bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Brigands and State Building: The Invention of Banditry in Modern Egypt
Authors: Brown Nathan
Published: June 2009

A late nineteenth-century epidemic of banditry seems to have swept through the Egyptian countryside, at least according to the writings and actions of influential Egyptians at that time. Contemporary newspapers recounted daily episodes in which gangs composed of between six and sixty or seventy members raided large estates, robbed travelling merchants, and organized local protection rackets. The threat to public security drew the greatest attention in the decade following the British occupation of Egypt in 1882.
German Club Life as a Local Cultural System
Authors: Eidson John R.
Published: June 2009

In the shadow of the Historikerstreit over the meaning of the Nazi era, West German historians are conducting a less highly publicized but similarly politicized debate about the role of ethnography in social history. The following analysis of local club life, based on ethnographic and archival research in Boppard on the Rhine, is offered as a contribution to and comment on this debate from the viewpoint of interpretive cultural anthropology. I contend that “local knowledge”—to employ the phrase by Clifford Geertz—is indispensable to broader historical syntheses, though for different reasons than have been suggested by either critics or advocates of cultural anthropology among West German historians.
Peasants Protest: The Claims of Lord, Church, and State in theCahiers de doléancesof 1789
Authors: Markoff John
Published: June 2009

For all the attention the rural insurrection of 1789 has received, there is still a great deal to learn. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has suggested that the revolts provide us with a window into a great transformation of the French countryside. He is struck by the contrast with the great seventeenth-century movements of violent resistance to the fiscal pressures of the growing state. After a long interval in which the defeated peasantry raised no major challenge, the distinctive target of the rural upheavals of the early revolution had switched from the claims of the state to those of the lord. Understanding this shift, Le Roy Ladurie suggests, should illuminate the rural history of France in modern times. Why do peasants rise against one target rather than another? To date there is little scholarly consensus on the forms and significance of the rural insurrection.
Ethnicity, Local Interests, and the State: Yi Communities in Southwest China
Authors: Harrell Stevan
Published: June 2009

People who are not members of the Han Chinese majority and who are officially classified as members of the Yi minzu (“ethnic group”) inhabit many villages within fifty kilometers of the industrial city of Panzhihua (formerly Dukou) at the southernmost point of Sichuan province. These people differ widely from each other in language and other cultural traits and in the nature of their relationship to their non-Yi neighbors. Of three Yi communities studied in the winter of 1988, one is isolated from and culturally distinct from the Han society of its neighbors, and its separate ethnic identity is taken by Yi and Han as a given. given. In another community, Yi and Han live totally intermixed and are culturally identical, and again the separate ethnic identity of the Yi and Han is accepted by all concerned. In the third community, the people classified as Yi are also culturally identical with the Han, though they live separately. Although they are classified as Yi, they do not admit that they belong to the Yi minzu; they insist instead that they are a separate group altogether—the shuitian zu or “rice-field people.” This paper attempts to explain why the nature of ethnic identity is so different in the three Yi communities.
Recycling Tradition: Culture, History, and Political Economy in the Chrysanthemum Festivals of South China
Authors: Siu Helen F.
Published: June 2009

In the mid-nineteenth century, a gentleman in Xiaolan having the Mai surname wrote in his memoir:

Age eighteen, the forty-seventh year of Qianlong's reign [1782], there was a chrysanthemum festival. Each major surname group put on floral displays, and six platforms were set up throughout the town. There were scores of theatrical troupes whose performance brought together kinsmen and friends. The tradition of the festival started that year.
Tobacco, Time, and the Household Economy in Two Kenyan Societies: The Teso and the Kuria
Authors: Heald Suzette
Published: June 2009

In 1975, the transnational British American Tobacco Company (BAT) set out to rapidly develop tobacco growing in four areas of smallholder production in Kenya. This move, prompted by the Kenyan firm's loss of tobacco leaf supplies from Uganda in 1972 and then Tanzania in 1976, was to prove remarkably successful. Output in the four areas chosen for production of tobacco leaf rose from 209 tons in 1975 to 4,034 tons in 1982, making Kenya self-sufficient in that crop despite a simultaneous sales campaign which doubled the domestic consumption of manufactured cigarettes over the same period. Production has continued to rise since then, with about 8,000 small-holder farmers in the scheme producing 6,000 tons of cured tobacco leaf in 1984.
Comparing Human Rights: South Africa and Argentina, 1976–1989
Authors: Merrett Christopher , Gravil Roger
Published: June 2009

Until recently it was rare to bring South Africa and Latin America into a shared focus for any purpose at all. Both regions habitually looked towards the United States of America and Western Europe and showed no interest in each other. With a few exceptions there was scant intellectual concern aroused by their common southern location. In the last few years, however, a number of academics have begun to show interest in comparisons and contrasts derivable from South Africa and Latin America. Our intention is to join this promising trend by examining the vexing question of human rights in South Africa and Argentina since the Soweto massacre and Peronist collapse in 1976. In that historic year of burgeoning abuse, Richard Claude complained that “comparative human rights research has not been systematic.” Concentration on definite themes in two appallingly delinquent countries may contribute to the general improvement he urged.
A Long Day in Monte Rotondo: The Politics of Jeopardy in a Village Uprising (1558)
Authors: Cohen Thomas V.
Published: June 2009

