On ships, the switching of the watch—the moment when a person at the helm is replaced by another—is a quiet affair. Dear readers, this foreword marks an editorial switching of the watch. I’m deeply indebted to be coming onboard as Chief Editor for a journal that has been such a significant force in shaping conversations across multiple fields and on comparative projects, big and small. It is a task made easier by the incredible work done by my predecessors, Paul Johnson and Geneviève Zubrzycki, the wonderful editorial team here at CSSH, and our partners at Cambridge University Press. I want to continue all the reasons that make this a special and unique journal (for a quick summary see here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/comparative-studies-in-society-and-history/information/about-this-journal/why-choose-this-journal) while also navigating a shifting landscape of academic publishing. Stay tuned for updates as we chart this course. Enough maritime puns, onto the task at hand! This issue has nine intellectually rich essays divided across four rubrics: Questioning Dualism; Spatial Projects; Nation “Building”; and Anticipatory Expertise.
QUESTIONING DUALISM Dualism and dualist thinking have been at the heart of numerous projects, philosophical and political, from the Manichean split of reality into light and dark; to materialist and idealist debates over the mind-body problem; Levi-Strauss’ cross-cultural structure of the unconscious; and a contemporary liberal world order seemingly divided into friends and enemies, public and private, secular and religious.
Matei Candea’s essay confronts the problematic of dualism and its limiting of anthropology’s comparative imaginary in “French Law, Danish Cartoons, and the Anthropology of Free Speech.” Candea revisits the “Danish cartoons controversy” through an ethnography of the 2007 French court ruling that found that the republication of the cartoons by the Charlie Hebdo magazine did not constitute a hate speech offense. Framed in popular accounts as a clash between two opposing (language) ideologies and critiqued by anthropologists and others as a failure of liberal regimes to reckon with difference, Candea’s analysis offers an alternative reading. For him, the form and content of the ruling emphasizes multiple and competing language ideologies at play within the court’s reasoning itself beyond a Euro-American “representationalism.” In exploring this internal multiplicity of liberalism, the essay is a call for a “different comparative imaginary—one that encourages us to count beyond two.”
Similarly questioning bright lines of dualist opposition, Arndt Emmerich’s fine-grained ethnographic case-study, “Jewish-Muslim Friendship Networks: A Study of Intergenerational Boundary Work in Postwar Germany,” turns to historical and contemporary moments of coexistence, of both conviviality and division, in Frankfurt am Main’s Bahnhofsviertel. In telling these partially forgotten tales, the essay blurs the sharp borders that are imagined as characterizing Jewish-Muslim relations in contemporary Germany. Instead, Emmerich shows the spatial and temporal ways in which boundaries are made and un-made that reflect and refract neighborly, regional, national, and global concerns. In addition to emphasizing these blurred boundaries, this case-study challenges a scholarly exceptionalism around Jewish-Muslim relations as somehow distinct from other quotidian boundary processes.
SPATIAL PROJECTS Spatial practices and imaginaries have important political and material consequences and effects. Claims about space and place are always about foregrounding certain histories, connections, and relations at the expense of others. These spatial practices and imaginaries are central to the making of not only nation-states but also other forms of community. Spatial projects are where the state and its competitors (subaltern and elite) make claims and counterclaims and where the boundaries of belonging and exclusion are negotiated.
In “Sinicizing China’s World Muslim City: Spatial Politics, National Narratives, and Ethnoreligious Assimilation in the PRC,” Susan K. McCarthy focuses on the rise and fall of one such spatial project, the World Muslim City (WMC), a development project in western China. The WMC sought to mobilize Hui identity and tradition as part of an economic and diplomatic overture towards the wider Muslim world. As McCarthy notes, this was envisioned as a multi-sited endeavor that would include a “World Muslim Folk Culture Street”; a “One Thousand and One Nights” theme park; and museums, mosques, and other visibly marked “Islamic” and “Muslim” sites, and was aligned with the PRC’s early twenty-first-century development initiatives and a state-sanctioned multiculturalism. While initially successful, this strategy, the article shows, was soon eclipsed by a competing and dominant spatial project of Sinicization under Xi Jinping that aimed to establish a “correct view of the motherland” through a re-ordering of both secular and religious space, one that echoes wider political, social, and economic transformations in the region and beyond.
The state of course is not the only spatial project that matters, a point that emerges in fascinating ways in the two other essays in this section. Magnus Marsden’s piece, “Beyond Long-Distance Nationalism: Khorasan and the Re-imagination of Afghanistan,” focuses on the spatial practices of diasporic intellectual-activists from Afghanistan who seek to re-imagine the relationship between geography, culture, and the state. The essay examines the significance of Khorasan as a historic-geographic region for these activists and the various intellectual exchanges, from political organizing to heritage tourism, through which a sovereign agency and desire is articulated beyond ethnicized appeals to “long-distance nationalism.”
