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The Porous and the Pure: An Artifactual History of Ties Between Asia, Europe, and Latin America

By Ajay Gandhi

This article is a shortened version of the eponymous MECILA Working Paper, which was originally published by the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America in 2024 and can be read here.

1. Introduction

This essay considers three artifacts that illustrate contact-points between Asia, Europe, and Latin America. The historical arc is from the 1500s till the present. My conceptual aim is to illuminate transcontinental proximities and colonialism’s cascading fallout. This essay’s premise is that an artifact offers both a naturalized narrative and prospective horizon. As we represent the world – something that seems pregiven – we also create and modify it.

The three artifacts which anchor this essay are first, 16th-century precious-metal prestige objects, made by Goan artisans for Portuguese patrons; second, a 17th century Dutch painting of a slave from India; and finally, the figuration of the spider’s web, as conjured in Caribbean folk tales.

The Goan objects made for Portuguese colonizers offer, for today’s museums, an apolitical celebration of cultural hybridity. I suggest, in contrast, that they underwrite the imperial politics of purity. The Dutch painting from the late 1600s seems to affirm colonial expansion and the confidence of racial hierarchy. I propose that it also expresses a complex vision of living with difference. The spider’s web, and the myth of the Anansi spider, moves between Africa, Latin America, and Asia. I argue that through the embodied experience of créole mixing, the spider’s mesh offers a convivial counter-politics, mirroring the incompleteness, the distribution, and the work of mending in social life.

[…]

4. Webbing the World

In previous sections, I examined the tensions of hybridity and imperatives of purity, and drew on a Dutch painting of an Indian slave to probe the distinction between a determinate “fact” and an open-ended “truth”. To conclude our journey and point to generative possibilities, I want, in this third section, to think about how metaphors enable a different reading of movement and encounter, and thus open up a different practice of politics.

It is evident to many that we conjure our societies as static, terrestrial roots.[1] Being sons of the soil, of the fatherland or motherland, are reigning metaphors.[2] They underlie ideas first broached in the nineteenth-century heyday of social science (which was when the nation-state also emerged). These include notions of race, community, culture, and nation.[3] As modern beings, we have become invested in fixed origins.

I find this idea to be exhausted and misleading. If language frames what is natural, and images establish what is possible, our metaphors need an update. This section advances an alternate figuration, that of the spider’s web. A spider’s web gives a more apt image of how, as social beings, we converge and unfold. To illustrate, let us look at the story of the Anansi spider.

In 1928, American anthropologists Melville and Frances Herskovits arrived in Suriname, a Dutch colony on the rim of the Caribbean (Herskovits and Herskovits 1936). The Herskovits, studying popular folklore, gravitated to capital Paramaribo’s dyari – “yards” or open-air compounds. Yards were proletarian zones outside of European scrutiny. They were one version of a general type; barrack-like quarters for the racial underclass dispersed through the Caribbean. One could see them in Port of Spain in Trinidad and Georgetown in British Guiana.

At Paramaribo’s interstices, yards comprised an agglomeration of cabins with multiple families, and open communal space, or clearings, for daily activities such as cooking. Yards were primarily inhabited by Afro-Surinamese, mainly descended from West African slaves. But other sections of the colonial underclass – Javanese, Chinese, and Hindostani – were also found there.

Figure 1: Migrants in a yard in Paramaribo, Suriname. Source: Leiden University / KITLV Shelf Mark / Image Code 8859.

For Dutch officials, Paramaribo’s yards were rowdy and unsanitary: a moral and health hazard.[4] This official unease coincided with the knotting, across imperial formations, of scientific racism and biomedical authority in the late nineteenth century (Stoler 2010). Burgeoning state administrations, new technologies, and twinned notions of racial purity and bodily health, led to intervention in the lives of the colonized.[5] Yet despite this official unease around the yards, the Herskovits’ saw a creative ferment in them. At night in the yards, they noted, the “gossip is liveliest”; neighbours competed for acclaim in singing and story-telling and Winti priestesses led dances to the gods (Herskovits and Herskovits 1936: 15).

