POWER FLOWER Imperial science and its collaborations, its landscapes, and its audiences is the theme of many interesting studies of late, including several pieces in this journal, such as Robert Shanafelt, “How Charles Darwin Got Emotional Expression out of South Africa (and the People who Helped Him)” (2003: 783–814), and Saul Dubow, “Earth History, Natural History, and Prehistory at the Cape, 1860–1875” (2004: 107–33). The first essay examines the practice and narrativizing of flower-collecting under imperial conditions.

In his own mission to versify the planet, or at least an exemplary portion of it, Captain Francis Kingdon-Ward (1885–1958) returned repeatedly, even obsessively, to certain places on the alpine plateaus of Northwest Yunnan and Southeast Tibet, where the vegetation, refracted through the Aleph of what I shall argue was a deliberate, laborious, and disciplined optical practice, became liquid, a sea:

This article pursues two basic agendas. My primary purpose is to explore the contours of repatriation language as spoken by Native Americans directly participating in repatriation processes. To this end, I argue that a first step entails a critical assessment of the terms and assumptions by which repatriation discourse is framed by observers, participant observers included. Therefore, the first section of this article works toward a critical theory of repatriation discourse, with particular reference to religious language and narratives of identity. I make a case for approaching repatriation discourse as a rhetorical field. Questions I ask include: Who speaks? Under what constraints? With what possibilities? Addressing these questions, among others, I advocate an analytical approach to repatriation that is both specific and frank in exploring the ways group boundaries are shaped and reshaped through narrative.

The world exposition stemmed from the specific context of nineteenth-century Europe, but by the end of that century, its practice had already spread to the colonies as the imperial powers organized a number of colonial expositions. The colonial exposition was meant to represent colonialism as fundamental to the progress of both the metropole and the colony. The ideas of “progress” and “modernity” were represented in such a way that colonial subjects would acknowledge the benevolent contribution of imperial rule to the development of the colony. This historical practice attracted not only nations that had already achieved imperial status, but also nations such as Japan that were aspiring to become an imperial power.

Inventions have their greatest impact when they go beyond their possible practical applications and act upon the imagination. When Martin Behaim invented the first globe in 1490, a functionally useless object consisting mostly of terra incognita, he was widely ridiculed; but somehow the ideas that his globe represented stuck, and within a few decades the basic validity of his construction was confirmed by the voyages of Columbus, Cabot, Vasco de Gama, Magellan, and others. Today, with efforts to situate the rapid growth of information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially the Internet, in the context of globalization, there is a similar division between those who dismiss it as being of no importance and those who see in it a looming (for good or ill) global revolution. But, as with Behaim's globe, the imaginary possibilities of these innovations are important in determining how and to what extent human existence is to be transformed by them.

How do we explain adequately the relative success or failure of complex political phenomena such as democratization? In the battle between conceptual and explanatory parsimony, on the one hand, and rich, thick description on the other, social scientists often fall into traps that obscure more complete explanations for our cases from the portfolio of the possible. For example, we often unconsciously generalize from the cases we know best. In single case studies, we can fail to recognize the explanations that don't shine brightly or bark loudly. More generally, we acquire a habit of thinking that orders causality in particular ways for each of us, a result both of an empirical reliance on our own familiar cases, and the conceptual and theoretical conclusions we have generalized consciously or unconsciously from those cases. In this article, we are self-consciously engaged in two tasks: (1) comparing divergent outcomes of democratization in otherwise fairly similar cases—Benin and the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville); and (2) proposing three possible primary causal hypotheses for the successful (Benin) and failed (Congo) outcomes.

In December 1832, less than a year before the British Parliament passed the first imperial slave emancipation bill, an all-white jury in the British Caribbean colony of Barbados convicted a black, enslaved man named Robert James of having robbed and sexually violated Margaret Higginbotham, an impoverished white widow and mother. Since Robert James was a black man accused of raping a white woman the jury's decision could hardly have surprised anyone and his rapid dispatch by a hangman must have been universally expected.