The question of diaspora is equally salient in Rachel Baron-Bloch’s “Drawing the Jewish Propter Nos: Nineteenth-Century Missions and the Making of Race.” Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Jewish community leaders in Western Europe and the United States began debating the need for Jewish missions to China and Ethiopia. Imagined as lost tribes, languishing both in isolation and ignorance, as well as threatened by projects of Christianization spearheaded by Western missionaries, the discourses and practices surrounding these missions sought to instrumentalize nineteenth-century imperial networks, including Christian missionary networks, and understandings of science, race, and modernity. Jewish communities in China and Ethiopia marked not only a geographic limit but also the racial limits of the Jewish world, and Baron-Bloch’s essay tells a different spatial story of Jewish internationalism and race-making that has profound consequences in the present.
NATION “BUILDING” How to build a nation? If the essays in the previous section foregrounded spatial projects and imaginaries, the articles in this rubric emphasize a more building block approach. Nation building takes a decidedly concrete turn in Arunabh Ghosh’s paper “The Significance of Small Things: Small Hydropower in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1983,” which explores the proliferation of small hydropower in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In contrast to the vision of the dam as a large and hyper-visible infrastructural project, tied to a developmentalist vision of state-building from the mid- and latter twentieth century, small hydropower stations, which increased from fewer than three dozen in 1949 to nearly ninety thousand by 1979, operated at radically different scales, ensuring that good and bad effects of dam-building were deeply localized. In addition to bringing to light the significance of the small in nation-building in the PRC, the essay intervenes in energy histories of the twentieth century that have often imagined this to be the era of carbon.
Luiza Monetti’s essay, “Beyond Order and Progress: Legitimacy and Nation-Building in Military Brazil” investigates the political instruments, specifically official and private propaganda materials, used by the military regime in Brazil following the 1964 coup to legitimize its rule and wield power. Media—short films, documentaries, radio jingles, and speeches—provides a rich archive that Monetti draws upon to examine the creation of three overarching discursive frames: “defenders of democracy,” “Great Brazil,” and “model citizenship.” These frames, she argues, allowed for the maintenance of a democratic façade. In contrast to neighboring Chile and Argentina, the military regime did not dissolve Congress, cancel elections, or ban political parties. However, these propaganda campaigns allowed the regime to build a Brazilian nation centered around military authority, economic development, and conservative familial and religious mores. These ideologies have complex and enduring afterlives even in the aftermath of the supposed end of military rule.
ANTICIPATORY EXPERTISE Global pandemics, climate change induced catastrophes, wars, occupations, and other ruptures seem to call into question temporal frames and the (im)possibilities of various futures. If the future, as the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has noted, is a “cultural fact,” anticipatory knowledges and practices have been key in organizing social, economic, and political structures geared toward making this cultural fact. Anticipatory expertise, embodied in practitioners—from oracles to actuaries—is at the forefront of this exercise, with experts explaining, taming, and at times profiting from unknown futures. The two essays in this section also remind us that anticipatory expertise is not only about predicting futures but is also located within specific histories and is itself generative of forms of historical consciousness.
In “Mediums, Media, and Mediated “Post”-Truth: Baba Vanga in the Russian Imagination,” Mary Neuburger and Adam Hanzel explore the many lives of the Bulgarian psychic/prophet Baba Yanga (1911–1996), who emerged as one of the most noteworthy mediums of “truth” in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian imagination. From Soviet-era discourses on the boundaries of science and religion, to post-socialist reworkings of those same divisions, and finally, contemporary social media circulations, Baba Yanga’s prophecies provide insights into “truth” as a category that transforms and is transformative. The historical genealogy offered here is a corrective to a narrative of “post-truth” where the contemporary moment is seen as marked by a surfeit of truth. Instead, Baba Vanga, whether tethered to consistent or patchworked scientific and religious logics or totally unmoored as in online and social media posts, is a medium in every era for reflecting on Russian narratives about Russia’s place and power in the world.
Omri Elisha’s essay, “Mirrors of the Past: Time and Historical Consciousness in Contemporary Western Astrology,” brings to the fore the “astrological historicity” of North American astrology practitioners. For Elisha, while astrology is about predictive futures, it relies on ideas of history and historicity. Guided by New Age metaphysics and psychodynamic theories of the self, North American astrology practitioners intervene in the present through a narrative about the past that includes a critical awareness of historical legacies of racial and social injustice. For Elisha, this astrological historicity is inherently neither conservative nor radical, but rather a divinatory logic that validates (and at times challenges) sentiments already resounding in the wider world that seek to make sense of deeply unsettling times.
