Monument restoration served as colonial propaganda proclaiming native incapacity for self-rule

Evidence

In the first place, the timing of the archaeological push coincided with the first political struggle over the state’s educational policies. ‘Progressives’ – colonials as well as natives – were urging major investments in modern schooling. Against them were arrayed conservatives who feared the long-term consequences of such schooling, and preferred the natives to stay native. In this light, archaeological restorations – soon followed by state-sponsored printed editions of traditional literary texts – can be seen as a sort of conservative educational program, which also served as a pretext for resisting the pressure of the progressives. Second, the formal ideological programme of the reconstructions always placed the builders of the monuments and the colonial natives in a certain hierarchy. In some cases, as in the Dutch East Indies up until the 1930s, the idea was entertained that the builders were actually not of the same ‘race’ as the natives (they were ‘really’ Indian immigrants). In other cases, as in Burma, what was imagined was a secular decadence, such that contemporary natives were no longer capable of their putative ancestors’ achievements. Seen in this light, the reconstructed monuments, juxtaposed with the surrounding rural poverty, said to the natives: Our very presence shows that you have always been, or have long become, incapable of either greatness or self-rule. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 672

Categorization

• DEFINE: The ideological hierarchy — builders as foreign/different race, or natives as decadent descendants — is a key mechanism for justifying colonial rule.
• XREF: Strongly parallels Orientalism’s claim that colonial knowledge production encodes native inferiority; integral to the toolkit being assembled for the Islamophobia readings. — connects to: Colonial states museumized sacred sites to legitimize themselves as guardians of tradition — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 673; Colonial rulers reject native self-determination as beyond subject capacity

Related

• Colonial archaeology functioned as conservative education to block native schooling (similarity 0.86)
• Colonial states museumized sacred sites to legitimize themselves as guardians of tradition (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial monument restoration drained sacred sites of living religious use (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial archaeology gave postcolonial states an inherited depth of field. (similarity 0.80)
• Museumizing and education of the colonized were launched together as twin colonial projects (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Colonial states museumized sacred sites to legitimize themselves as guardians of tradition #corroborates (0.90) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 673
• Colonial rulers reject native self-determination as beyond subject capacity #complicates (0.78)