bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ethnicity as Practice? A Comment on Bentley
Authors: Yelvington Kevin A.
Published: June 2009

Confronted with the reality of cargo cults, postcolonial politics, disunited working classes, and the United Nations seminars on racism, theorists of different persuasions have found themselves in the last twenty years having to explain—or explain away—ethnic phenomena. In his recent article in this journal (CSSH29:1, 24–55), G. Carter Bentley1 points out the deficiencies in the two pervading schools of thought on ethnicity and fruitfully advocates applying Bourdieu's concepts of “practice” and “habitus” to the study of ethnicity. This appropriation of Bourdieu's concept of the habitus to the study of ethnicity is surely innovative, and Bentley argues effectively that we should look at practice for an objective “handle” on ethnicity. Nevertheless, Bentley's approach suffers for two reasons.
On Being Woken Up: The Dreamtime in Anthropology and in Australian Settler Culture
Authors: Wolfe Patrick
Published: June 2009

In the wake of decolonisation, an increasing number of analyses turned the ethnographic gaze onto anthropology itself. Humbler postcolonial strategies emerged, designed to democratise anthropology's intercultural staging by means of an exchange of dialogue (Crapanzano 1977, 1980; Dwyer 1977, 1982). Though sensitive to the backdrop of neocolonialism, however, these strategies largely ignored anthropology's own cultural genealogy in favour of a more particularistic focus on the scene of ethnographic interaction.
Hot Literacy in Cold Societies: A Comparative Study of the Sacred Value of Writing
Authors: Niezen R. W.
Published: June 2009

The argument that the presence or absence of widespread literacy constitutes the central criterion to distinguish “savage” from “domesticated” society, presented by Goody in a number of works (1968, 1977, 1986, 1987), makes close associations between alphabetic literacy and the growth of knowledge and between restricted literacy and traditional societies. In this essay, I will challenge these associations by presenting material from medieval Europe, in which the milieu of restricted literacy is creative, and from Muslim Africa, in which widespread literacy does not lead to criticism or the revision of basic religious tenets. Second, I will deal with some of the reasons for the vitality of Islamic reform in West Africa, concerning myself principally with the impact of Western education on village society and the response of reformers through the promotion of Arabic literacy. A consideration of Western education and acculturation is vital for an understanding of scriptural reformed Islam's appeal. The latter issue will emerge from the material to be presented, but I will deal exclusively with the literacy debate for the moment.
Dismembering and Remembering the Nation: The Semantics of Political Violence in Venezuela
Authors: Coronil Fernando , Skurski Julie
Published: June 2009

Although political violence has played a central part in the formation of nations, its historical constitution and its role in representing nations havereceived scant attention. All too frequently the explanation of violence is equated with the identification of its causes, its form is accounted for by its function, and its function is seen in instrumental terms; violence is reduced to a practical tool used by opposing social actors in pursuit of conflicting ends. Whether treated as a cause, function, or instrument, violence is generally assumed rather than examined in its concreteness. Little attention is paid to its specific manifestations, to the way its effects are inseparably related to the means through which it is exerted, and to the meanings that inform its deployment and interpretation. In contrast, typological approaches that postulate a correspondence between types of societies and forms of violence often recognize the opacity of violence yet lose sight of the historical depth and specificity of its manifestations.
The Redistributive Role of Government: Economic Regulation in Old Régime France and England
Authors: Root Hilton L.
Published: June 2009

The lobbying activities of private groups had an important redistributive influence on national economic policies in both England and France; however, the different organization of government in the two nations gave a particular shape and structure to the redistributive character of national politics. In England, Parliament's role in the legislative process made gaining economic concessions from the government long and difficult. During the eighteenth century, the English government's role was increasingly limited to adjudicating the claims of influential but conflicting groups. In France, by contrast, the government's economic decisions were neither subject to parliamentary scrutiny nor to open public discussion. Whereas the rules of the redistributional game in eighteenth-century England were increasingly public knowledge, the administrative and political process that allowed the French government to pursue its mercantilist programs was private. Furthermore, the rules changed according to ministerial whim. As one historian put it, public law was a forbidden domain, “a mystery reserved to the king and his ministers,” permitting select members of privileged clans, rather than broadly defined interest groups, to enjoy the benefits of government patronage. Although the creation of sophisticated interests and competitive lobbies allowed the English Parliament to provide special favors to particular industries during the eighteenth century, unlike the French executive, neither Parliament nor the English executive had the discretionary authority to distribute monopoly rents to particular ministerial or royal favorites. In England the government's distribution of spoils followed procedures more open to the English political elite as a whole; still, corruption was more pervasive in English public administration than in France, where executive supervision of central government agents was more comprehensive.
Life and Death in a Chinese Famine: Infanticide as a Demographic Consequence of the 1935 Yellow River Flood
Authors: Li Lillian M.
Published: June 2009