The Hindostani, or indentured Indians, arrived in Suriname after 1873, and slavery’s abolition. Docile labour was necessary, to keep Caribbean sugar plantations, central to European wealth from the 1600s, profitable.[6] Indians fulfilling this function in Suriname were of a larger wave of subcontinental migration to the region from the 1800s to early 1900s (Tinker 1974). The largest portion – of roughly half a million migrants from all of Asia in the 19th century – went to the British West Indies, including British Guiana, Trinidad and Tobago (Lowe 2015: 36–37). Smaller numbers ended up in Suriname, and nearby French Guadalupe and Martinique, as well as British Jamaica, St. Lucia, Nevis, St. Vincent and Grenada.

The Hindostani under Dutch jurisdiction in Suriname were to reside near plantations they worked on. But soon they were present in Paramaribo’s yards. The Herskovits saw them there, alongside African, indigenous, and Asian people. Yards hosted an expressive amalgam of diviners, healers, and ceremonial dance, part of a wider “countercultural” Caribbean religiosity (Fokken 2018: 273–275). Disparate groups, in settings such as markets, adopted linguistic patois, healing ideas, and ritual practices.[7]

This interlacing of gossip, song, and ritual included Anansi storytelling. The Anansi spider, in West Africa, has long figured in oral tales (Marshall 2010). Through slavery, and the journey between the Gold Coast and New World, this crawler became part of Caribbean folklore. The Anansi is seen as cunning and a bit of a trickster. In one version, the spider, through subterfuge, gets the sky god to part with his stories. The Anansi then shares them with everyone, democratizing what was private property. In other renderings, on both Atlantic coasts, the spider outwits larger beings, dissembling to achieve its goal.

On Caribbean plantations, the school of life was in stories. Strategic indirection vis-à-vis colonial masters was needed to survive. Work slow-downs, staged confusion, and food theft preserved strength and autonomy.[8]

*

The web motif informs literature scholar Hazel Carby’s memoir, Imperial Intimacies, on her Jamaican and British family (Carby 2019). It suggests movement and narrative as kinds of connective tissue. The migration of bodies and stories we tell are woven strands:

“The architecture of this tale has the tensile strength of a spider’s web spun across the Atlantic: spinnerets draw threads from archives, histories and memories, joining the movement of men from Britain during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars to the flood of volunteers that left the Caribbean to travel to Britain during the Second World War; the radial fibres that hold rural England and rural Jamaica in tension link the Atlantic port cities of Bristol and Kingston. Orphan threads have been left broken because I do not know how they should connect. Though I am unable to make these repairs the web weathers and holds.” (Carby 2019: 3–4)

A spider’s labyrinth, in this way, resembles our world: one that is partial and fraying, that requires constant mending, and yet has, out of this incompletion and fragility, an overall architecture.

Here, the web ensnares our fiction of society as a pure pedigree. The Anansi arachnid, for post-slavery communities, signals convergence in movement, but also, crucially, what is undone and divided: the severing of African ties via the Middle Passage; the demand to clear and harvest unfamiliar land. In the Caribbean, the conceit of primordial wholeness and categorical purity was impossible.[9]

What makes the Anansi relevant to our discussion is that it permeated beyond Afro-Caribbean groups to adjacent others.[10] Crucial here, in the West Indies, were spaces of meshing, like yards and steamships. Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman, for instance, tracks indentured workers who moved back and forth between Guiana or Trinidad and India (Bahadur 2013). Their journeys were suffused by physical danger, familial stress, and money woes. On these difficult, lengthy oceanic passages, Indians told “nansi stories, tall tales from West Africa about the spider Anansi” (Bahadur 2013: 168).

Nansi tales were picked up through Brown and Black proximity: on plantations, in créole towns, in Paramaribo’s yards.[11] From such places, the Anansi trafficked between the Caribbean and South Asia, when Indians returned home. Moving athwart, spider-like, the Anansi story took a roundabout route from Africa to Asia via the West Indies.

This non-linear movement shows how culture, a latticework, is diffuse and leaky. Some things stick and others pass through.[12] The Anansi’s travel through disparate societies embodies mutable mesh itself.[13]

*

Thus to a second illumination afforded by the Anansi motif. The spider’s web is incomplete; its constituent parts have an uneven integrity. Parts get broken by insects, damaged by rain, and weakened by wind. Its geometric components never achieve wholeness, as in imagined unity. The filaments that comprise its netting remain provisional, though still supple and supportive.

As Carby notes, webs can be broken or disconnected, yet still weather and hold. No form – be it a spider’s web or person’s body or social network – is finished. Our go-to metaphor of roots implies primary ancestry. It invites us to extrude difference, in the service of future completion. Yet the web’s layout, and our social arrangements, are not determined a priori. Many shapes are possible.