One morning in the middle of May 1558, the chief constable of the Governor of Rome led a detachment of his police to Monte Rotondo, a rural town some twenty miles north of the capital. There was nothing unusual in his mission, which was to capture two outlaws, who, though banished from the papal states for homicide, had returned to live under the shelter of the local lords. Nor was there anything extraordinary in the first response of the villagers, who, caught between their signori on the one hand and the state on the other, did their best to lend the police a very feeble hand. What was more unusual was what happened next, when, half by design and half by mischance, the village rose up in arms against the police and, for much of the day, held them hostage. In this essay, we will study the tangled events of that day, not so much as an example of a rural insurrection as, rather, a handsome illustration of a particular style of negotiation. Thus, settlement as much interests us here as does conflict, for it illustrates well the dense interplay of liberty and constraint. The burden of our exposition is that, to extricate themselves from a perilous impasse, the villagers, their magistrates, and the city's police could all bargain cannily with all sorts of risks, not only their adversaries', but also their own. Not only did they threaten one another, but, to their own profit, they pointed out external dangers and cited the perils they themselves faced.
In Whose Turban Does the Lord Reside?: The Objectification of Charisma and the Fetishism of Objects in the Hindu Kingdom of Kota
Authors: Peabody Norbert
Published: June 2009

The shiny, black stone statue of Shri Nathji that today resides in the busy pilgrimage town of Nathdvara (Rajasthan, India) is the preeminent image of the Vaisnava sect of the Vallabha Sampradaya. Like all statues in the sect, the image is an anthropomorphic manifestation of Krishna, the sect's paramount deity (see Plate 1). More than simply representing Krishna, Vallabhite statues are believed to contain this deity's ‘immanent presence’ and to possess (and emanate) his mystical powers. In order to partake of these powers, the worship of images is a regular feature of Vallabhite religious practice, and pilgrimage to important temples, such as the Shri Nathji Temple, is a cherished goal of all members of the sect. This article examines how the Hindu rajas of western India attempted to bind these mystical powers to the service of their rule and what consequences this had both for royal action and for the maintenance and perpetuation of the divine powers of the statues themselves.
Schooling, Language, and Knowledge in Literate and Nonliterate Societies
Authors: Akinnaso F. Niyi
Published: June 2009

The relationships among schooling, language, and knowledge—especially through the systematic comparison of the organization, form, function, and acquisition of institutionalized knowledge—in literate and nonliterate societies has hardly been examined. This essay attempts such an analysis, focusing on knowledge acquired through the use of language, because language is the major medium for imparting knowledge in schools and for social reproduction in the larger society, because knowledge acquired through the use of language is readily identifiable and testable, and because language is one of the major terms of the present analysis. The proposed elastic concept of schooling views schooling as a cover term for institutionalized learning in any society, literate or nonliterate. It thus questions the analytical adequacy of the received, Euro-American, concept of schooling as a unitary phenomenon based on the dual assumption that the school specializes in the transmission of literate knowledge and that literacy education is coterminous with formal education.
Frazer, Leach, and Virgil, The Popularity (and Unpopularity) ofThe Golden Bough
Authors: Beard Mary
Published: June 2009

In 1985 Edmund Leach, well into retirement from his chair of Anthropology in Cambridge, made his first visit to the site of the temple of Diana at Nemi, some fifteen miles southeast of Rome.Leach called this visit a pilgrimage, for Nemi and the problems of its bizarre cult were the starting place for James Frazer's founding work of Social Anthropology,The Golden Bough. This was the spot that Frazer described in such lavish detail in his opening chapter: ‘the sylvan landscape [that] was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy.’ This was the setting for the problem that Frazer set out to solve: Why in Roman times could the priest-king of the sacred grove of Nemi (the so-calledRex Nemorensis) win his priestly office only by killing the previous incumbent; why would he himself lose it only through murder at the hands of his successor? For those who see Frazer's work as the start of anthropological study in its modern sense, the site and the cult of Nemi must hold a particular place: This colourful, but minor, backwater of Roman religion marks the source of the discipline of Social Anthropology.
Women's Work in Agriculture: Divergent Trends in England and America, 1800 to 1930
Authors: McMurry Sally
Published: June 2009