Famine mortality has a special interest for those interested in population history. After Malthus wroteAn Essay on the Principle of Populationin 1798, famine was viewed as an event that “checks” population growth, perhaps the inevitable consequence of overpopulation. Although demographers have recently tried to show that a single famine or demographic crisis cannot retard population growth in the long run (Watkins and Menken 1985; Bongaarts and Cain 1982), yet famine, to the extent that it exists today, still constitutes a most dramatic demographic event.
Religion and Reproduction among English Dissenters: Gloucestershire Baptists in the Demographic Revolution
Authors: Urdank Albion M.
Published: June 2009

The growth of English Nonconformity during the era of the demographic revolution (circa1750–1850) has long been regarded as an impediment to the reconstruction of reproductive behavior. Historical demographers have relied heavily on Church of England registers of baptisms, burials, and marriages, while treating Protestant dissenters from the Church of England secondarily, as a factor of underestimation in the Anglican record. Such treatment suggests that religious culture played no independent role in determining population growth. This assumption seems problematic, however, considering the central role that social historians have assigned evangelical dissent to the emergence of modern English society and the somewhat greater place that religion has occupied in demographic studies of populations in continental Europe, the United States, and the third world.
A Backlands Saints in the Big City: Urban Transformations of the Padre Cícero Tales
Authors: Slater Candace
Published: June 2009

The massive and ongoing exodus to cities from the countryside, a fact of life throughout Latin America today, includes Brazil. Although as late as 1960 that nation was a primarily agricultural country, over two-thirds of the population presently live in urban centers.
Slavery's Impasse: Slave Prostitutes, Small-Time Mistresses, and the Brazilian Law of 1871
Authors: Graham Sandra Lauderdale
Published: June 2009

In March 1871 the young slave woman Honorata went to police in the Rio de Janeiro parish of Sacramento to complain formally that her mistress had forced her into prostitution from the age 12. She testified that she was sent on various occasions to houses of known ill-repute “to be at the window receiving visitors.” At other times her mistress arranged the assignations herself, instructing Honorata to dress and go with a client. Between these stints at brothels, and sometimes at the same time, she was hired out as a domestic, usually as laundress or cook. The court record described Honorata as nineteen years old, black, a Creole born in the province of Bahia, and brought to Rio de Janeiro by her mistress some years earlier, unmarried and a domestic servant.
The Misrule of Law: Land and Usurpation in Brazil
Authors: Holston James
Published: June 2009

How do we conceive of law if litigation does not aim to settle conflict, if it is a means to perpetuate and obscure rather than resolve disputes? In this essay, I shall demonstrate the power of an unsettling norm: The Brazilian legal system aims neither to solve land conflicts justly nor to decide their legal merits through adjudication. My argument stresses intention and norm because land law in Brazil is so confusing, indecisive, and dysfunctional in its own terms that one suspects that the cause of these characteristics is not incompetence or corruption alone but rather the force of a set of intentions concerning its construction and application different from those aimed at resolution. Thus, I argue that Brazilian law regularly produces unresolvable procedural and substantive complexity in land conflicts; that this jural-bureaucratic irresolution dependably initiates extrajudicial solutions; and that these political impositions inevitably legalize usurpations of one sort or another. In short, land law in Brazil promotes conflict, not resolution, because it sets the terms through which encroachments are reliably legalized. It is thus an instrument of calculated disorder by means of which illegal practices produce law and extralegal solutions are smuggled into the judicial process. In this paradoxical context, law itself is a means of manipulation, complication, stratagem, and violence by which all parties—public and private, dominant and subaltern—further their interests. It therefore defines an arena of conflict in which distinctions between legal and illegal are temporary and their relations unstable.
The Spread of Literacy in a Latin American Peasant Society: Oaxaca, Mexico, 1890 to 1980
Authors: Kowalewski Stephen A. , Saindon Jacqueline J.
Published: June 2009

The object of this essay has been to help examine spatiotemporal variation in literacy. The research reported here centered on the Valley of Oaxaca, an agricultural region in southern Mexico, during the period from 1890 to 1980. The data consist of a systematic compilation of tax and voting lists from the nineteenth century, census responses from 1890 to 1980, community ethnographies, published histories and biographies, and government reports. Attending to both the spatial and the temporal scales of events and causes was methodologically important for this research.
Portuguese and Chinese Maritime Imperialism: Camões'sLusiadsand Luo Maodeng'sVoyage of the San Bao Eunuch
Authors: Finlay Robert
Published: June 2009

