serving the influence of custom” (Furnivall 1956,
3). Consequently, while colonial policies appear to
be homogeneous, colonial practices come to differ.
The analysis of the latter therefore becomes the
main focus for understanding the effects that the
former had on the structuring of social roles and
functions of individual categories.
A second question that must be considered in the
context of the study of the effects of colonial poli-
cies and practices on the local populace is that
colonial partitions brought about the breaking up
of cultural areas which were demarcated by the
presence of specific values and norms derived from
the spread and acceptance of religious beliefs based
on either a historical revelation or theophany (Islam,
Christianity, and, to a certain extent, Buddhism) or
on a philosophical-gnomic system (Confucianism).
Although these often were either influenced by or
incorporated local customs in the domain of ritual,
overall they continued to preserve their intrinsic
structural semantics. Disregarding completely the
contours of colonial partitions and of modern
political geography in this region, in fact, it is pos-
sible to distinguish four areas defined by the pro-
minence of a particular religion: the Theravada
Buddhist nations of continental Southeast Asia
(Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia); the
Muslim countries of archipelagic Southeast Asia
(Malaysia, Indonesia); the Christian areas of
Oceania (Australia, New Guinea, and the Pacific);
and the Confucian and Shinto areas of China and
Japan respectively. The borders of these areas are
not sharp but rather blur and overlap current state
borders so that religious enclaves may be found
beyond colonial and, later, national boundaries.
The implementation of colonial policies, however,
notwithstanding the cultural-religious-ethnic het-
erogeneity of the regions in question, was homoge-
neous and uniform. Colonial governments considered
colonial peoples as a shapeless mass or entity and
as a mere “territorial” extension of the colonial
power. The policies of the mother country were
extended indiscriminately to the colonial periphery.
Women in colonial settings came to epitomize the
“colonized mass” as a whole. Since reproduction
was the means of perpetuation and transmission of
genetic/ethnic markers, it was necessary to control
those considered to be the bearers of racial features,
namely women. Policies were designed to target the
maintenance of ethnic boundaries and perpetuate
European dominance. By controlling women, both
native and European, through laws regulating mixed
marriages, prostitution, and education, it was pos-
sible to draw and maintain distinctive ethnic
east asia, southeast asia, australia and oceania 63boundaries between the colonizer and the colo-
nized, which constituted the basis for the structur-
ing of political and social relations of dominance
and dependency.
The absence of policies discriminating among the
heterogeneity of local cultural realities, although
indicating the instrumental function of women in
colonial settings, makes the task of defining the
effects of those policies, particularly on native
women, extremely difficult. While European women
continued to live within the boundaries of their
autochthonous cultural-religious templates even in
colonial settings, the status and role of native
women presumably underwent radical changes.
The analysis of precolonial narratives and of socio-
economic and political patterns in the areas in
question reveals that women played an important
participatory role in society that complemented
that of their male counterparts. Buddhism, Islam,
Confucianism, and Animism all acknowledged the
important social and economic function of women
(Furnivall 1956, 13). It follows that the policies
enacted by the Christian colonizers profoundly
altered the precolonial balance and complementar-
ity underlying gender relations.Strange bedfellows: religion
and colonial/imperial policies
and practices
Religion and religious institutions have been
regarded by scholars of all times as playing a func-
tional role in the creation of colonies and empires.
The expansion of and conversion to the religion of
the colonizer were deemed or envisaged as means
to facilitate and foster the stability of colonial rule.
Such an approach, however, has been unable to
account for the ideological discontinuities and per-
sisting dialectics that characterized colonial settings.
As a matter of fact, religious beliefs, values, and
norms, sanctioned and transmitted by ritual repeti-
tion informed the actions of both colonizers and
colonized, shaping particular socioeconomic and
political organizations and engendering perceptions
of difference and epistemological misunderstand-
ings. If one assumes religion to be the constantly
changing product of continuous processes of adap-
tation to a particular ecosystem, which in turn
prompt parallel processes of internal group inte-
gration through the linkages of language and the
conceptions of time and space, in other words as a
system of survival and perpetuation, it appears that
religion plays a foundational, rather than func-
tional role in patterning and structuring cultural,
political, and socioeconomic templates. Religious