MAKING ILLEGIBILITY The great decipherments of defunct writing systems—of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, the cuneiform script of the Sumerians and Akkadians, the Brahmi of Ashoka, Linear B, the Mayan glyphs—have vastly increased the extent of the past accessible to history. Decipherment of lost scripts is a decidedly modern impulse. The ancients showed little inclination to rescue lost scripts or save dying ones; John Leyden wrote (about 1810) of the Romans in Egypt that they did nothing to preserve Egyptian literature, leaving us “nothing but the hieroglyphics as a riddle to perplex future ages, a cipher of which they destroyed the key.” The modernist imperative to decode past scripts has been exercised to great effect since the early nineteenth century, but there has been little scholarly attention to the causes of the extinction of scripts. The opening essay is, as far as we know, the first comparative study of how scripts die.

By any measure, the creation and development of writing was a cybernetic advance with far-reaching consequences. It allowed writers to communicate with readers who were distant in time and space, extended the storage capacity of human knowledge, including information that ranged from mundane accounting to sacred narrative, bridged visual and auditory worlds by linking icons with meaningful sound, and offered an enduring means of displaying and manipulating assertions about a wide variety of matters.Broader definitions of writing that embrace purely semantic devices (semasiography, Sampson 1985:29) relate to ancient systems of communication, especially “Mexican pictography” (Boone 2000:29), but depart from the linguistic underpinnings that characterize the writing systems reviewed here. Semasiographic definitions are not very helpful in understanding heavily phonic systems. Their limited applicability to writing systems of the world identifies a typological weakness; even the Mexican examples are inconclusive, since these texts bundle genuine lexical items with supporting graphic devices. An alternative view is that the mixed Mexican pictography contains writing, yet supplements it with effective pictorial clues. From this comes a narrative that is translatable, with some controlled liberties, into language. Equating this distinctive package of features with the preponderantly phonic nature of Egyptian, cuneiform, or Mayan glyphs blurs distinctions. A broad definition of writing does not elucidate these scripts, although it is useful for understanding the relation of texts and accompanying images (Baines 1989; Taube 2000). In part, the first writing attracts attention because it contributes to a teleological narrative of progress (Trigger 1998: 42). The invention of writing is thought, with good justification, to undergird and enable present-day society. In its more developed forms, it is indispensable to bureaucracy, propaganda, and administration.

This paper was prompted by a personal question that has puzzled many former Soviet people, myself included, since the late 1980s: How to make sense of the sudden evaporation of the colossal and seemingly monolithic Soviet system and way of life, in which we grew up and lived? What was it about the Soviet system that made its “collapse” appear completely unimaginable and surprisingly fast not only to most Western Sovietologists but also to most Soviet people? The experience of the unexpectedness and abruptness of the collapse is reflected in diverse materials I have collected in Russia in the past ten years. This question is not about the “causes” for the collapse but about its “conditions of possibility”: what conditions made the collapse possible while keeping that possibility invisible? To begin addressing this question, we must analyze how the particular “culture” of Soviet socialism invisibly created the conditions for the collapse and at the same time rendered it unexpected. The period when these conditions emerged, the approximately thirty years preceding the beginning of perestroika (the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s), I shall call Soviet “Late Socialism.”

What do you think you would find on the desk of a censor? He—almost certainly “he”—would not need much. A jar filled with blue pencils. A coffee cup. A phone for whispering praise to the higher-ups and for ignoring the entreaties of his victims. For reading material, an ideological reference manual or a dog-eared sheaf of instructions would suffice. Surely, one would not expect to find any actual books on the censor's shelves—why read when your life is committed to eviscerating literature?

The current intellectual climate is marked by a dual retreat, faltering and uneven, from the excesses of neo-liberalism and postmodernism. First, the idea that the world is, and should be made as far as possible, like a perfect market, virtualism for Carrier and Miller (1998), is losing ground, giving way to an understanding organized around the more-or-less pervasive presence and influence of market imperfections and the need for the non-market to correct them. Second, obsessive interpretative and relativist deconstruction of the world associated with the cultural turn across the social sciences is increasingly conceding to a renewal of interest in material culture—how reality is both construed and created. Over the past decade, the extraordinary rise to prominence of two concepts in particular has symbolized these developments. In the lead, serving as a filter for a highly diverse range of approaches and topics, is globalization.For brief overview, see Fine (2002a, ch. 2; 2002b). Close behind in timing, weight, and scope is social capital, the counterpart in most respects to globalization at the national or lower levels of community.See Fine (2001) for a comprehensive and critical account.