Shortly before Vasco da Gama returned to Lisbon in September 1499 from his great voyage to India, a Florentine merchant in the Portuguese capital reported troubling rumors that ‘certain vessels of white Christians’ had visited the port of Calicut on the Malabar coast only a couple of generations previously. If true, this would mean that some other European power had beaten Portugal in its long search for a maritime route to the Indies. After speculating that the mysterious mariners were Germans (although ‘it seems to me that we should have some notice about them’) or Russians (‘if they have a port there’), the merchant concluded that ‘on the arrival of the captain [da Gama] we may learn who these people are.’
On the Colonization of Amerindian Languages and Memories: Renaissance Theories of Writing and the Discontinuity of the Classical Tradition
Authors: Mignolo Walter D.
Published: June 2009

When George Balandier proposed his theoretical approach to a colonial situation, the colonization of language was not an issue that piqued the interest of scholars in history, sociology, economics, or anthropology, which were the primary disciplines targeted in his article. When some fifteen years later Michel Foucault underlined the social and historical significance of language (‘l'énoncé*’) and discursive formation, the colonization of language was still not an issue to those attentive to the archaeology of knowledge. Such an archaeology, founded on the paradigmatic example generally understood as the Western tradition, overlooked the case history in which an archaeology of discursive formation would have led to the very root of the massive colonization of language which began in the sixteenth century with the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires.
Conversion and Demonism: Colonial Christian Discourse and Religion in Sri Lanka
Authors: Scott David
Published: June 2009

Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, it has been difficult for anthropology to avoid the fact that its own discourse is ever entangled in a whole Western archive. What became clear, of course, was that the categories through which anthropology constructs descriptions and analyses of the social discourses and practices of non-Western peoples are themselves participants in a network of relations of knowledge and power. Interestingly enough, however, whereas the general import of this Foucauldian thesis has now been quickly assimilated, its challenge has hardly been taken up in terms of tracing out the lines of formation of specific anthropological, or, let us say, anthropologized, concepts.
The Rise of Absolutism and Noble Rebellion in Early Modern Habsburg Austria, 1570 to 1620
Authors: MacHardy Karin J.
Published: June 2009

The most crucial problem confronting historians of early modern Europe is the nature of absolutism and its relationship to society. At the center of scholarly debate have been the questions of the social and economic bases of absolutism. What determined whether state policies could be successfully implemented? Were rulers dependent on the nobility, and did they therefore act in its interest; or did they achieve independence from the dominant class by supporting the interests of a new bourgeoisie or by balancing interests between the two groups? Closely related to these concerns is the problem of how to explain the causes and nature of the numerous rebellions by the elites during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusions in Colonial Southeast Asia
Authors: Stoler Ann
Published: June 2009

This essay is concerned with the construction of colonial categories and national identities and with those people who ambiguously straddled, crossed, and threatened these imperial divides.1It begins with a story aboutmétissage(interracial unions) and the sorts of progeny to which it gave rise (referred to asmétis, mixed bloods) in French Indochina at the turn of the century. It is a story with multiple versions about people whose cultural sensibilities, physical being, and political sentiments called into question the distinctions of difference which maintained the neat boundaries of colonial rule. Its plot and resolution defy the treatment of European nationalist impulses and colonial racist policies as discrete projects, since here it was in the conflation of racial category, sexual morality, cultural competence and national identity that the case was contested and politically charged. In a broader sense, it allows me to address one of the tensions of empire which this essay only begins to sketch: the relationship between the discourses of inclusion, humanitarianism, and equality which informed liberal policy at the turn of the century in colonial Southeast Asia and the exclusionary, discriminatory practices which were reactive to, coexistent with, and perhaps inherent in liberalism itself.2
Coping with Global Debt Crises: Debt Settlements, 1820 to 1986
Authors: Suter Christian , Stamm Hanspeter
Published: June 2009

The settlement of the external debt of insolvent sovereign borrowers has become one of the most important issues in relations between the north and south since the outbreak of the global debt crisis in the early 1980s.For the past eight years representatives of governments and international organizations, bankers, and scientists have suggested several proposals and plans to solve the present debt crisis. The most prominent schemes in this respect are the Baker Plan of 1985, which suggested massive new credits for the most highly indebted developing countries, and the recently adopted Brady Plan, which proposes partial debt discounts and reductions in interest rates. Both of these debt settlement proposals were initiated by the United States and are supported by the other principal creditor countries. However, despite the ten years of crisis management, world leaders have not yet agreed upon a longterm solution to the current debt problems. In the history of the capitalist world economy, the current problems of coping with a global debt crisis do not represent a unique event. Rather, recent empirical studies demonstrate that sovereign borrowers have experienced many instances of debt-servicing difficulties during the past 150 years (Eichengreen and Portes 1986; White 1986; Eichengreen and Lindert 1989; Marichal 1989; Suter 1989).
Travel-Capitalism: The Structure of Europe and the Advent of the Tourist
Authors: Böröcz József
Published: June 2009

