KINSHIP IN HISTORY CSSH has a long and continuing commitment to kinship as a topic of study—see, for example, such notable essays as Lawrence Stone's “Marriage among the English nobility in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”, 3:182–206 (1961), Jack Goody's “Adoption in cross-cultural perspective,” 11:55–78 (1969), and James D. Faubion's “Kinship is dead. Long live kinship,” 38:67–91 (1996). In this issue two essays show again to what good effect kinship can be put in the hands of able historians.

The gorgons had thus the same effect as paradoxes. For paralysis means: immobility; and immobility: to be unable to observe (Niklas Luhmann).Niklas Luhmann, “Sthenographie und Euryalistik,” Paradoxien, Dissonanzen, Zusammenbrüche, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht und K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds. (Frankfurt a. M., 1991), 58. Recently, the “paradoxical” character of sixteenth-century Venetian politics and culture has become the focus of attention among scholars of early modern Venice. In her book on City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice, Martha Feldman states that “Venice was above all a paradoxical city,” given the “divided consciousness” of Venetians whose urban culture oscillated “in a peculiarly ambivalent counterpoise” to contemporary court culture.Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (University of California Press, 1995), 10. Margaret Rosenthal has examined how Veronica Franco, poetess and prostitute in sixteenth-century Venice, portrayed herself as an “honest courtesan,” ingeniously appropriating the oxymoronic Venus-Virgin paradigm in Venetian iconography.Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (University of Chicago Press, 1992). According to Edward Muir, the doge's “two contrasting personae, one so humbled and the other so splendid,” were the complementary features of a “paradoxical prince.”Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton University Press, 1981), 261. I would like to contribute to this debate by analyzing how the social practice of marriage among the patriciate and the language of perfection in sixteenth-century political discourse followed the logic of paradoxical constellations. Rather than arguing for a causal connection between social practice on the one hand and political theory on the other, I propose to apply one analytical framework to investigate the paradoxical qualities of different social, political, economic, and cultural phenomena which were at the center of politics and society in Late Renaissance Venice.

Like women in many parts of the world whose husbands predeceased them, widows in China were free electrons, unbound elements in the social chemistry. Economically vulnerable, ritually superfluous, and at the same time socially destabilizing and sexually threatening, they were archetypal liminal figures—marginalized, caricatured, and feared. This has made the widow a good subject for literary critics, anthropologists, and historians interested in the way that societies treat women and in the way that treatment of widows in particular is intended to ward off or contain potential disturbance to the status quo. For China, as pioneering work by Mark Elvin and Susan Mann has shown, examining changing attitudes toward widows can illuminate larger social, political, and economic shifts in the late imperial period, roughly the thirteenth through the early twentieth centuries.Mark Elvin, “Female Virtue and the State,” Past and Present 104, 111–52; and Susan Mann, “Widows in the Kinship, Class, and Community Structures of Qing Dynasty China,” Journal of Asian Studies, 46:1 (February 1987), 37–56. Among newer work, see the excellent discussion in Bettine Birge, “Levirate Marriage and the Revival of Widow Chastity in Yüan China,” Asia Major, 8:2 (Fall 1995), 107–46. By focusing on Manchu widows, the present essay attempts to improve our understanding of widowhood in late imperial China and at the same time shed light on the role of widows, and women generally, in the construction of ethnicity in the Qing period (1644–1911), when the alien Manchu dynasty ruled the country.

Melville J. Herskovits (e.g., 1966, 1941) argued that African Americans in virtually every American nation “retained” some greater or lesser cultural “memory” of the African past. Assuming that the cultures of the West African Fon, Yorùbá, and Ashanti (as reconstructed in the “ethnographic present”) represented the extant “base line,” or starting point, of African-American cultural history, Herskovits' “ethnohistorical” method posited that less-acculturated African-American groups instantiated the earlier historical stages of the more acculturated African-American groups. Thus, for example, spirit possession in the Brazilian Candomblé, could be taken to demonstrate the African derivation of “shouting,” or the behavior of those “filled with the Holy Spirit,” in black North American churches (Herskovits 1958[1941]:220–1). No less, the Candomblé, could be taken to represent an earlier stage of black North Americans' gradual syncretic adaptation, accommodation, and acculturation (Herskovits 1958[1941]:218). Herskovits' descriptions tend to represent the distinctive qualities of African-American cultures, in terms of enduring “deep-seated drives,” “bents,” and “underlying patterns.” On the other hand, Herskovits gives little attention to proximate historical and sociological mechanisms of their transmission. Dozens of scholars have usefully employed similar methods in the study of African cultural “memory” and adaptations. E.g., Arthur Ramos, Edison Carneiro, Ruth Landes, and Roger Bastide on Afro-Brazilians; Lydia Cabrera on Afro-Cubans; Herskovits himself on Haitians and Surinam Maroons; Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán on Afro-Mexicans; W. E. B. Du Bois, Joseph Holloway, Sterling Stuckey, Albert Raboteau, Robert Farris Thompson and Margaret Creel on blacks in the United States; and so forth. This study revises Herskovits' cultural history of the African diaspora and proposes, at the Afro-Latin American locus classicus of Herskovitsian studies, some non-linear alternatives to Herskovits' and others' visions of diasporas generally.

