Space is rarely an asymmetrical imposition of power which all agents are subjected to equally. This is a very crude and underwhelming statement, but it is one whose implications we should always remind ourselves of when adopting new historical approaches. Those implications are drawn out much more elegantly by Michel de Certeau who, in one of the critiques he aims at Michel Foucault in L’invention du Quotidian, characterises the Foucauldian perspective on space as perceiving it as a part of a structure of power.[1] Space, in this understanding of Foucault, becomes a tool from which systems of power may better categorise, hierarchise, and discipline society into conformity. These dichotomic divisions of society ‘draw their efficacy from a relationship between procedures and the space that they redistribute’[2] in order to deepen the chains of significations that reaffirm the logic of these categorical separations. In other words, our relative understandings of where we position ourselves in relationships of power are conceptualised spatially and are reinforced through spatial practices.
What de Certeau offers as an alternative to this argument is a realm in which the individual agent escapes the structuralising nature of ordered space through ‘multiform, resistance, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised.’[3] In drawing out the implications of this position, we open up broad new approaches to history in which we can frame past events as belonging to a process of resistance and individuality, rather than one of inevitable and encroaching control and repression; essentially, giving agency back to the agent. Furthermore, by looking at the historically constant and individualised reappropriations of spaces, we can see how disordered spatial practices can snowball and perhaps undermine the structuralising effects which the hierarchical relationships of power that ordered spaces attempt to create could have on other individuals. In this instance, we can use the example of Rangoon to justify this statement.
Twenty years after the conquest of Rangoon, its restructuring upon a gridiron system, and its bureaucratisation as the colonial capital of British Burma, the British colonial authorities decided to conduct a census across the entirety of their Burmese territories in 1872.[4] Rangoon had been planned by the British using a similar model to other colonial cities they had planned, relying upon centuries of intellectual refinement from the “grand modell”, and, as a consequence, Rangoon resultingly shared many of its demographic features with these similarly planned Asian cities: a multicultural and polyglot population, as well as a significantly imbalanced gender ratio.[5] However, As this census would suggest, the urban techniques that the British had used to assert their bureaucratic and cultural power across the globe were not so effective an apparatus of power as they would have believed.
In the census report’s section focusing upon the enumeration of towns, the report’s author states that it was ‘the easiest work of all’ and that it was mostly ‘taken in one night.’[6] “mostly” is the operative word here, since the report’s author emphasises that there was the significant ‘exception of Rangoon Town.’[7] What occurred in Rangoon is described by its town magistrate as thus:
‘The night of the 15th was a fine night; and, with a hope of securing correct numbers, &c., of the cooly classes who live in barracks and lodging-houses of various kinds, I instructed the Police, and had the Inspectors told off to superintend the work during the night. The Assistant Superintendent of Police, the Assistant Magistrate, and myself went about the town to exercise general supervision. We then witnessed the great want of legal authority in the work, for in some of these barracks, &c., the people pretended to be asleep, and not to hear the order of the Police to open their doors and bring lights. All was darkness, and the Police dare not resort to force. Delay ensued, and it was found quite impracticable to carry out my original intention; I was therefore obliged to cause the forms to be checked by sending Police and enumerators round the town for a week to test the accuracy of the forms, and make corrections.’[8]
In other urban spaces, such as the mostly natively constructed Thayetmo, no such issues were encountered and the colonial authorities could impose much more aggressive tactics due to the effectiveness of their enumeration, including the detention of boats trying leave or enter Thayetmo on the night of the 15th of August.[9] Instead, by refusing to wake up, the low wage, contracted, potentially even indentured labourers who had been housed in regimented communal living spaces, perhaps by the town authorities or the capital interests that they were serving as a way of reinforcing their economic and social positions in the city’s hierarchy, were appropriating these spaces as places of their own rest and security, and they therefore felt no need to comply with the disciplining attempts of the state’s agents. Rather than being spaces of order and compliance, these people used these spaces to reposition their relative proximity to the state and its control over them. This simple act of sleeping and the bravery to not answer the door was enough to change the nature of the census, warping it from a comprehensive survey being imposed upon them outside of working hours, to a rough survey which was conducted around their work schedules for their convenience. By resisting attempts to be categorised by the state through sleeping in their beds, the repressed of Rangoon restricted the state’s ability to enforce future policies within this city space due to the more greatly inaccurate abstract conception of the demographic makeup of the city’s population that colonial authorities now had. Due to this assertion of agency and ownership from the bottom-up, the people within this urban space, which was designed to order and control them to a greater extent than those urban spaces which, in actuality, ended up being more compliant, resisted the degree of hierarchisation of this new colonial space that the colonial authorities wanted to impose.
Space played a vital role in this small moment of history, but it was a role of resistance which those self-empowering individuals chose to give it, rather than one of control and imposition.
[1] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 2011), 96.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] H. T. Duncan, Report on the Census of British Burma: Taken in August 1872 (Rangoon, 1875).
[5] Robert K. Home, “The ‘Grand Modell’ of Colonial Settlement” in Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities (1996), 9-37.
[6] Duncan, Report on the Census of British Burma, 3.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.