Ahmed Sa'id was Secretary of his neighborhood NGO and a member of a joint government-NGO committee. He was also a successful owner/operator, or master (‘usta), of a workshop (warsha). He owned a body shop that checked the balance of cars with computerized equipment. He had paid 120,000 LE (about US$ 35,000) for that equipment—produced in Italy to his specifications—with money he had saved as a migrant worker in Germany, Turkey, and Italy. Sa'id's equipment gleamed in the center of his workshop. To the left stood his desk, which attested to the business function of a workshop master, and his special status as Secretary of the NGO. Under the glass of his desk lay a display of the business cards of some of his most valued customers—mainly army officers.

A generation ago, alert historians jolted the field of witchcraft studies by calling attention to the fact that it was women in particular who burned on the pyres of the European witch trials. Amazingly enough, earlier historians had overlooked, or at least underplayed that particular skew in the record. Now the idea of witch-hunts as a “women's holocaust” is old hat, and in fact, has made one of those rare successful crossovers into popular culture. Historical approaches never stay still, however, and recent publications have reoriented the discussion yet again. A spate of new interpretations, particularly by Stuart Clark and Robin Briggs, push gender off the center of the screen, arguing that other factors were equally or more important in shaping accusations. Other works muddy the waters by noting the many places, particularly in the Baltic and Scandinavia, but also pockets within Western Europe, where men, not women, comprised a large fraction or even the majority of the accused.Evidence of male witches in Estonia, Finland, and Iceland is found in Maia Madar, “Estonia I: Werewolves and Poisoners,” in Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 257–72; Juhan Kahak, “Estonia II: The Crusade against Idolatry,” in ibid., 273–84; Antero Heikkinen and Timo Kervinen, “Finland: The Male Domination,” in ibid., 319–38; Kirsten Hastrup, “Iceland: Sorcerers and Paganism,” in ibid., 383–401; Marko Nenonen, ‘”Envious are all the People, Witches Watch at Every Gate”: Finnish Witches and Witch Trials in the 17th Century,' Scandinavian Journal of History 18 (1993):77–91. In Western Europe, regions that produced larger trials generally included higher percentages of males among the accused. See E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976); H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch-Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562–1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972). In the heart of Europe, France also offers some exceptionally high representation of males in particular jurisdictions, although not uniformly throughout the country. Alfred Soman finds that over half of the 1,300 defendants who appealed witchcraft convictions before the Parlement of Paris were male. Alfred Soman, “Les Procès de sorcellerie au Parlement de Paris (1565–1640),” Annales 32 (1977):790–814; and “La Sorcellerie vue du Parlement de Paris au début du XVII<+>e siècle,” Actes du 104<+>e congrès national des sociétés savantes, Bordeaux, 1979, Section d'histoire moderne et contemporaine (Paris, 1981); and Sorcellerie et justice criminelle (16e–18e siècles) (London, 1992), 798–99. William Monter finds an extraordinary pocket of male witches in Normandy. “Here, in the Pays de Caux, lay the epicenter of male witchcraft in Western Europe.” W. Monter, “Toads and Eucharists: The Male Witches of Normandy, 1564–1660,” French Historical Studies 20 (1997):563–95, quote on 581. Other discussions of the involvement of men in witchcraft trials include Eva Labouvie, “Männer im Hexenprozess. Zur Sozialanthropologie eines ‘männlichen' Verstädnisses vom Magie und Hexerei,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16 (1990):56–78; Robert W. Thurston, Witch, Wicce, Mother Goose: The Rise and Fall of the Witch Hunts in Europe and North America (London: Longman, 2001), 126–27.On Russia's male witches, see Russell Zguta, “Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-Century Russia,” American Historical Review 82 (1977):1187–207; Valerie Kivelson, “Through the Prism of Witchcraft: Gender and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy,” in Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec, eds. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); A. S. Lavrov, Koldovstvo i religiia v Rossii, 1700–1740 gg. (Moscow: Drevlekhranilishche, 2000); E. B. Smilianskaia, Koldun i ved'ma v kontekste russkoi kul'tury XVIII veka (Moscow: ROO “Sodeistvie sotrudnichestvu Instituta imeni Dzh. Kennana,” 2000); “Sudebno-sledstvennye dokumenty kak istochnik po istorii obshchestvennogo soznaniia (iz opyta izucheniia “dukhovnykh del” pervoi poloviny XVIII v.),” in Issledovaniia po istorii knizhnoi i traditsionnoi narodnoi kul'tury Severa (Sytyvkar, 1997), 168–75; and her forthcoming book, Volshebniki, bogokhul'niki, eretiki. Narodnaia religioznost' i dukhovnye prestupleniia v Rossii XVIII veka (Moscow: Indrik, 2002). W. F. Ryan also acknowledges some gender imbalance among those accused in Russia, in, “The Witchcraft Hysteria in Early Modern Europe: Was Russia an Exception?” Slavonic and East European Review 76 (1998):49–84. Still, little systematic work has appeared that seriously attempts to sort out why in some areas people believed that, “particularly through the agency of woman are infernal enchantments brought to pass,” and elsewhere men became the more common targets of accusation.The quote is taken from an early Russian text, but the presence of this textual tradition did not prevent later Muscovites from accusing primarily male witches. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans and ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Medieval Academy of America, 1973), entry for the year 1071, p. 153.

