This essay compares the two greatest conquest movements of pre-modern times, the Arab and the Mongol, which resulted in the creation of world empires, and analyzes the importance of religion in these events. This attempt is hardly in the mainstream of current cultural anthropology, which does not encourage much comparative study of historical societies separated in time and space. Nonetheless, perhaps this comparison will facilitate a better understanding of some serious conceptual problems that both of these conquests pose for anthropologists and historians. The fact that the Arab society had a strong nomadic component and the Mongol society was firmly based on pastoral nomadism makes this comparison even more interesting.

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.1 I 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 as huacas. 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.

The year 1492 in Spanish history is an unforgettable date. Within the span of a few months, Spain ended a struggle for political unity on the peninsula lasting centuries and embarked upon a colonial enterprise that was to encircle the globe. But 1492 seduces the imagination, inclining one to read history's momentous consequences into the minds of the protagonists at the time. The historian is tempted to make the actors of 1492 larger than life, multiplying the importance of their actions by the eventual consequences, but this would hinder an understanding of 1492 from the perspective of the people who experienced it.

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 centuries b.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.

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.

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.

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.