English cheeses—Cheddar, Gloucester single or double, Cheshire, Stilton, and others—are familiar throughout the Anglo-American world, whether consumed after dinner in English homes or as key ingredients of American tex-mex or vegetarian cuisine. These famous cheeses originated long ago but in most cases reached a zenith in quantity and in reputation during the last century. Little is known about the history of English cheese dairying, despite its fame and its importance to agriculture past and present. Its economic background has received only slight attention, and its social history is almost entirely unexplored; yet clearly the social structure of English cheese dairying has historically exerted a major influence on the industry, because it traditionally depended upon a distinctive sexual division of labor. The history of women's work in English cheese dairying has implications for a broader historiographical question: When and why did women gradually disappear from many kinds of agricultural work in Western societies?
Frontier Tales: The Narrative Contruction of Cultural Borders in Twentieth-Century California
Authors: Klein Kerwin L.
Published: June 2009

Maclntyre sought to raise a series of crucial questions in an address before the Eighty-First Annual Meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. What is the best way to evaluate two competing languages, conceptual schemes, or cultural approaches to being in the world? May conceptual schemes or theoretical languages be so radically different as to be fully incommensurable, that is, incapable of intertranslation or meaningful comparison?2Maclntyre, drawing upon the example of the sixteenthcentury Zuni Indian and Spanish colonial frontier, contended that some languages or conceptual schemes might well be partially untranslatable, but this did not necessarily preclude commensurability. His remarks suggest additional questions, namely, what does constitute a frontier situation? What is involved in the symbolic differentiation of one conceptual scheme, one interpretive group—one culture—from another? We might recognize here the familiar problem of boundary construction, the social process of creating a common group identity that marks it as different from others.3
Manhood, Femaleness, and Power: A Cultural Analysis of Prehistoric Images of Reproduction
Authors: Linke Uli
Published: June 2009

Ideologies of reproduction are social facts, collective representations, of the dramatic ways in which human beings construct and appropriate gender for the imaging of social reality. Such symbolic universes are often centered on the body (Foucault 1980; Martin 1989; Turner 1984; Douglas 1973). As a template of cultural signification, the body becomes a model through which the social order can be apprehended. For instance, gender hierarchies are sometimes envisioned by means of an anatomical or physiological paradigm (Needham 1973; Hugh-Jones 1979; Theweleit 1987). However, the operation of societal power is generally focused on women's bodies and bodily processes. Women, according to a widespread (and controversial) paradigm, are grounded in nature by virtue of the dictates of their bodies: menstruation, pregnancy, birth (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 1969; Ortner 1974; Ardener 1975; Mac-Cormack and Strathern 1986).
The Conflict of Generations in Ancient Mesopotamian Myths
Authors: Harris Rivkah
Published: June 2009

Recent years have brought a proliferation of studies on the family on such topics as household composition, marriage patterns, childbearing practices, and life-cycle transitions. Scholars in ancient near eastern studies have contributed mainly to the legal and economic aspects of family history. Frequently the work done has centered on philological questions. The cuneiform data on the Mesopotamian family, accidental and all too often limited, is spread over a period of some three thousand years. Nevertheless it is time to broaden the focus despite the inherent problems. In this essay, I treat the question of the dynamics of Mesopotamian family life, more specifically intergenerational conflict, a topic barely touched upon by scholars in the field.
Work Authority in Industry: The Happy Demise of the Ideal Type
Authors: Mitchell Katharyne
Published: June 2009

Recent dramatic changes in the social and political organization of Eastern Europe and what was the Soviet Union have led to a widespread reformulation of certain generic terms that have long plagued comparative scholarship. Similarly, with the destruction of the monolithic Berlin Wall has come the imperative to deconstruct monolithic terms, such as communism or traditionalism, which have often obfuscated difference and negated geographical and historical specificity. In this essay, and in the spirit of laying to rest the ghost of the ideal type, I compare the work and authority relations in Chinese and Soviet factories in the 1960s and 1970s. When the differing variables that coalesced to form distinctive patterns of labor relations in these two countries during those years are more clearly understood, it will be possible to discuss the current patterns of change with greater accuracy. In addition, when the essentially structuralist constraints of an overarching communist type are loosened, it is also possible to reintroduce actors into the dialectic and to enrich the comparison with finer social and historical detail.
Sacred Texts and Dangerous Words: The Politics of Law and Cultural Rationalization in Malaysia
Authors: Peletz Michael G.
Published: June 2009

This essay concerns the politics of law and culture in Malaysia. It examines how processes of cultural change are shaped by state laws and policies and the ways in which local communities are incorporated into more encompassing political entities and their attendant moral orders. I am particularly interested in “rationalization,” a concept of central importance in much of Max Weber's work on comparative history and politics and the sociology of religion. Weber, who used this concept in a variety of ambiguous, multidimensional, and contextually specific ways, further confounded students by his difficult language and style. It is widely agreed, however, that he employed the term to refer both to institutional changes involving differentiation, specialization, and the development of hierarchical, bureaucratic forms of social organization; and to intellectual or attitudinal trends entailing, in negative terms, “the disenchantment of the world” (the displacement of “magical elements of thought”), and, in positive terms, processes by which “ideas gain in systematic coherence and naturalistic consistency” (Gerth and Mills 1958:51; Wrong 1970:26; Turner 1974:151– Schluchter 1979:14–15; Alexander 1989:74).
The Official Representation of Social Classes in Britain, the United States, and France: The Professional Model and “Les Cadres”
Authors: Szreter S.R.S.
Published: June 2009