In one of the twenty lines it allocates to a description of Hungary, the nearly 300-page edition in 1877 of A Satchel Guide for the Vacation Tourist in Europe summarizes the architectural and aesthetic worth of the country's capital city for sightseeing American visitors by pronouncing that, in Budapest, “the churches and the public buildings are of no particular interest” (Satchel 1877:194). Twenty years later, the 1897 edition of that same guidebook takes a more amiable but scarcely enthusiastic pitch, allowing that “some of the new public buildings are elegant in their way” (Satchel 1897:184). Twenty-seven years later—following a world war, two revolutions, and a foreign military occupation resulting in the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy—the presence of what has remained of Hungary is noted by an increase to eighty-one lines (Satchel 1924). Except for a one-sentence reference to a Danubian steamboat trip downstream from Pressburg (Bratislava, Pozsony), the entire description remains restricted to Budapest. Nearly two generations after the pronouncement of the disparaging opinion above, the 1924 text notices that Budapest's “picture at sunset is one of the most striking in Europe” (Satchel 1924:272) and that “it is not only the most considerable city of Hungary, but is probably to be numbered among the four most beautiful capitals of Europe” (1924:273).
Free Market Metaphor: The Historical Dynamics of Stamp Collecting
Authors: Gelber Steven M.
Published: June 2009

Stamp collecting and industrial capitalism in the United States emerged simultaneously in the mid-nineteenth century. England issued the first government postage stamp in 1840, and other nations quickly adopted the idea. The United States printed its first official stamp in 1847, although it was preceded by the provisionals issued by local postmasters. Postage stamps were a product of the industrial revolution. The adoption of the prepaid penny post in England, while opposed by the General Post Office, was widely supported by large merchants who understood that a low-cost, single-rate system was vital to the communication demanded by an increasingly national market. The adhesive label was originally conceived by the English postal reformer, Rowland Hill, as a convenience for illiterates who would not be able to write addresses on the official envelopes that he preferred as proof of prepayment. Within a decade, almost every major nation in the world had borrowed this device, which became a symbol of the economic transformation of the nineteenth century. I would argue that the collecting of these tokens was a microcosmic performance of the system that created them. Stamp collectors took on many of the key roles of actors in the market economy and played out various conflicts embodied in the larger society in the philatelic arena.
Culture and History: Subregional Variation Among the Maya
Authors: Goldin Liliana R. , Rosenbaum Brenda
Published: June 2009

Mayas from Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico, narrate strikingly similar stories that are part of their oral tradition. These similarities reflect the fact that Mayas from both areas share a common cultural tradition dating to pre-Hispanic times and a basic pattern of beliefs central to the Mesoamerican cultural complex. At the same time, the stories contain notable differences that can be explained historically and traced both to pre-Hispanic or post-Hispanic developments as they combined with ecological conditions. In this study, we compare the present expression of a series of Earth Lord accounts and explain interesting differences that we observed between two groups of Maya Indians. Our results suggest that the differences can be traced to the diverse ways by which peasants are incorporated at various degrees into the capitalist system, mainly through trade or through wage labor or combinations of these with other forms of production.
Classes as Clients of the State: Landlords and Labourers in Andalusia
Authors: Djurfeldt Göran
Published: June 2009

This is a study of landlordism, agricultural labourers, and the State of Andalusia in southern Spain. This region, a classical case of landlordism, deviates from the typically West European agrarian structure dominated by the family farm. Andalusia's history centers on the conflict over land between a majority of landless peasants and a minority of powerful landlords, which was one of the main causes of the Spanish civil war. This study deals with two periods covering nearly fifty years of this latifundist system and its conflictridden relations of production. It examines the freezing of the agrarian structure for nearly forty years by the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and the adaptation of social and agrarian policy for the next ten years by the socialists. In other words, this is the story of how the agricultural laborers of Andalusia were transformed in less than one-half century from “peasants without land” to “clients of the welfare state” dependent on the social policies of the state.
From Citizenship to Négritude: “Making a Difference” in Elite Ideologies of Colonized Francophone West Africa
Authors: Lambert Michael C.
Published: June 2009

By examining three historical stages between 1914 and the late 1950s in the development of African political ideology in Francophone West Africa, this essay will explore the problem represented by the category of the colonized.1This category, first formulated in 1961 by Frantz Fanon, has increasingly been used to revise understandings of African ideologies formed before 1960 in terms of political economy. Indeed, ever since Fanon published his polemical,The Wretched of the Earth(1968), the rage of the colonized has been naturalized in academic literature asthereaction to colonization. Yet in arguing that the rage of the peasants did not characterize the reaction of the “most completely” colonized (the elites and merchants), Fanon acknowledged that rage did not define the position of his elite predecessors. Fanon's work appeared in the twilight of the colonial era not as a dispassionate analysis but as a call to action. He intended to awaken the peasant's rage, which he considered the legitimate and local reaction to colonialism, within the elites, who did not share this attitude towards the colonizer.
Agricultural Slavery in the Northern Colonies and in Classical Athens: Some Comparisons
Authors: Rosivach Vincent J.
Published: June 2009