African studies, at least in its northern versions, has historically been about mediating Africa to the rest of the world. Those of us who teach in the United States are still stalked by battles from the 1960s about whether or not the study of Africa is intellectually viable; many of us claim that the real struggle is against stereotypes and correcting racist myths about Africa. Indeed, the syllabus for my undergraduate African history survey has in its introduction a few lines about how the stereotypes about nineteenth-century Africa—tribal warfare, superstition, poverty and disease—have hindered our ability to understand Africa's past and present. In their research, scholars have grappled—in varying degrees of course—with the question of how to represent Africa, and how to translate experience there to the rest of the world. Over the last forty years, this has meant some impressive apologies for repressive regimes and some imaginative accounts of social and economic conditions. If only one looked closely enough, many argued, one could see civil society/creative outpourings/new social arrangements emerging amidst growing poverty and disappointment. Such statements are anything but cynical, however: they are as much a part of the struggle against the older stereotypes as my upper division survey course claims to be. We are wary of showing an Africa that others might think awash with odd beliefs, or the site of meaningless violence, or as having politics that are more corrupt than consensual. Besides, what we study in Africa has been the subject of much criticism within the field, and many scholars also struggle against claims that we are exoticizing Africa, or, as in a famous critique of a Rhodes-Livingstone Institute anthropologist (see Ferguson, 28–29), that we study what is irrelevant to African lives—like leisure—instead of the colonial oppression under which Africans toiled. Many scholars have taken this critique quite seriously, and have approached the study of African songs, gossip, and sexuality with some defensiveness; others have focused on colonialism and its myriad evils to the point that independent Africa (i.e., the last thirty to forty years) is rarely an object of study in and of itself, but instead is the direct result of colonialism (i.e., the colonial legacy). The result has been at best linear, and at worst paternalistic. How Africans understand their own contemporary dilemmas has rarely been an object of enquiry.

Working ethnographers know that cultural contradictions often hide in plain sight. We may represent such contradictions in our monographs as deep, dark secrets it has taken an expert to unveil, but such nods to the demands of academic theatre tend to violate the sense in which they are very much visible on the surface of daily life. Argyrou's argument focuses on one such contradiction in the culture of anthropology itself: quite obviously, anthropologists both make a living out of claiming that cultures and people shaped by cultures are different from one another while at the same time attacking those who propound racist and ethnocentric arguments by asserting that at bottom people and cultures are in the most important respects all the same. The burden of Argyrou's short, impressively well-argued monograph is to show that this contradiction is present in all versions of anthropology (Victorian, modern, post-modern) and that it dooms the discipline to a kind of incoherence, at least in theoretical and political terms, if not ethnographic ones.