In the course of the inter-war period, a particular empirical model of national social structure emerged in the official census publications of both Britain and the United States. In the postwar period the essential characteristics of this model subsequently became almost second nature for many English-speaking social and policy scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. This “professional model” of social structure took the following form when it was adopted in the United States in the 1930s:

I. Professional

II. Proprietors, Managers, Officials

III. Clerical, Salespersons

IV. Skilled Manual

V. Semi-skilled Manual

VI. Unskilled Manual

The Registrar-General of England and Wales had used the professional model since the 1911 census and has continued its use, with minor variations, to the present day.
Too Much of a Good Thing: Crises of Glut in the Faroe Islands and Dominica
Authors: Wylie Jonathan
Published: June 2009

The question to which this essay is addressed struck me when, having done ethnographic field work in the Faroe Islands, I undertook another stint on Dominica, at the opposite corner of the North Atlantic.1In the Faroes, I took part in a couple of slaughters of herds of pilot whales. Thegrindadrápis dramatic, but apart from the inevitable tumult of the slaughter itself, in which romantically inclined observers have been pleased (or horrified) to find Faroese acting like their Viking ancestors, it is a remarkably orderly business. In a Dominican village called Casse, I took part in another great sea hunt, in which shoals of skipjack tuna were caught inshore. Seiningbonik, as these fish are called in the French Creole vernacular, is no less dramatic than the grindadráp, if considerably less difficult and dangerous. But particularly in the division of the spoils, bonik seining is disorderly, even chaotic.
Segmentary State Formation and the Ritual Control of Water Under the Incas
Authors: Gose Peter
Published: June 2009

There is a strange and unacknowledged paradox in the historiography of the Incas. On the one hand, few would deny that theirs was a typically theocratic archaic state, a divine kingship in which the Inca was thought to.be the son of the Sun. On the other hand, the standard descriptions of Inca political structure barely mention religion and seem to assume a formal separation between state and cult.1I believe that these secularizing accounts are misguided and will show in this essay that the political structure of the pre-Columbian Andes took form primarily around a system of sacred ancestral relics and origin points known generically ashuacas. Each huaca defined a level of political organization that might nest into units of a higher order or subdivide into smaller groupings. Collectively they formed a segmentary hierarchy that transcended the boundaries of local ethnic polities and provided the basis for empires like that of the Incas. However, these huacas were also the focus of local kinship relations and agrarian fertility rituals. The political structure that they articulated therefore had a built-in concern for the metaphysical reproduction of human, animal, and plant life. Political power in the pre-Columbian Andes was particularly bound up with attempts to control the flow of water across the frontier of life and death, resulting in no clear distinction between ritual and administration.
Colonial Knowledge and the Fate of Hindustani
Authors: Lelyveld David
Published: June 2009

Towards the end of Paul Scott'sA Division of the Spoils, the final novel ofThe Raj Quartet, and in the television series as well, Indian people make an appearance and commit acts of unmotivated and horrible violence. The British heroine comments, “Such a damn, bloody, senseless mess … the mess therajhad never been able to sort out.” Making sense, sorting out, was supposed to be the special vocation of British rule, yet here were all the seething, primordial conflicts rising to the surface again in the Hindu versus Muslim partition of India in 1947.
A Triptych: Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, Rider Haggard's She, and Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race
Authors: Mazlish Bruce
Published: June 2009

Culture, one of the keywords of our time, became common, as Raymond Williams has suggested, in Western discourse in the early nineteenth century. Subsequently, pushed by both anthropological and literary-aesthetic studies and extended to global dimensions, the concept of culture, which supposedly expresses primordial naturalness and the irrational, is often played off against its counterpart from the beginning, the calculated mechanicalness of civilization, or the rational. More recently, in the burgeoning field of cultural studies, the boundaries between the two terms have become increasingly blurred. Now civilization, too, is seen as the domain of the irrational, masking itself in socalled rational representation.
Vampire Priests of Central Africa: African Debates about Labor and Religion in Colonial Northern Zambia
Authors: White Luise
Published: June 2009

When I was a girl, I was taught not to gossip by a school game. We would sit in a circle, and someone would whisper a phrase into the ear of the person sitting next to her. By the time the phrase was returned to the first speaker, it was totally deformed—hilarious proof that hearsay distorted facts. I had already published a book based extensively on oral interviews when I realized how insidious this game was, that it rested on two extremely authoritarian principles: Information should be transmitted passively, and no one has the right to alter or amend received statements.
Flowers and Bones: Approaches to the Dead in Anglo-American and Italian Cemeteries
Authors: Goody Jack , Poppi Cesare
Published: June 2009