Our view of agricultural slavery tends to be dominated by the plantation model familiar from modern slavery, especially in the Caribbean and the Cotton Kingdom of the southern United States. The well-documented plantation model is in fact a useful comparative tool which, when properly used, can advance our understanding of the less well-documented Roman latifundist slavery. This plantation model is all but irrelevant, however, to the very different slave regime of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuriesb.c., and one must look elsewhere for a similarly well-documented model to use for the purpose of comparative analysis of Athenian agricultural slavery. Such a model, I would suggest, can be found in the agricultural slave regime of the northern North American colonies (New England and, to a lesser degree, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) in the second half of the eighteenth century. As we shall see, this less familiar regime of slavery in these colonies displays striking similarities to the agricultural slave regime of classical Athens. We will examine some of these similarities and indicate, by illustration, some of the ways by which a knowledge of northern agricultural slavery can be of use to the student of Athenian social history.
Tea Talk: Violent Measures in the Discursive Practices of Sri Lanka's Estate Tamils
Authors: Daniel E. Valentine
Published: June 2009

At the most manifest level, this paper is about agricultural and agronomic terminology as found in the discourse of Tamil-speaking workers on Sri Lanka's tea plantations or tea estates, as they are called there. My use of the terms agricultural and agronomic in this context is admittedly idiosyncratic. In the tea estates of Sri Lanka, two kinds of agricultural (in the unmarked sense) terminology are in use, one belonging to managerial agriculture and the other to folk agriculture. But by and large, the tea estate is the regime of managerial agriculture. Whereas in village India, folk agriculture prevails. I call the class of terms belonging to managerial agriculture, agronomic terminology, and reserve the term “agricultural terminology” for the domain of folk agriculture. By analyzing four communicative events that I observed and recorded on tea estates in Sri Lanka, I attempt to show how these two terminological worlds interact. The nature of that interaction is such that the dominant terminology of agronomy may be seen to be deconstructed by the subdominant terminology of village agriculture.
Railway Workers and Relational History: Arabs and Jews in British-Ruled Palestine
Authors: Lockman Zachary
Published: June 2009

During the period of Ottoman rule over the Arab East, from 1516 until the end of the First World War, the term Palestine (Filastin) denoted a geographic region, part of what the Arabs called al-Sham (historic Syria), rather than a specific Ottoman province or administrative district. By contrast, from 1920 to 1948, Palestine existed as a distinct and unified political (and to a considerable extent economic) entity with well-defined boundaries. Ruled by Britain under a so-called mandate granted by the League of Nations, Palestine in that period encompassed an Arab majority and a Jewish minority.
Changing Russian Political Culture in the 1990s: Parasites, Paradigms, and Perestroika
Authors: Lempert David
Published: June 2009

This essay reflects a year of field work in what was then the Soviet Union, in a study regarded as the first ethnographic research conducted by a Western anthropologist in a Russian city. The Russians are particularly important for anthropological study, not only because of recent historic events indicating changes in their political and economic structures but because they are one of several groups of northern people organized into urban industrial societies characterized by varying amounts of mass violence. This violence has been employed in subjugating minority peoples within their normal borders and outside of their borders, in absorbing those cultures, and has taken on the various forms of genocide, purges, propaganda and fear.
En/gendering Language: The Poetics of Tamil Identity
Authors: Ramaswamy Sumathi
Published: June 2009

Since the publication of Benedict Anderson'sImagined Communitiesalmost a decade ago, historians and anthropologists have become accustomed to think of the nation—that bedrock of our existence as moderns—as an imagined entity.1Yet it is problematic, at least to this author, that while the spotlight is (once again) on the nation, the other key actor in Anderson's formulation, the language through which a specific nation is subjectively conceived and imagined, appears to have been relegated to the sidelines. By proposing that languages, too, be considered cultural and symbolic entities that are themselves enrolled into projects of imagination, this essay assumes its beginnings in questions provoked by Anderson's analysis. Because languages themselves are subjected to multiple imaginations, how indeed can they enable the harmonious and contention-free imagination of communities? How indeed do they acquire the capacity to generate feelings of “contemporaneity,” “solidarity,” and “belonging,” as Anderson proposes? Do they not just as well have the power to scatter and disaggregate such sentiments? These are questions occasioned by more than just theoretical curiosity. In many parts of the world, the diverse imaginations that cling to languages have frequently sparked off contestation, divisiveness, and even violence, especially in multi-lingual pluralities like India, the focus of this article.
Time- and Age-Awareness in Early Modern Russia
Authors: Kaiser Daniel H. , Engel Peyton
Published: June 2009

Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie has observed that in medieval Montaillou ”time was always vague,” so that “history was absent or almost absent from Montaillou culture.” According to the inquisition record on which LeRoy Ladurie depended, Montaillou villagers often found it difficult to determine exactly how long ago a given event had occurred. They described past events as having happened “three or four years ago,” “seventeen or eighteen years ago,” “twenty or twenty-four years since.” Others quantified the past by referring to “the time when the heretics predominated in Montaillou, before the round-up by the Inquisition in Carcassonne.” Unsurprisingly, the same imprecision governed their sense of age. In rural Montaillou, the rhythm of transhumance more readily marked time than did any abstract calendar (LeRoy Ladurie 1979:280–1).
Gender, Culture, and Capitalism: Women and the Remaking of Islamic “Tradition” in a Sudanese Village
Authors: Bernal Victoria
Published: June 2009

Have women in third-world societies been made second-class citizens by colonialism, incorporation into the capitalist world economy, and class formation? Or are women relegated to less prestigious and less economically rewarding roles by patriarchal ideologies and practices the origins of which lie in indigenous cultures? Much of the anthropological scholarship on women can be divided between those who emphasize the relative importance of capitalism (for example, Leacock 1981; Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Boserup 1970) and those who emphasize culture (for example, Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Schlegel 1990; Rosaldo 1974) as determinants of gender roles and relations.
A Community Model of African Politics: Illustrations from Nigeria and Tanzania
Authors: Hyden Goran , Williams Donald C.
Published: June 2009

The first years following independence in Africa were an exciting time for scholars who rushed off to observe the emerging politics of new states across the continent. The analytical frameworks these scholars brought with them for the purpose of interpreting what they saw were largely borrowed from mainstream models derived from the study of American politics that were widely popular at the time. However, soon after the early independence era (1956–1966), it became obvious that a sole focus on the formal structures and functions of state and society revealed little about the actual practice of politics. Across the continent, governments were suffering from constitutional failures, an inability to offer a consistent application of regulatory mechanisms or enforceable law; and few states could even extract sufficient revenue to support either pre-existing colonial-era governmental structures or the many new ambitious projects undertaken by politicians soon after independence.
The Maritime Household in Northern Europe
Authors: Byron Reginald
Published: June 2009

The forms and processes of local-level social organisation seen today in fishing communities in northern Europe can be fully appreciated only after their history is recognized and explored. Until the middle of this century, the predominant form of organisation was the joint maritime household, which involved men and women in separate sets of collaborative activities. With changing technology, rising standards of living, and the intervention of the institutions of modernity, women everywhere in northern Europe have been able to disengage themselves from their former obligations, doing so largely in order to realise their aspirations for domestic independence. The men, however, continue to own their boats in partnerships and to pool their labour, drawing upon relationships of kinship, affinity, and neighbourhood as economic and social recnnrces
The Crises of Atlantic Port Cities 1880 to 1920
Authors: Konvitz Josef W.
Published: June 2009

The industrialization of shipping, a process which accelerated rapidly between the 1870s and 1910s, induced and accompanied dramatic changes in European and American port cities. Never before or since have so few cities on both sides of the Atlantic concentrated such a large proportion of the world's commerce. Thanks to the expansion of shipping, the great port cities of the Atlantic world acquired a significant manufacturing sector, including shipbuilding, and met the needs of their growing population for food and energy supplies. The reduction of freight rates and the expansion of shipping capacity and services brought considerable benefits to the urban economy. But the growth of shipping was also a factor in waves of migration, environmental and public health problems, traffic congestion, substandard housing, strikes, and conflict over strategies for development.
Trading States, Trading Places: The Role of Patrimonialism in Early Modern Dutch Development
Authors: Adams Julia
Published: June 2009

The decline of Iberia in the sixteenth century shook the foundations of world trade and politics, undermining Spain's Asian and American trade monopolies and creating the international opening that spurred other European states and merchants in the contest for overseas markets. After the waves had subsided in the seventeenth century, the world system had been reconfigured. The United Provinces of the Netherlands had become the first truly global commercial power—the first hegemon. The rise of the Netherlands to the position of world hegemony is at first glance startling. The seven provinces had a relatively small population (some 1.5 million inhabitants in 1600, compared to 10 million in Spain and Portugal, and 16 to 20 million in neighboring France), and had formed part of the Low Countries, an uneasily aggregated group of seigneuries, cities, and provinces under Spanish rule until the 1570s.
The Problem of Market Relations and the State in Revolutionary Russia
Authors: Rosenberg William G.
Published: June 2009