Historically, the abolition of slavery marked the signal moment that established a legal distinction between people and property: people could not be property. If slavery had been based on the potential equivalence or interchangeability of people and property, its abolition asserted an absolute legal and moral difference between them. Yet, these dichotomous ways of thinking about persons and things emerged alongside and in tension with a third way of thinking that they now obscured, in which property and personhood were closely linked—in which property tied people to communities, to particular histories, and to personal status; property was what was ‘proper’ to the person. While the trade in and ownership of persons has been broadly condemned, this connectedness of property and personhood has remained crucial to modern notions of the individual, privacy, and subjectivity. Indeed, the story of the emergence of the modern legal subject is often told as the progressive, if inevitably incomplete, process of publicly superceding this linkage of property and personal status, and limiting it to a demarcated private sphere. Such formulations construe the family as a domain where persons and things will necessarily continue to be linked, where relationships will inevitably blur affective, moral, and material claims, and where relationships of status will continue to prevail.

In this letter, Donato Acciaiuoli, a politically prominent but not particularly wealthy member of an esteemed Florentine family, writes to Riccardo del Bene, a richer but younger co-resident of the neighborhood of Vipera, looking for an insider's assistance in keeping his tax burden down. Donato paints his economic position bleakly, unwittingly conforming in detail with prescriptions provided in the now-famous contemporaneous memoir of Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli, written to urge his own heirs to hide their wealth and dramatize the fiscal injustices done to them:

Ever since the 1967 posthumous publication of parts of Malinowski's field diaries (A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term), the legendary ethnographer has been the subject of a dual fascination—of interest because of both his pioneering ethnographic work and also for what we learned from his diaries about his complex psyche. The disparity between Malinowski's productive public persona and his tormented private soul has puzzled anthropologists ever since. Now, with the publication of Michael Young's Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884–1920, we need no longer rely on our own flights of fancy to imagine the totality of Malinowski.

In Friction, Anna Tsing uses logging practices and timber consumption, environmental activisms and ideas about nature, local loss of livelihood and local despair over the loss of forest-as-life (as opposed to forest-as-resources), and Indonesian nation-making through business practices and international investment as her entry points for a richly argued and ethnographically nuanced analysis of the social processes by which the spatial, discursive, and metaphoric sites that have come to be known as the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ are made by each other. Her ethnographic contribution is her ability to demonstrate multiple experiences of events—from Meratus Dayak elders to Indonesian environmentalists, from Indonesian businessmen to consumers in an IKEA, from the Korean Development Company to Freeport McMoRan—which each person and institution understands and narrates differently. Indeed, Tsing shows that these people and institutions understand events and misunderstand each other in profound ways, but that the misunderstandings are productive, creating the social fact that is the Indonesian forest.

Osa's study is part of a larger literature that looks at the decomposition of communism and postcommunist politics through the prism of the literature on social movements. The book stands out, along with Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik's Rebellious Civil Society and John Glenn's Framing Democracy, as among the best in this school of research. Osa concentrates on the creation of networks of resistance in communist Poland from early 1950s to the period of Solidarity's formation and suppression in 1980–1982.

Sandhya Shukla has written a highly interdisciplinary comparison of Indian diasporic cultures in Britain and the United States. Specializing in Anthropology and Asian American Studies, she is particularly strong on historical and literary text analysis. She says, “The relational aspects of a range of texts and experiences, which include historical narratives, cultural organizations, autobiography and fiction, musical performance and films, are of paramount importance in this critical ethnography” (20). Contending that the Indian diaspora confronts “a simultaneous nationalism and internationalism,” she is celebratory about India and “formations of Indianness,” and uses phrases like “amazing force” and “wildly multicultural” (17). Her exploration shows “the tremendous impulse to multiple nationality that Indianness abroad has made visible” (14) and, “the amazing persistence of Indian cultures in so many places” (22).