The subtitle of this book refers to Bangalore, “India's High-Tech City.” Today, Bangalore is indeed best known as a kind of Silicon Valley in India. The author, however, has been ill-advised to put this in the title, since her book hardly touches on that central feature of contemporary Bangalore. Instead it offers a conventional historical account of the Karaga ritual and its performers, the Vahnikula Kshatriyas, a traditional caste of gardeners. The Karaga ritual is an annual performance, featuring an earthen pot carried by a priest. Priest and pot together are seen as a manifestation of the female power (shakti) of Draupadi, one of the main characters of the Mahabharata. The performance belongs to the Karnataka ‘jatre' genre and shares features with other Goddess cults in the region. A special and interesting element is the association of the Karaga performance with a Sufi Saint Cult in Bangalore. The procession of the Karaga can only continue past the Sufi shrine after paying respect to the Saint. Unfortunately, the author does not attempt to analyze this in connection with the growing communal tensions between Muslims and Hindus, even in the South of India. The Vahnikula Kshatriyas are seen as part of a larger community, called Tigala. As a result of the political gains of the backward class movement in Karnataka they claim the status of backward tribe. The author describes in detail the formation of a caste association of the Tigala, a political alliance of several communities.

Working ethnographers know that cultural contradictions often hide in plain sight. We may represent such contradictions in our monographs as deep, dark secrets it has taken an expert to unveil, but such nods to the demands of academic theatre tend to violate the sense in which they are very much visible on the surface of daily life. Argyrou's argument focuses on one such contradiction in the culture of anthropology itself: quite obviously, anthropologists both make a living out of claiming that cultures and people shaped by cultures are different from one another while at the same time attacking those who propound racist and ethnocentric arguments by asserting that at bottom people and cultures are in the most important respects all the same. The burden of Argyrou's short, impressively well-argued monograph is to show that this contradiction is present in all versions of anthropology (Victorian, modern, post-modern) and that it dooms the discipline to a kind of incoherence, at least in theoretical and political terms, if not ethnographic ones.

The history of the Andean region is permeated by violence of conquest, a violence that resonates through contemporary relationships of profound social, economic, and political asymmetry in the nation-states of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Although scholars of the Andean region have analyzed colonial and post-colonial structures of power, they have tended to emphasize “ethnicity” and “class” to the exclusion of “race.” In Cholas and Pishtacos, Weismantel brilliantly demonstrates the intertwining of racial and sexual discourses in the Andes. Drawing evidence from a broad range of popular and scholarly material, she integrates archival documents, folklore, festivals, classic works by novelist José María Arguedas and photographer Martin Chambi, and descriptions of the people and events from her long ethnographic fieldwork in Ecuador. As she notes, each of these genres “demands it own form of interpretation, and offers a different kind of truth” (p. xxiv). In weaving together these distinctive genres, Weismantel creates a powerful intertextual narrative that illuminates the complex discourses naturalizing economic inequality and grounding social hierarchies in the Andes and throughout the Americas.

This book is an insightful, carefully researched account of the experiences of Chinese students who attended college in the United States between 1900 and 1927. Ye examines how their experiences transformed their views of nationalism, politics, professionalism, race, gender roles, morality, and leisure.

At times in intellectual life the appropriate response can only be to stand and applaud. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra's foray into the world of eighteenth-century historiography provides us with one such moment. He draws on archival and library research in Spain, France, England, the United States, and Mexico to challenge and revise dominant understandings of eighteenth-century historical practice. In so doing, he recreates the various historiographical tendencies, debates, and innovations existing on both sides of the Atlantic during this era. One result is the demolition of the notion of a unitary—and, explicitly or implicitly in this formulation, primitive and backward—“Spanish mind.” However, Cañizares-Esguerra achieves far more than this as he leads us through an analysis of the various ways that the period's intellectuals, primarily in Spain and “Spanish” America, constructed knowledge about the pre-Colombian American past.