If the market has emerged in current Soviet and Western discourse as a notional Rosetta stone capable of deciphering the coded blueprints of post-Soviet reconstruction, its apparent destruction by the Bolsheviks during the Civil War and subsequent resurrection under the New Economic Policy (NEP) is often seen as a similarly defining element of the whole early Soviet project. As many would have it, the party's initial urge to control entirely the whole complex of economic exchange relations firmly situates Soviet totalitarianism in a Leninist political economy. The brutal repression of free traders and the mindless nationalization of production clearly evidences the calamitous utopianism of Bolshevik class-based ideology, while the reemergence after 1921 of limited market mechanisms, even if only a reluctant concession to political weakness and economic devastation, opened alternative paths to a non-Stalinist Soviet modernity involving elements of a civil social order. In a phrase, reified conceptions of the market broadly shape historical constructions of a unique and problematic Soviet past, just as they purportedly demonstrate what is peculiar about the post-Soviet present and necessary for the future.
God's Continent Divided: Politics and Religion in Upper Canada and the Northern and Western United States, 1775 to 1841
Authors: Adamson Christopher
Published: June 2009

Following the American Revolution, the social foundation supporting a settled ministry and sustaining the Old World tradition of an established state church began to crumble, prompting Alexis de Tocqueville to observe that in the United States, “the ideas of Christianity and liberty are so completely intermingled that it is almost impossible to conceive of the one without the other.” Large numbers of ordinary Americans who had internalized egalitarian, anti-aristocratic attitudes while advancing the patriot cause began to search for and find spiritual meaning in evangelical forms of religious expression. Indeed, the revivals sweeping the northern and western states between the American Revolution and the Civil War have been described as “the Revolution at work in religion.”
The Revolt of Islam, 1700 to 1993: Comparative Considerations and Relations to Imperialism
Authors: Keddie Nikki R.
Published: June 2009

Within the Muslim world, revolts with a religious aspect or ideology have had a long history. My current comparative research on this topic indicates that these revolts, common in the early centuries of Islam, became less frequent thereafter. These revolts may generally be characterized as either “left” sectarian or “orthodox” revivalist. The latter revived after circa 1700. It is part of my thesis to see three phases to these modern revivalist revolts and to say that all three phases were, in different ways, tied to interaction with the West, although this was far from being their only cause. These three phases were the pre-colonial phase, early resistance to colonialism, and the recent Islamic revival. The scope here covers the whole Muslim world, and the approach is comparative.
Haitians, Magic, and Money: Raza and Society in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands, 1900 to 1937
Authors: Derby Lauren
Published: June 2009

Sitting on the banks of the shallow riverine waters separating the northern border towns of Dajabón of the Dominican Republic and Ouanaminthe of Haiti, one can see children wade, market women wash, and people pass from one nation to another. They are apparently impervious to the official meaning of this river as a national boundary that rigidly separates these two contiguous Caribbean island nations. Just as the water flows, so do people, goods, and merchandise between the two countries, even as the Dominican border guards stationed on a small mound above the river watch. The ironies of history lie here, as well as the poetics of its remembrance. This river is called El Masacre, a name which recalls the 1937 Haitian massacre, when the water is said to have run scarlet red from the blood of thousands of Haitians killed by machetes there by soldiers under the direction of the Dominican dictator, Rafael M. Trujillo (1930–61).
Flexible Specialization in the Southern European Periphery: The Growth of Garment Manufacturing in Peonia County, Greece
Authors: Simmons Colin P. , Kalantaridis Christos
Published: June 2009

Since the mid-1970s a number of rural areas on the periphery of Southern Europe have undergone rapid economic growth and structural transformation. They appeared to be following the earlier and much celebrated experience of the Third Italy comprising the North-East and Central provinces. The major form of industrial organisation which emerged in these regions was the small “flexible” firm, which was widely regarded as an alternative to the principles of Taylor-Fordism that lay at the heart of the industrialisation process of the more favored regions. However, almost from the outset the idea that flexible specialization presented a coherent and robust organisational paradigm has been controversial. Much of the debate was directed towards Spain and Portugal, but Greece, though an integral part of the Southern European space and despite its earlier accession to the European Community (hereafter, EC), has only attracted a limited degree of scholarly interest.
A Spectator in the Tropics: A Case Study in the Production and Reproduction of Culture
Authors: Pallares-Burke Maria Lúcia G.
Published: June 2009

In Brazil, ever since the thirties, when the sociologist, Gilberto Freyre, made pioneering use of journalism as a source for his studies of the past, considerable weight has been given to journalistic texts on the grounds that their news and editorial sections, as well as their advertising columns, portray society with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
Colonialism and Forestry in India: Imagining the Past in Present Politics
Authors: Sivaramakrishnan K.
Published: June 2009

Forests in India are at the center of highly charged conflicts. Use of the past by the different historical subjects engaged in these contests over forest lands in India results in several threads intertwined across a shared frame. I shall try to unravel only one strand in this essay, namely, the official ideologies implicated in colonial forestry and the technologies of power that it spawned. I will show how the colonial state, drawing on several pasts, constructed the question of forests in India.
“It Is a Strict Law That Bids Us Dance”: Cosmologies, Colonialism, Death, and Ritual Authority in the Kwakwaka'wakw Potlatch, 1849 to 1922
Authors: Masco Joseph
Published: June 2009