In order to become the governing authority of the emerging Puerto Rican nation before the invasion of the United States in 1898, a group of letrados constructed the phantasm of a coherent and integrated national Self by excluding a phantasmagoric Other (such as the infirm Puerto Rican iíbaro).The reader will remember that, unlike the majority of Latin America, Puerto Rico was not an independent republic by the end of the nineteenth century but remained a Spanish colony. I borrow the term letrado from Angel Rama. He uses it to describe not only a class of cultured intellectuals but also a particular type of colonized consciousness that accepts the arbitrariness of the connection and, therefore, the implied rupture between signs and referents. A close examination of the works by members of this educated elite makes apparent the complexity of the dynamic between discourses of the Self and the Other that sustains this act of empowerment, as well as acts of empowerment similar to this one.

The information society, late capitalism, and globalization raise serious questions about many tidy categories through which the world has conventionally been understood. Resistance, the subject of this essay, is one of these categories. The proliferation of globalizing means of communications such as the satellite dish and the internet has added new dimensions to our world. One is the collapse of premodern conceptions of space and time. Our phenomenological world is one that compresses time and in turn annihilates space, as Harvey suggests,David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989). or delineates space and time and liberates them from their local markers, asGiddens argues.Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 21. As space shrinks phenomenologically, people in different places experience the same events at the same time.The globalized world and modernity and their impact on our understanding of the social phenomenon are not tied to the works of Harvey and Giddens alone. Other theorists such as Roland Peterson, Ulrich Beck, and Scott Lash are central to the globalization debate. For a good summary of the Globalization debate, see Malcolm Walters, Globalization (New York: Routledge, 1995). In light of the confusion stemming from the increase in global political, economic, and social activities, the world seems beset by the paradox of homogenizing and fragmenting impulses. Complicating this picture even further is our increasing dependence on the mediaFor a debate on the media, information society, and globalization, see Karamjit S. Gill, ed., Information Society: New Media, Ethics and Postmodernism (London: Springer-Verlag London Limited, 1996); Lance Starte, Ronald Jacobson, and Stephanie B. Gibson, Communication and Cyberspace (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 1996); Sandra Braman and Annabelle Mohammadi, Globalization, Communication, and Transnational Civil Society (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 1996); and Andrew King (ed.) Postmodern Political Communication: The Fringe Challenges the Center (Westport, CT: Braeger, 1992). to bring world events to our homes, giving us the illusion that we were taken there to witness these events. In this heavily mediated world, the “signs for the real,”This is Baudrillard's argument. For more, see Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Mark Poster, ed., Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 166–84. text and image alike, seem more real than the real itself. Nowhere has the impact of globalization been felt more intensely than in the Middle East. Data from the Gulf states in particular raise new questions about our understanding of resistance, national boundaries, and territoriality as well as other social science concepts such as sovereignty, the nation state, and citizenship.

In February 1989, General Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay's longtime dictator, was deposed in a coup led by one of his top generals. During the first days after the coup, hundreds of rural Paraguayans swept onto unused lands claimed by the state, the Stroessner family and its cronies, and foreign investors, to set up ramshackle huts and clear plots to grow manioc and corn. They were soon followed by thousands more. By mid-1990, observers and representatives of the occupants estimated that roughly 19,000 families had claimed lands totaling over 360,000 hectares.These figures are derived from information provided by several organizations involved with the occupants and from data collected by the Centro de Documentación y Estudios and published in its monthly Informativo Campesino. For more information, see note 4. Most of the occupations occurred in the eastern and northern border departments, a frontier zone that had been rapidly developed for commercial agriculture during the preceding decades. But small farmers and rural workers throughout the nation mobilized to demand direct participation in their new government, more favorable agricultural policies, and restitution for past abuses. For Paraguay, then a nation of only 4.1 million persons, 2.06 million of them rural, this mobilization represented a considerable proportion of the population. Although land occupations were not new to Paraguay, his wave of rural activism was exceptional. Coinciding with Paraguay's first hesitant steps toward democracy, the occupations expressed the hopes of the rural poor for a more democratic rural society and for their own voice in the new political system.

