialists treated natives as obstructing objects lacking agency, not as agents

Evidence

Latour’s Stone in my usage is a concept that ascribes presence, not agency, to the physical realities of the complex of land and people that was to become the colonies. Presence precludes a human structure of intent, a necessary condition for agency. Intent presupposes a rational action of choice, for when choice does not ontologically exist, there cannot be intent. I cannot intend to lift this chair if I operate without a concept of choice. As I suggested earlier, I do not have agency as a life-loving person if the only choice I have is to be killed by a bullet or by hanging. The locus of agency here is life itself, not the method of execution. In the colonial context, presence was the issue, not agency, according to the evidence of the existential, cultural, epistemological, political, legal, educational, psychological, and similarly profound transformations that were inflicted on the indigenous populations, some of which I have explained in the second chapter. Latour’s Stone captures this presence within the overall structure of European power. As the ecological humanities scholar Deborah Bird Rose perceptively remarked, the native “got in the way” of the colonialists “just by staying home.” For the colonial settler, as Chaim Weizmann attests in his profoundly prophetic statement, the natives—in this case Palestinian—are nothing but “rocks” that present “obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 388

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Hallaq’s concept of ‘Latour’s Stone’ as presence without agency, distinguishing it sharply from the standard Latour sense.
• SHARE: Send to a friend working on settler-colonial theory or indigenous studies — the Weizmann ‘rocks’ quote is a devastating primary-source gem.
• XREF: connects to: Natives were rightful occupants but lacked power to sell their land. — Supreme Court of the United States (Marshall Court, 1823), Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. M’Intosh,…, 169; Colonial peoples were naturalised alongside their land as savage nature to be tamed — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 404