One term for this is incipience. For Adrienne Rich, in a poem of that title, the spider manifests what, at every moment, is possible:

“to know the composing of the thread
inside the spider’s body first atoms of the web
that will hang visible tomorrow” (Rich 2013: 7)

Like spider snares or star constellations, we exist in unsettled adjacency. Humans are akin to webs or galaxies: matter coexisting in irresolution. Our stories are yet to be told from connections not yet made.

*

This brings us to the third part of this story, around the labour of connective care. The metaphor of roots invites a native-alien distinction. In India, America, and Europe, others are conceived of as infestations: as menaces to uproot. The spider image illustrates the limits of this thinking. Webs are always, somewhere in their physical structure, fraying or damaged. A spider’s tracery may be full of holes yet still serve as a place to rest, feed, and thrive.

The banal but necessary work of life – nourishing, upholding, repairing, patching – is the spider’s lot. And it is also that of many people who comprise an unseen infrastructure of support. Across many societies, it is migrants who clean, cook, and care. As was seen during the covid pandemic, the state can be secondary to our well-being. What matters beyond official infrastructures are grids of kin, friends, and strangers. We exist in the criss-crossing of migrants and (often female) dependencies. Authorities tear and tangle – yet depend upon – these webs. They harass foreigners and underpay women, without whom society would collapse.

Our stories – our relations, too – are passing forms in a larger design. A web will split and dissolve. A person gets ill and vanishes. Our societies fragment and disperse. Yet we still respond and recuperate to stitch something new. The spider constantly moves around and mends the form which supports it. For us, mending is both the manual activity of weaving fibres, and the aspect of interpersonal care. Maintenance becomes a practical and moral capacity: a means to live, and to tell the story of how we ought to live.

The Anansi figure and spider web thus draw us to our present. It not only tells us how we, across time and space, came to be. It offers a vision of what we might be. Connected through sticky links, not tethered to roots. In process and undefined, not pre-set as fixed types.

Continue reading here.


Notes

[1] On the yoking of social and terrestrial images in modern polities, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980]). They build off the figurative contrast between arboreal, or tree-like formations – centralized and hierarchical – and rhizomatic, or more diffuse, modes. For Deleuze and Guattari, the unified or “molar” tree, and the nomadic unboundedness of the “molecular” rhizome, stand in for inter-dependent but distinctive ways of being.

[2] Benedict Anderson succinctly captures how passionate patriotism or “political love can be deciphered from the ways in which languages describe its object: either in the vocabulary of kinship (motherland, Vaterland, patria) or that of home… Both idioms denote something to which one is naturally tied… nation-ness is assimilated to skin color, gender, parentage and birth-era – all those things one can not help” (Anderson 1991: 143). George Mosse elaborates how the Vaterland relies upon cultivating embodied affects, and circumscribing affinities: “the supremacy of the fatherland over the individual subordinated personal desires to the collective consciousness – the Volk, the ‘people’” (Mosse 1985: 72).

[3] The suturing together of an ethnic and religious public and its putative territorial roots is not confined to the west. It is also central to postcolonial nationalisms. For a discussion of the centrality of Bharat Mata (India Mother) in contemporary Hindu nationalism – a feminized polity anchored in a fixed land, or bhoomi, that must be aggressively defended against foreign, especially Muslim depredations – see Chatterjee (1993: 113–114) and Hansen (1999: 82-83, 109-112).

[4] In Dutch colonial newspapers, and in governmental reports from the late nineteenth century, yards were “pig sheds” that were “filthy and dirty” and full of “constant discord” (Fokken 2018: 272–275). These apparent hotbeds of strife were read through the liberal discourse of improvement: yards were communal spaces precluding individual responsibility.

[5] In the colonial archive of this period, “intimacy between contracted emigrants, indigenous people, slaves, and slave-descendent peoples are referenced by negative means, in cautionary rhetoric and statements of prohibition with respect to possible contacts between colonized groups, all implying the fear and anxiety of racial proximity in a context of mixture and unstable boundaries” (Lowe 2015: 34).

[6] On how the Caribbean sugar trade figured into European wealth, and how racialized plantations figured, if elliptically and implicitly, in Western art and political thought, see Buck-Morss 2000; Mintz 1985; Trouillot 2015 [1995].