The profusion of fresh flowers in Italian graveyards amazed nineteenth-century travellers from America used to more severe practices. In England, too, flowers were sparse. Nor was their paucity unintentional. Strong sentiments were involved, for despite the increasing pomp of Victorian funerals, much ambivalence was displayed about elaborate rituals and offerings in the Anglo-American world—“a green grassy turf is all I crave,” wrote Beattie in theMinstrel. Even Loudon, the great architect of the new rural cemeteries in England, was reluctant to make a place for flowers in his plans.
The Head of the King: Museums and the Path to Resistance
Authors: Winans Edgar V.
Published: June 2009

The museum has become disputed terrain in the closing years of the twentieth century. Not that there has been any unanimity of opinion about these institutions at any time in their history, but until relatively recently the disputes were often among insiders. These disputes were conducted within Western culture, within the professional world of specialists, and within a universe of agreed upon and accepted ideas about a viewing public and the objects they viewed. Karp and Lavine locate this debate and its dimensions succinctly: “whether to privilege context or object… aesthetics of objects or prepositional knowledge about them… [and] whether a curator's message… is more authentic than the provenance of the object itself” (1991:12)
Object Lessons and Ethnographic Displays: Museum Exhibitions and the Making of American Anthropology
Authors: Jenkins David
Published: June 2009

In the early nineteenth century, many private, well-to-do persons collected rocks, minerals, fossils, insects, skeletons, animal skins, Indian artifacts, and so on, for their aesthetic appeal or mystical connotations. Their fragmentary and miscellaneous collections incited wonder and admiration in those privileged to see them while communicating a narrative of the prestige, esoteric knowledge, and adventurous spirit of the collector. Referring to aesthetic and mystical, rather than scientific criteria, collectors juxtaposed a seemingly incongruous hodge-podge of objects in their cabinets—armadillos and ostrich eggs, quartz crystals and rattlesnake rattles, for example. These collectors sought to celebrate the stability of their belief systems through the commonly understood marginality of the strange freaks and curiosities that sparked their imaginations. The rare, abnormal, bizarre, and the old were especially valued.
“Survival in Justice”: An Afrikaner Debate over Apartheid
Authors: Giliomee Hermann
Published: June 2009

Within nationalist movements a tension typically exists between group demands for ethnic self-preservation and the more universal demands of religious belief, professional commitment, or academic vocation which confront particularly the intelligentsia in the group. Ethnic politicians tend to argue that decades or centuries of oppression or the anticipated disastrous consequences of a loss of self-determination makes loyalty to the group and its leadership's strategies a matter of overriding importance. It is usually exceptional individuals, often poets or novelists, who in times of crisis issue the challenge that survival be reconciled with universal values and prevailing international political norms.
Nationalism, Mauritian Style: Cultural Unity and Ethnic Diversity
Authors: Eriksen Thomas Hylland
Published: June 2009

Nationalism is a kind of ideology (or secular religion) which holds that there should be congruence between cultural boundaries and political ones (Gellner 1983; Anderson 1991 [1983]). This essay discusses what such congruence should entail; notably, whether or not it necessarily means that the members of a nation ought to belong to the same ethnic group for the concept of nationhood to be meaningful. The empirical material to be discussed in some detail derives from Mauritius, a polyethnic island state which is probably less atypical, globally speaking, than European evidence on nationalism may suggest. A main contention in the present essay is that nationalisms quite different from the European ones are being developed in various countries. Particular nationalisms, and perhaps especially emergent ones, ought therefore to be examined comparatively.
First Movers and the Growth of Small Industry in Northeastern Italy
Authors: Baker Thomas H.
Published: June 2009

In the 1970s, Italy's economy grew faster than all in the industrialized world but Japan's. Its growth rates of up to 5 percent, although lower than in the 1960s, compared favorably to the relatively flat figures from Britain, Germany, and the United States, most strikingly in the two years after the second oil shock of 1979. Following its first “economic miracle” in the 1950s and 1960s, wroteThe Economist, Italy's “second, lesser miracle” was how the country continued to thrive in the 1970s despite a “bumbling bureaucracy,” ineffective governments, high inflation and public debt, terrorism, and “the left-wing unions’ greedy, if understandable, reaction to the headlong development of the 1960s.” Italy's rapid growth was all the more impressive in light of the ongoing economic stagnation of the South and a general crisis in the big corporations of Lombardy and Piedmont, which had been dragged down by high oil prices, recession abroad, and indexed wages.
Turning the Horns: Cultural Metaphors, Material Conditions, and the Peasant Language of Resistance in Ionian Islands (Greece) during the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Gallant Thomas W.
Published: June 2009

The bells tolled early on the morning of the 28th of January 1867, summoning the peasants from Agró and the surrounding areas on the island of Kerkyra. The bailiffs employed by the local landlords and the constables ordered to protect them were to arrive that day to collect the current year's rent. Most peasants in the area around Agró were sharecroppers cultivating the land of absentee landlords and bound to these plantation owners both by contracts and forms of quasi-feudal obligations. The annual collection of the rents was always a tense affair because under Ionian law and custom, if a sharecropper failed to pay his rent, he was subject to summary seizure and detention in prison until someone settled the debt. And from this law, there was no right of appeal.
“All That Glitters”: Contemporary Amazonian Gold Miners' Tales
Authors: Slater Candace
Published: June 2009

