MILK RELATIONS Blood is thicker than water, but milk is another substance through which relations of kinship can be embodied, as the first article explains. (Also on kinship and its fluids: Gillian Feeley-Harnik, “Communities of Blood: The Natural History of Kinship in Nineteenth-century America,” 1999: 215–62.)

This article is a comparative elaboration of Eugene Hammel's pioneering analysis of “fictive kinship,” Alternative Social Structures and Ritual Relations in the Balkans (1968). In place of godparenthood, I examine the structurally similar institution of fosterage or “milk kinship” as documented in former mountain kingdoms of the Hindu Kush in northern Pakistan. Comparable structures of interdomestic allegiance and tributary patronage organized through milk kinship are attested more fragmentarily elsewhere in the Middle East and Central Asia, and there is further evidence that such hierarchized foster relations also extended into many peripheral regions of premodern Europe (E. Goody 1982:280–1; Parkes n.d.). Hammel himself mentioned Serbian “kinship by milk” (srodstvo po mleku)—“meaning the fictive kinship relationship between two children suckled by the same woman, but otherwise unrelated” (1968:31 n.27)—with reference to Filopovich's (1963) earlier survey of South Slavonic ritual kinship. Yet Hammel did not pursue the possible analogies of such fosterage ties with kumstvo godparenthood: as structurally equivalent institutions of constructed kinship, once orchestrating transitive chains of interdomestic allegiance and tributary governance in peripheral polities throughout Eurasia.

“Western” societies today are by and large post-Christian, in the sense that many people do not seriously identify with a religious denomination or sect, major public discourses—particularly academic ones—are secular, and Christian institutions and values are no longer naturalized in public politics.My secular sense that Australia is among the most secular societies in a largely secular “Western” world is evidently shared by committed Christians. A leading Anglican minister refers to Sydney as “a godless city” and differentiates “our Christian counter-culture” from “the world's culture” (Age Good Weekend [Melbourne], 22 Aug. 1998:12). In the United States, confrontation and competition from a host of born-again contenders can force post-Christian religious indifference into quasi-fundamentalist rivalry for the moral and political high ground, but mainstream academic discourses remain as resolutely secular as they have been at least since World War I. Given that this period has seen the heyday of anthropology's disciplinary professionalization,George Stocking locates anthropology's “classical” period from about 1920 to about 1965 (1992:93–4). it is not surprising that its dominant orientations have often been unreflectively sociopolitical, even though its usual proclaimed objects of study were, until relatively recently, putatively “traditional” “societies” with “cultures” aptly categorized as “religious.”

The spectacular confrontation between the Chinese government and the Falungong spiritual movement has focused attention on the very visible conflict between state and religion in China's urban areas. Conflict and violence have also accompanied the explosion of popular religious activities in the rural areas of post-Mao China, where much of the conflict is subdued and largely invisible to the outside observer. Christians are denied the permits necessary to make “home worship” legal; popular religious temples are confiscated and occupied by authorities hungry for physical and cultural space; proselytizers seeking to spread the Word or the Way are run out of town on a rail. Other examples, however, are much more spectacular, and recall the mobilizing force enjoyed by certain religious groups in imperial times. Wu Yangming was arrested in 1995 for having founded the “Anointed King Sect” in eastern Anhui, which was to “unite the country” in its spirit (Maclean's 1996). The “Lightening from the East” sect preached the second coming of Christ as a woman, and prophesied the end of the world according to a mixture of folk Buddhist and Christian soteriological motifs (China Study Journal 1997). In the context of the group studied in this essay, the Way of the Temple of the Heavenly Immortals, a sect leader summoned village cadres to a Temple festival in 1985 and delivered—in trance—a message to village cadres:

Haitian Vodou has long been viewed through a distorted lens by outsiders. In the nineteenth century, as the Republic of Haiti suffered from a unique degree of economic and political isolation implemented and enforced by the powerful slaveholding empires and nations that surrounded it, Vodou was commonly represented as the ultimate antithesis of “civilization,” as a case of African superstition reborn in the Americas. During the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, images of Haitian Vodou as a terrain of demonic possession, absurd superstition, and zombis proliferated in the United States. At the same time, the twentieth century has also seen the publication of several careful ethnographic works about Vodou. During the 1930s, Melville Herskovits published his Life in a Haitian Valley, which argued that the Haitian religion had West African roots. During the same period Zora Neale Hurston wrote her less well-known Tell My Horse. Both of these works attentively described aspects of Vodou, as did Alfred Metraux's classic 1959 text Voodoo in Haiti. The next year Harold Courlander's Drum and Hoe provided detailed examinations of Haitian ritual music. The filmmaker and dancer Maya Deren published her at times experimental Divine Horsemen, which drew on Joseph Campbell's theories in seeking to describe the theological system of the religion. Another dancer, Kathryn Dunham, also described Vodou in her Island Possessed, published in 1969. The obstinate, broader stereotypes against which these works were articulated influenced the ways in which all these authors wrote about and interpreted the religion. These texts, notably those by Metraux and Deren, fought a battle for Vodou, confronting the idea that was it was little more than a “cult” or the expression of “superstition,” with carefully crafted descriptions of the belief systems and ritual of what they showed to be a complex and deeply rooted religion. This work on Vodou developed alongside other works on “Afro-Atlantic” religions, such as Cuban Santéria, and Brazilian Candomblé, as well as on the African influences on Afro-American Christianity.Melville Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1971); Zora Neal Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990); Alfred Metraux, Voodoo in Haiti (New York: Schocken Books, 1959); Harold Courlander, The Drum and the Hoe: Life and Lore of the Haitian People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (New York: McPherson and Company, 1953); Katherine Dunham, Island Possessed (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969). Among the classic broader studies of African religion in the New World are Roger Bastide, African Civilizations in the New World (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), and, more recently, Robert Farris Thompson's Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983).

Little is known of the private worlds of working people in the growing cities of nineteenth-century India, still less of the space women occupied in them. Historical documentation is almost silent on information about their everyday lives. An exception perhaps are certain legal records, such as the proceedings on petitions of insolvents. From the early nineteenth century onwards, many humble citizens of metropolitan cities were able to petition the courts for protection from their creditors. It is here that we find the striking record of the personality and concerns of Ayesha, mother of an insolvent butcher in nineteenth-century Bombay. This article draws upon the documentation generated by the hearings on Ismail Sobhan's petition to the High Court of Bombay for protection.

One hundred years ago, Mrs. Archibald Little summarized the activities of Sichuan women with whom she was, after long residence in that province, quite familiar.

In 1990, after seventeen years of dictatorial rule in Chile, General Augusto Pinochet ceded power to a democratically elected government. The ensuing transition from authoritarian rule has presented the governing Concertación coalition and Chileans more generally with formidable challenges: checking the power of the military, dealing with the legacy of human rights abuses, democratizing the authoritarian state structures created by Pinochet and confronting the heightened class inequality generated by the military's neoliberal economic policies. In the years following 1990, however, public debate has frequently centered on a distinct, although not unrelated, set of issues: crime, teenage pregnancy, drug use, divorce and abortion.Works that provide an overview of military rule and the transition from authoritarian rule in Chile include The Struggle for Democracy in Chile, 1982–1990, ed. Paul Drake and Iván Jaksic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); El modelo chileno: Democracia y desarrollo en los noventa, ed. Paul Drake and Iván Jaksic (Santiago: LOM, 1999); Lois Hecht Oppenheim, Politics in Chile: Democracy, Authoritarianism, and the Search for Development (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993); Philip D. Oxhorn, Organizing Civil Society: The Popular Sectors and the Struggle for Democracy in Chile (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). My assertions regarding the prevalence of public debate on moral issues since 1990 are based on observations I made while in Chile during 1988, 1991–1993, and December 1996.

As we enter the twenty-first century, the photographed, digitally produced, and globally disseminated printed image impinges upon us with growing insistence from all directions, inflecting and normalizing certain views and desires while foreclosing and obscuring others. Never before has it been so cheap or easy to purchase, use, and then toss away a camera, so commonsensical to expect the everyday images that crowd one's day to “cover the globe,” or so unsettling to see the specter of total visibility and surveillance granted such legitimacy. Yet in an age in which the Internet is celebrated by many with messianic fervor, when modernity's fascination with speed enjoys a new apotheosis, and when the perceived shrinking of the globe crystallizes in the quaint vision of a “village” ready-made for a millennial “Family of Mankind” album, the photograph in all its two-dimensional stillness seems to beckon from a more quiet and disappearing world. Increasingly in this great blizzard of speed, technology, and global communication, all photographs appear to emit a sepia-toned glow. This may be one reason why the study of photographs and photography has become especially attractive in the last decade among those scholars especially attuned to their social and historical dimensions, notably anthropologists, historians, literary and art critics.

In correlation to the expansion and intensification of capitalist forms of agricultural production in the Malay states during the end of the nineteenth century, the British Colonial administration articulated the need to systematize the policing of agricultural production with increasing strength. The economic prospects of feeding the world market's increasing demand for natural rubber, combined with the objective of decreasing the Malay states' dependence on import of basic staples (notably rice), were taken by the Colonial administration as indicators of an urgent need to spur on the progress of agricultural production. A revolution of agricultural practices, which would transform what was seen as the backward and inefficient techniques of the “native cultivators” into modern and progressive production forms based on scientific knowledge, could only take place, it was argued, by resorting to systematic government intervention.