This paper links memory to generations of meaning and argues that generational belonging mediates access to memory. Generations of meaning create memories because they connect experiences, beyond the lifetime of individuals, with the wider cultural existence of social communities. Such connections can be understood as a hermeneutic and relational process. Meaning is not a factor of causation, but is cumulative, as meanings are recollected across generational thresholds of experience. This paper conceptualizes such thresholds of experience through three lines of enquiry. First, generativity produces new carriers of culture and memory, which sustain perceptions of historical beginnings. Second, generational change is a condition of liminality and in-betweenness, which people work to transcend by mediating fractures and thus connecting past problem spaces to frameworks of anticipation. Third, narrative commitments emerge as memories are recollected across different temporalities, incommensurability, and forgetting. Memory is not the product of one determining generation, but relational, cumulative, and stretched out in time.

Anthropological studies of Indian villages conducted in the 1950s and 1960s form a valuable archive of rural life soon after India's independence. We compare sections of that archive with recent fieldwork in the same villages in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha. If we trust the ethnography of the 1950s, domestic and caste spheres were the locations of village incivility. It is noteworthy that there is no reference in the early work to the Partition of the subcontinent that had occurred just a few years before. Neither is there mention of discrimination or violence carried out in the name of religion in these locations. New fieldwork reveals a different story about the rise of wholesale religious incivility in the public sphere. Caste has not vanished, but inter-caste relations have taken on new forms. We suggest that the intersection of affirmative action policies, political parties, and the systematic penetration of Hindu nationalist organizations has been crucial in the remaking of rural India.

This article provides a framework for understanding the continuing political potential of the anticolonial dead in twenty-first-century India. It demonstrates how scholars might move beyond histories of reception to interrogate the force of inheritance in contemporary political life. Rather than the willful conjuring of the dead by the living, for a politics in the present, it considers the more provocative possibility that the dead might themselves conjure politics—calling the living to account, inciting them to action. To explicate the prospects for such an approach, the article traces the contested afterlives of martyred Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh (1907–1931), comparing three divergent political projects in which this iconic anticolonial hero is greeted as interlocutor in a struggle caught “halfway.” It is this temporal experience of “unfinished business”—of a revolution left incomplete, a freedom not yet perfected—that conditions Bhagat Singh's appearance as a contemporary in the political disputes of the present, whether they are on the Hindu nationalist right, the Maoist student left, or amidst the smoldering remains of Khalistani separatism in twenty-first-century Punjab. Exploring these three variant instances in which living communities affirm Bhagat Singh's stake in the struggles of the present, the article provides insight into the long-term legacies of revolutionary violence in India and the relationship between politics and the public life of history in the postcolonial world more generally.

Russia and Ethiopia, both multiethnic empires with traditionally orthodox Christian ruling elites, from the nineteenth century developed a special relationship that outlived changing geopolitical and ideological constellations. Russians were fascinated with what they saw as exotic brothers in the faith, and Ethiopians took advantage of Russian help and were inspired by various features of modern Russian statecraft. This article examines contacts and interactions between the elites of these two distant countries, and the changing relations between authoritarian states and Orthodox churches from the age of European imperialism to the end of the Cold War. It argues that religio-ethnic identities and institutionalized religion have grounded tenacious visions of global political order. Orthodoxy was the spiritual basis of an early anti-Western type of globalization, and was subsequently coopted by states with radically secular ideologies as an effective means of mass mobilization and control.

Functionalist anthropology has a contested legacy. Some scholars have praised functionalism as a contributor to the relativizing of civilizations and cultures while others have criticized it as a colonial science smoothing the interwar workings of indirect rule. This article argues that the colonial politics of functionalist anthropology can only be understood against the background of resurgent settler colonialism in British East Africa. Supporters of indirect rule increasingly relied on a language of scientific administration and welfarist policies associated with the League of Nations to bolster their position against the settlers in the 1920s and 1930s. Functionalism offered them some means of support on this count. The functionalists, meanwhile, co-opted the language of indirect rule to pursue their own intra-disciplinary ends. This combination of interests was pragmatic and flexible rather than ossified and ideological, marked more by what both opposed (settler colonialism) than a shared ideal towards which they aspired (indirect rule). Anthropologists and colonial administrators possessed very different ideas of indirect rule, with strikingly different implications for the future of Britain's African Empire.

From the twelfth and certainly from the thirteenth century onwards, a social group of artisans with their own political and economic aspirations can be clearly delineated in Netherlandish towns. Bound through common skilled work, they made up a distinctive group with a self-image and a developing political vision and economic programme. Their “guild ideology” is increasingly clearly expressed in the sources they produced from the fourteenth century onwards as a self-confident group in urban society. Labour, certainly when organized within guild structures, was the cornerstone of community life, cultural experiences, and practical ethics. Even though there were socioeconomic differences among guildsmen and many geographical and chronological variations in the degree of political power they wielded, the ideal of artisan ideology in the late medieval Low Countries was one of a community of brotherly love and charity centred on the value of skilled labour.