[7] Festivity’s incorporative aspect – the way that it invites disparate forms of participation – troubled colonial authorities in the Caribbean. Madhavi Kale describes the celebration of Hosay (Muharram) by Hindus, Muslims, and Afro-Trinidadians in colonial Trinidad. It was seen as suspect because     it dissolved so-called “traditional forms of Indian cultural expression” (Kale 1994: 85). In turn, this rebuke to cultural continuity and segmentation was a political threat. The boisterous confidence of such festivity was dangerous to colonial authorities, a sign that Indian labour was “unpredictable, possibly ungovernable” (Kale 1994: 86).

[8] For a broader discussion of such modes of resistance prevalent amongst workers in the Caribbean, including Asian indentured laborers, see Kale 1994 and Marshall 2010. On a general discussion of quotidian or everyday forms of resistance among subaltern peoples, see Scott 1990.

[9] It is useful here to distinguish rhetorical enmity between social groups, and the prosaic mixture that belies claims of separation. Aisha Khan notes, for example, that a social discourse that posits Indo- and Afro-Trinidadian enmity cannot explain the offspring produced in sexual encounters between disparate groups Khan (2003: 9). Khan’s observation, of Indo-Caribbean anxiety at sexual mixing with other racial groups, is also evident in the documentary Jahaji Music (Sharma 2007). In it, “chutney-soca”, a hybrid musical genre deriving from soca and calypso and using Indian instruments, is marked by sexual innuendo and suggestive dancing, drawing the participation of Indo-Trinidadians as well as their ire.

[10] The prevalence of the Anansi motif within Indo-Caribbean groups can be seen at different levels, from the naming of people in the community as “Nancy”, to Anansi-like motifs of tricksters transgressing hierarchies in literary texts by descendants of indentured Indian migrants (Sidnell 2000).

[11] Nayan Shah draws our attention to the forms of “migrant sociability” and “stranger intimacy” in “zones of transit” such as the port colony (Shah 2011: 55).

[12] Plurality is, despite rote liberal applause, usually a fraught social reality. Tejaswini Niranjana has written of the historical censure by Indian nationalists of women who underwent indenture in Trinidad from the second half of the 19th century, and the contemporary anxiety at blurred song-dance genres like “chutney-soca” (Niranjana 2006). Women’s participation in the ludic and erotic genres spawned by the encounter with Afro-Caribbeans competes with the patriarchal refrain of decency and domesticity. For a further take on the ways in which “chutney” music among Indo-Caribbeans in Trinidad figures into notions of propriety and hybridity, see Mohammed 2002: 178–179.

[13] A parallel analysis of mesh as metaphor for sociality is Tim Ingold’s notion of “meshwork” as “entangled lines of life, growth and movement” through which action emerges (Ingold 2011: 63).


References

Bahadur, Gaiutra (2013): Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Carby, Hazel V. (2019): Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, Lonon: Verso.

Fokken, Margaret (2018): Beyond Being Koelies and Kantráki: Constructing Hindostani Identities in Suriname in the Era of Indenture, 1873-1921, Groningen: Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.

Herskovits, Melville and Herskovits, Frances (1936): Surinamese Folk-lore, New York: Columbia University Press.

Lowe, Lisa (2015): The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press.

Marshall, Emily Zobel (2010): “Anansi, Eshu, and Legba: Slave Resistance and the West African Trickster”, in: Hoermann, Raphael and Mackenthun, Gesa (eds.), Human Bondage in the Cultural Contact Zone: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Slavery and Its Discourses, Münster: Waxmann, 171–186.

Rich, Adrienne (2013): Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971-2012, New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Stoler, Ann Laura (2010): Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Tinker, Hugh (1974): A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830-1920, London: Oxford University Press.


About the author

Ajay Gandhi (Mecila Senior Fellow, 2021) is an Assistant Professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His interests are in urban, political, and economic anthropology, with a focus on South Asia. He was earlier a Research Fellow and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany, and received his PhD in Anthropology from Yale University. He has published on transactional and material forms, postcolonial jurisdiction, political and urban violence, and social aesthetics and concepts. 


Citation: Ajay Gandhi, The Porous and the Pure: An Artifactual History of Ties Between Asia, Europe, and Latin America, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 22.04.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/56829


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (April 22, 2025). The Porous and the Pure: An Artifactual History of Ties Between Asia, Europe, and Latin America. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved May 19, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13s6f


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