One of the most persistent of all New World dreams, El Dorado has acquired new life over the last two decades throughout much of the Amazon Basin. Many of the same golden visions that led Orellana and his men to plunge ahead down an “ocean-river” in the sixteenth century continue to prompt large numbers of people in Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and, above all, Brazil to leave their families and set out for makeshift mining camps to seek their fortunes amidst a sea of mud. This discussion focuses on representations of gold miners or garimpeiros by themselves and others. I argue that although miners unquestionably draw on a much larger oral tradition, their stories stand apart from those told by a more general population in their tendency to portray gold as an active, female agent and in their relative lack of interest in clear-cut morals. In addition, while the vision of nature and natural forces as female and the fixation on violence as a (if not the) key element of life in the garimpo would appear to corroborate precisely those images of miners that reach a national and international public, this surface agreement cloaks important underlying differences that underscore the fundamental multiplicity of metaphor.
Madness and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. A Review Article
Authors: Herold Niels
Published: June 2009

Duncan Salkeld's study of madness in the age of Shakespeare is conceived of as being against the grain of both traditional literary criticism and historiography. Noting that the critical contemplation of the inner life of Shakespearean character has been central (as far back as Coleridge) to previous approaches to the study of madness in Shakespeare, Salkeld argues instead that the “inner worlds of the mind of Shakespearean characterization are largely represented by external appearance, in language describing corporeal states.” Thus, the towering constructs of personality in Lear and Hamlet, for example, are turned inside out when critical attention is focused on the “materiality” of madness and its forms. This privileging of “external appearance” and “corporeality” over the imagined inner life of character is licensed by Salkeld's thesis that personal crises in the dramatic lives of Shakespeare's tragic heroes and heroines must invariably be read qua political crisis. The author writes that any “discussion of the internal life of a character then becomes a second order issue, and considerably more problematic when the historical specificity of these conditions is addressed” (p. 2).
Within and Against Peasantness: Backwardness and Filiality in Rural China
Authors: Kipnis Andrew B.
Published: June 2009

Economically the contradiction between town and country is an extremely antagonistic one both in capitalist society, where under the rule of the bourgeoisie the towns ruthlessly plunder the countryside, and in the Kuomingtang areas in China, where under the rule of foreign imperialism and the Chinese big compradore bourgeoisie the towns most rapaciously plunder the countryside. But in a socialist country and in our own revolutionary base areas, this antagonistic contraction has changed into one that is non-antagonistic; and when communist society is reached it will be abolished.

[Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) 1937:345]
Consuming Counterrevolution: The Ritual and Culture of Cannibalism in Wuxuan, Guangxi, China, May to July 1968
Authors: Sutton Donald S.
Published: June 2009

People are eating each other, came the message from southern Guangxi to Peking in the early summer of 1968, as the violent phase of the Cultural Revolution was drawing to a close. When militia reinforcements arrived in Wuxuan, parts of decomposing corpses still festooned the town center (Zheng 1993:2–3). No proper investigation was conducted, however, for this was a county in which order had already been imposed and the rebels had been crushed. Only in 1981–83, long after the Gang of Four had collapsed, was an investigation team sent into the county. It compiled a list of those eaten and a number of the ringleaders in cannibalism. Fifteen were jailed, and 130 Party members and cadres were disciplined. The Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region announced the expulsion from the Party of all who had eaten human flesh.1 But the regulations were withdrawn quickly for fear that the document would be slipped out to Hong Kong and reveal this episode of cannibalism to the world (Zheng 1993:52).
Intellectuals, Nationalism, and the Exit from Communism: The Case of East Germany
Authors: Joppke Christian
Published: June 2009

In Eastern Europe, succeeding generations of intellectuals have been at the forefront of first creating and then demolishing the communist regime. Because communism was ultimately based on ideas (“logocracy,” says C. Milosz), the abandonment of these ideas by intellectuals turned dissidents was a critical factor in the regime's demise. As Daniel Chirot (1991:20) emphasizes, communism died more from ideological exhaustion and “utter moral rot” than from its economic malaise or the pressure of organized opposition movements. The dissident intellectuals, powerless as they seemed to be, delivered the decisive blow when they denounced the regime's underlying ideology as ritualized lies out of touch with reality.
A Nation-in-Arms: State, Nation, and Militarism in Israel's First Years
Authors: Ben-Eliezer Uri
Published: June 2009

