The Colonial Ethnological Line: Timor and the Racial Geography of the Malay Archipelago

In this chapter I examine the epistemic practices, theories, and classificatory imaginaries through which colonial boundaries in Island Southeast Asia became, or failed to become, racialised during the twentieth century. By looking at the case of East Timor, I explore the classificatory work required to hold racial typologies together with spatial distributions of colonial significance. This viewpoint builds on, and contributes to, a growing body of literature in colonial studies and the history of science and geography. Since the 1990s scholars have been exploring the close ties between mapping practices, colonial power, and cartographic representations in the period of European national and colonial expansionism.1 Cartographic inscriptions of imageries of human difference may have a deeper history in European mapping traditions. Yet racial mapping as such gained momentum during the nineteenth century, prompted by the establishment of geography and anthropology as companion scientific disciplines, and the strengthening of colonialism, racialism, and nationalist ideologies of ethnic identity.