In the century since Franz Boas began his field work on the Northwest Coast, the Kwakwaka'wakw1 potlatch has proved irresistible to the anthropological imagination. It has been variously interpreted as an interest-bearing investment of property (Boas 1897), as a demonstration of a paranoid, megalomaniacal personality (Benedict 1934), as a substitution for warfare (Codere 1950), as a means of distributing food (Piddcocke 1965; Vayda 1961), as a phenomenon of social morphology (Levi-Strauss 1969; Rosman and Rubel 1971), and as a religious event (Goldman 1975; Walens 1981). Indeed, an intellectual history of anthropology can now be written simply by examining how the Kwakwaka'wakw potlatch has served the various theoretical schools (see Michaelson 1979). If anything unites such disparate accounts, however, I suggest it is an underestimation of the impact of European colonization on Kwakwaka'wakw society.2 Our understanding of the nineteenth-century potlatch has been limited by a tendency to exclude Kwakwaka'wakw cosmology from the colonial power dynamic. This study contributes, then, to the longrunning, and at times vociferous, scholarly discourse on the potlatch by focusing directly on the cultural repercussions of the colonial experience. Consequently, it is not an analysis simply of the funding or logistics of exchange: This essay attempts to situate the cosmologies behind the gift in their changing historical context in order to assess the socio-cultural impact of the colonial encounter on native systems of belief.
Ethnogeographic Integration and Exclusion in Anticolonial Nationalism: Indonesia and Indochina
Authors: Henley David E. F.
Published: June 2009

In one chapter ofImagined Communities, Benedict Anderson draws attention to an obvious, yet seldom remarked, contrast between the anticolonial nationalist movements in the prewar Dutch East Indies and French Indochina. This contrast concerns not class, ideology, or politics but ethnicity and geography. In the Dutch colony, the Indonesian nationalist movement sought to unite all of the scattered islands and diverse ethnic groups into a single Indonesian nation based upon the ambiguous principle of unity in diversity. In Indochina, by contrast, existing ethnogeographic divisions were not abridged by the common reaction against French colonialism; and the colony ultimately disintegrated into the separate nations of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The Indonesian and Indochinese responses to colonialism represent examples of what I will call integrative and exclusive nationalism, respectively.
Kings in the Age of Nations: The Paradox of Lèse-Majesté as Political Crime in Thailand
Authors: Streckfuss David
Published: June 2009

The Thai monarchy, protected by the law of lèse-majesté, appears to be an anachronism in the age of nation-states. Over the past century, the spread of nationalism has leveled most monarchies, reducing kings (or queens) to the status of semiprivate individuals or preserving them as innocuous symbols. Usually considered mere remnants of feudal pasts, the laws protecting monarchies in the twentieth century have received little scholarly attention, even less perhaps in Thailand, where any critical analysis of the monarchy is discouraged by the threat of the lèse-majesté charge.
Bureaucracy, Friends, and Money: The Growth of Capital Socialism in China
Authors: Pieke Frank N.
Published: June 2009

Since 1978, the Chinese economic reforms that Deng Xiaoping initiated have given more room to market forces, legalized private entrepreneurship, and decentralized considerable decision-making power into the hands of the directors of state-owned enterprises through responsibility or contract systems. These reforms have produced some spectacular successes. Currently, the Chinese are richer, better informed, and have more personal freedom than at any other time since the Communist victory in 1949. Yet, despite these results, there seems to be no clear-cut plan of reform. At the national level, the policies of reform are the object of constant debate and infighting between shifting coalitions of Party and state leaders. As a result, the reforms are often inconsistent and display a continually changing pattern of radicalization and retrenchment through an array of policy initiatives, experiments, and new legislation.
Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires: Public Space and Public Consciousness inFin-de-SiècleLatin America
Authors: Needell Jeffrey D.
Published: June 2009

The Parisian Faubourg Saint Germain and perhaps the Rue de la Paix and the boulevards seemed the adequate measure of luxury to all of thesnobs. The old colonial shell of the Latin American cities little approximated such scenery. The example of Baron de Haussmann and his destructive example strengthened the decision of the new bourgeoisies who wished to erase the past, and some cities began to transform their physiognomy: a sumptuous avenue, a park, a carriage promenade, a luxurious theater, modern architecture revealed that decision even when they were not always able to banish the ghost of the old city. But the bourgeoisies could nourish their illusions by facing one another in the sophisticated atmosphere of an exclusive club or a deluxe restaurant. There they anticipated the steps that would transmute “the great village” into a modern metropolis.

—José Luis Romero