Like many other states, Israel was forged through the struggle of a national liberation movement that likely drew inspiration from an ethnic past and that certainly worked to establish a political framework. Once the state existed, however, its leaders did not regard theethnieas an objective category that would in large measure determine whether a nation would emerge. Instead, they viewed the ethnie as a subject susceptible, in varying degrees, to manipulation, invention, domination, and mobilization. As the prime minister of Piedmont said, “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians”; or as Israel's first prime minister, Ben-Gurion, put it in April 1951 during the election campaign: “I see in these elections the shaping of a nation for the state because there is a state but not a nation.”
Popular Genealogical Nationalism: History Writing and Identity among the Balga Tribes of Jordan
Authors: Shryock Andrew J.
Published: June 2009

The proprietors of Amman's publishing houses do a brisk trade in books about politics and religion. They have also, in recent years, begun to profit from the growing demand for “tribal literature.” This new market, which emerged in the late 1970s, expanded greatly in the 1980s. It includes folkloric monographs (al ʿAbbadi 1989; al-ʿUzayzi 1984), genealogical compendia (Abu Khusa 1989), Bedouin poetry (al-ʿUzayzi 1991), introductions to tribal law (Abu Hassan 1987; al-ʿAbbadi 1982), and studies which, combining elements of all these genres, are packaged as “historical” works (al-ʿAbbadi 1984, 1986). The advent of a popular literature about the Jordanian tribes written by and for local Bedouin has been hailed in Jordan's national press as a new form of “patriotism,” and the oral traditions now being adapted to print are thought to convey a uniquely Jordanian heritage.
The King Is King by the Grace of the People: The Exercise and Control of Power in Subject-Ruler Relations
Authors: Gulbrandsen Ørnulf
Published: June 2009

In the face of the dominating tradition of British structural functionalism, anthropological studies of political leadership represented an important move towards accounting for the dynamics of centralized, as well as acephalous, polities (for example, Barth 1959 and Baily 1970;cf. Schapera 1956). Moreover, in focusing upon political actors and, by extension, political relations, these studies necessarily took account of the role of the subjects. Yet, despite Gluckman's innovative notion of “rituals of rebellion” (1954;cf. Beidelman 1966), the issue of political leadership has rarely focused upon the political dynamics of the ruler-subject relationship, examining the concerns and responses of those who more or less voluntarily subject themselves to an authority figure. Even such an important contribution asSuccessionto High Office (Goody 1966) completely ignores this issue.
Early Contact as Drama and Manipulation in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea: Pacification as the Structure of the Conjuncture
Authors: Schieffelin Edward L.
Published: June 2009

Accounts of first contact in Papua New Guinea have aroused considerable interest over the years (Hides 1936; Leahy and Crain 1937; Nelson 1982; Connelly and Anderson 1987; Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991). No doubt, this has been in part because these accounts have an intrinsic drama and popular romantic appeal (intrepid explorers enter remote mountain valleys and discover vast populations of previously unknown tribes who had never seen white men before and believed they were supernatural beings). More recently, anthropologists and historians have begun examining these sorts of events to explore how historical and cultural forces unique or intrinsic to quite different societies become transformed when they come into contact with each other, a process, that Sahlins has termed the “structure of the conjuncture” (Sahlins 1980, 1985; Dening 1988). Accounts of the period immediately following first contact in Papua,1 during which Australian government officers extended political control over the newly discovered native Papuan tribesmen, however, are usually narratives of European (Australian) colonial history, with little sense of Papuan experience.
From Utopian Hopes to Practical Politics: A National Revolution in a Rural Village
Authors: Reed Roert Roy
Published: June 2009

To begin a revolution is very difficult. To sustain it is even more difficult. To win it is almost impossible. But once you have won, then your troubles really begin.

Stephen Bann states that Utopia “forms the concrete expression of a moment of possibility,which is however annihilated in the very process of being enunciated” (Bann 1993:1, emphasis added). He traces this characteristic to Sir Thomas More, whose neologismUtopiapuns on being both the Good Place (eutopia) and No Place (Outopia), and to the modern denial of this No Place, which he labels ”a ritual of double negation” (Bann 1993:1). The present essay focuses on one ethnographic instance of Utopia's annihilation by enunciation. I will demonstrate that, when the enunciation of Utopia requires the implementation of public policy, the process of creating the Good Place is undermined by the mundane demands of practical politics.
In Different Times: Scheduling and Social Control in the Ottoman Empire, 1550 to 1650
Authors: Barkey Karen
Published: June 2009

Reading Ivo Andric's colorful short story, “The Vezir's Elephant,” suggests a weakness in state rule consistent with a Eurocentric image of Ottoman backwardness. In the story, just as Bosnian peasants familiarized themselves with the habits of one Turkish official, he would be removed, transferred to another province and replaced by a new official with new whims and wishes. Throughout the sixteenth and a large part of the seventeenth centuries, a more or less firmly established rotation system was part of the Ottoman state mode of social control. Patrons and clients, and patrons among themselves remained foreign and unfamiliar. The resulting level of uncertainty in the provinces disrupted patron-client ties.
Caste Politics, Violence, and the Panchayat in a South Indian Community
Authors: Vincentnathan S. George
Published: June 2009