On September 14, 1991, when the National Peace Accord was signed in Johannesburg, the cream of South Africa's political elite was there: future President Nelson Mandela, then President F. W. De Klerk, Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, and other luminaries, new and old. But amid the politicians stood a different kind of figure, looking slightly out of place: a chubby, balding, middle-aged businessman named John Hall. Yet to the surprise of no one present, Hall was chosen unanimously to head the National Peace Committee they had just created in a bid to end the political violence blazing across the country. Although this moment was a turning point in South Africa's transition to democracy, it has been almost forgotten. Indeed, despite the acres of print dedicated to democratization in South Africa, commentators have largely ignored a crucial factor in its success: business.

Hasan Kayali brings his obvious talents for narrative and description and knowledge of the extant literature on the relations between the Arabs and the Turks in Arabic and Turkish to bear on the important but understudied topic of the Arabs of the Young Turks. In this relatively short volume, consisting of an introduction and six chapters, he covers this topic from the period of the Tanzimat through to the end of the Ottoman Empire. He is aware of the fact that the feelings that were and still are at the bottom of this complex relationship did not end in 1922 but that would be the subject of an entirely different book.

The intifada, or uprising, that began in the Occupied Territories in December 1987 and ended about four years later was a watershed in that it profoundly transformed the rules of the game for Palestinian politics locally, regionally, and internationally. Glenn E. Robinson's Building a Palestinian State: The Incomplete Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) discusses the precedents, processes, and aftermath of the intifada by focusing on the role of elites in this trajectory. The book is structured around three questions: First, what compels aggrieved individuals to turn to sustained collective action? In the Palestinian context, the author argues that this became possible only when national leadership in the territories was transferred, beginning in the late 1970s, from a class of politically accommodating, wealthy, conservative, urban, landowning elites to a younger generation of more radical, university- educated, lower-middle class and middle-class village, refugee camp, and urban residents who sought social as well as political transformation. As a number of other scholars have argued, this leadership transfer was facilitated by Israeli land confiscations and restrictions on land and water use, the concomitant rise of a migrant wage-labor force largely dependent on manual work in Israel, and the expansion of Palestinian universities after the 1967 Israeli occupation of the territories. Robinson argues that these universities were particularly important for the rise of the counter-elite because their student bodies largely came from the non- and small-landowning residents of villages, towns, and refugee camps (the children, particularly male, of the wealthy were more likely to be educated abroad).

“Our public sphere, which should have displayed and preserved the grandeur and beauty of our civic ideals and moral excellences, is instead inane and vacuous when it is not utterly mean, ugly, or indecent” (p. 4). Troubled by the tawdry nonsense circulating in the public sphere—and she wrote before learned enquiries into whether the President's genitals had any distinguishing characteristics—Rochelle Gurstein turns to history to understand how we arrived at such a sorry destination. Hers is a tale of decline: The Victorians “we moderns” so routinely deride for their Puritanical repressiveness understood full well that certain things have to remain private, even shameful, in order to retain their sacred value-and in order to protect a public sphere worth having.

Germany's brief colonial career began in the 1880s after centuries of European overseas expansion. Yet as Susanne Zantop shows in this interesting study, German observers were anything but “passive” during these long years of colonial abstinence. Between the Welsers' ill-fated South American colonial venture (1528 – 55) and the late-nineteenth-century Scramble, German writers generated a huge literature on colonialism which was fraught with fantasies about imperial conquest, European conflict, and German class struggles. While most recent work on German colonialism focuses on the late nineteenth century and on the sites of Germany's eventual overseas empire, this book concentrates on the New World, arguing that it played a more important role in German colonial fantasies than Africa, Asia, or the Pacific. Zantop traces the evolution of colonial discourses within a variety of literary, philosophical, and scientific genres, focusing on the period from the mid-eighteenth century to the 1870s.