Mysteriously, some sense justice when others sense injustice. … The desire to sense justice in events may cause people to look to law as an instrument to control… events. Then justice has preceded law. Law is made a part of events and is itself then viewed as promoting or blocking justice, depending on the role it plays and also depending on the perceived self-interest of the participants in, or viewers of, the events [Hartzler 1976:4].
“Lamaism” and the Disappearance of Tibet
Authors: Lopez Donald S.
Published: June 2009

At an exhibition in 1992 at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., “Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration,” one room among the four devoted to Ming China was called “Lamaist Art.” In the coffee-table book produced for the exhibition, with reproductions and descriptions of over 1,100 of the works displayed, however, not one painting, sculpture, or artifact was described as being of Tibetan origin. In commenting upon one of the Ming paintings, the well-known Asian art historian, Sherman E. Lee, wrote, “The individual [Tang and Song] motifs, however, were woven into a thicket of obsessive design produced for a non-Chinese audience. Here the aesthetic wealth of China was placed at the service of the complicated theology of Tibet.” This complicated theology is named by Lee with the term “Lamaism,” an abstract noun that does not occur in the Tibetan language but which has a long history in the West, a history inextricable from the ideology of exploration and discovery that the National Gallery cautiously sought to celebrate. Lee echoes the nineteenth-century portrayal of Lamaism as something monstrous, a composite of unnatural lineage, devoid of the spirit of original Buddhism (as constructed by European Orientialists). Lamaism was a deformity unique to Tibet, its parentage denied by India (in the voice of British Indologists) and by China (in the voice of the Qing empire), an aberration so unique in fact that it would eventually float free from its Tibetan abode, an abode that would vanish.
The Social Construction of Population Science: An Intellectual, Institutional, and Political History of Twentieth-Century Demography
Authors: Greenhalgh Susan
Published: June 2009

Demographers have often lamented their field's reputation as one of “all methods and no theory.” Pushed by advances in computer technology and pulled by the appeal of being the “hardest,” most scientistic of the social sciences, the field has grown ever more sophisticated in mathematical technique. At the same time, theory has languished, becoming increasingly narrow and divorced from the realities of a rapidly changing post-Cold War world (McNicoll 1992). Leading members of the field routinely bemoan this state of affairs, though proposals for remaking the discipline are rarely offered (Preston 1993; Keyfitz 1993).
Power, Peasants and Political Development: Reconsidering State Construction in Africa
Authors: Munro William A.
Published: June 2009

Recent writing on political development in Africa has shown a marked tendency to de-privilege the state. We might discern three broad, related, reasons for this trend. The first is the deepening political crisis involving what Crawford Young has described as “shrinkage in the competence, credibility and probity of the state.” The second is the growing dissatisfaction among scholars with the narrow analytical focus of state-centered scholarship on state structures and elites. The third is the re-emergence of civil society as an analytical concept (sparked by political crises in Eastern Europe) and a renewed emphasis on market institutions as appropriate arbiters of social provision.Many scholars, despairing of the political and economic decline of African countries and seeking more compelling explanations, have moved the state out of the explanatory spotlight. They have stressed the fragmentation of politics, processes of economic disengagement from the realm of state control, and expanding areas of social life that fall outside of the ambit of state authority. For some, the relationship between the state and civil society has offered a more appealing focus for analysis.2 Society-centered research has even suggested that the state is not (or is no longer) the main organising principle of politics in Africa.
“Not by Word Alone”: Missionary Policies and Religious Conversion in Early Modern Russia
Authors: Khodarkovsky Michael
Published: June 2009

In 1821 the newly appointed director and rector of the Imperial Kazan University received the following instructions from the government in St. Petersburg: “It is of utmost importance for the government that the education of its people be based on a firm foundation of the Christian religion, that the evil spirit of our time, the all-destructive spirit of free thinking, does not penetrate the sacred temples, where the happiness of the future generations must be secured by teaching the contemporary youths.” The fact that Orthodox Christianity was at the heart of Russian imperial identity is not surprising, but the fact that such an identity was to be uncompromisingly forged in the Kazan region, where most of the residents were non-Russians of different faiths, is noteworthy.
The Rise of the Male Breadwinner Family: A Reappraisal
Authors: Creighton Colin
Published: June 2009

During the last two decades there has been intense debate over the causes of the domestic subordination of women within industrial-capitalist societies. A significant part of this discussion has involved attempts to understand the emergence of a form of family organisation in which the husband was expected to be the main, preferably the sole, bread-winner and his wife was to assume responsibility for running the household, preferably on a full-time basis. Established first among the middle classes, this pattern spread widely throughout the working class with increasing momentum from the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Although the outlines of this development, and the accompanying payment of a family wage to men, are now well-established, the factors responsible for its origins and expansion are still a matter of controversy. In this article I shall review some major explanations of the rise of this “male breadwinner” family and seek to identify a number of weaknesses in the debate as a whole.