At a crucial meeting during their proceedings, on 9 November 1983, the sixteen members of Britain's influential Warnock Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology reached a key decision on how to base proposals for comprehensive legislation governing this largely uncharted territory. Famously, they chose the formation of the “primitive streak” in the early embryo as the basis for the fourteen-day rule that has now served as the global benchmark for experimental research in this area for nearly thirty years. Based on newly available archival material and interviews, this article offers a sociological account of the ways in which a specific translation of biological facts became the basis for an enduring social contract governing controversial bioinnovation in the UK. In particular, the combined roles of Committee Chair Mary Warnock and biologist Anne McLaren are examined in terms of how a decision, or “iterative settlement,” was reached as to “where to draw the line” using specific “developmental landmarks” to establish a basis for legal regulation. Drawing from this analysis, I offer a broader argument concerning the sociology of biological translation and biogovernance that is germane to ongoing debates such that over how to limit CRISPR-Cas 9 gene editing. I contend also that we have yet to fully grasp the historical and sociological lessons to be drawn from the early histories of establishing governance over new forms of technological assistance to human reproduction, and in particular the formation of the “Warnock Consensus.”

In conflict-ridden communities, justice specialists gather evidence through verbal accounts and material vestiges of violations committed by repressive regimes and during warfare, to eventually lay legal charges against alleged perpetrators. Anthropologists and sociologists engage with similar contexts but have included conventional bodily rituals, routinized practices, and commemoration practices as sources of knowledge of violent pasts and struggles for historical justice, although without the intention of determining legal accountability. This article shifts from the prevailing focus on repressive regimes and warfare to analyze the famine continuum and expands the procedures for gathering evidence of violations. It shows how, in one Mozambique community, a contingent combination of singular bodily actions, collective imagination and negotiations, and kinship norms evolved and became instrumental in two ways: contested fragments of evidence of violations perpetrated during the experiences of the 1980s famine were refined, and local struggles for accountability conveyed through bodily actions were sustained. The ensuing embodied accountability reshaped relationships by overcoming silence and denial, exposing ordinary perpetrators of violations, and cementing memories of guilt in the landscape. To capture the diversity of legacies of violations marred by fragile evidence, we must be attentive to the versatility of singular bodily actions. We need to consider the multiplicity of meanings, contexts, and perpetrators and how those in conflict zones struggle with embodied accountability.

This essay examines relations between eastern Africa and western India in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in respect to two related sets of problems: the changing regimes of commercial circulation, and more particularly the evolution of patterns of human movement, notably via the slave trade from Ethiopia and the Swahili coast to Gujarat and the Deccan. It argues that over the course of the sixteenth century, commercial relations between Deccan ports such as Goa and Chaul, and the Swahili coast, came to be strengthened through the intervention of the Portuguese and their military-commercial system. At the same time, large numbers of African slaves reached the Muslim states in India, especially in the period after 1530, where they played a significant role as military specialists, and eventually as elite political and cultural actors. The shifting geographical dimensions of the African presence in India are emphasized, beginning in western Gujarat and winding up in the Deccan Sultanates. This contrasts markedly with the African experience elsewhere, where the meaning and institutional context of slavery were quite different.

Scholars have treated British colonial rule in India and the internal colonization of the United States in the nineteenth century as analytically distinct moments. Yet these far-flung imperial projects shared a common set of anxieties regarding land and labor. This paper seeks to conceptualize the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 in India and the Indian Appropriation Acts of 1851–1871 in the United States as part of a congruent effort to manage and define the labor force in the context of the intensified expropriation of land. In the complement to agricultural improvement programs, British and American colonizers sought to rehabilitate itinerant populations to create a labor pool endowed with suitable qualities for unleashing the productive capacity of land. While in India the cumulative effect of criminal tribes legislation was inclusive in that members of criminal tribes were purportedly reformed in preparation for joining the colonial labor force, reservation policy in the United States excluded Native Americans from lands that were the preserve of white labor while simultaneously laying the groundwork for assimilation.

This article examines an Arabic commentary on the American self-help pioneer Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, written by a one-time leading intellectual of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Muḥammad al-Ghazālī. Ghazālī’s 1956 commentary was perhaps the earliest manifestation of an influential genre of literature within the Islamic world today: “Islamic self-help.” Although scholars treat Islamic self-help as an effect of neoliberalism, this article reorients the study of Islamic self-help beyond neoliberalism by showing first, that Ghazālī’s early version of it emerged through a critical engagement with several ideological forms that relate in complex ways to neoliberalism's antecedent, liberalism; and second, that his Islamic self-help is best understood in terms of an Islamic encounter with American metaphysical religion made possible by Carnegie's text. It argues that Ghazālī’s Islamic self-help constituted a radical reconfiguration of Western self-help, one that replaced the ethics of self-reliance and autonomy with Islamic ethical sensibilities clustered around the notions of human insufficiency and dependence upon God. In doing so, it highlights how scholars of contemporary Islam might fruitfully pose the question of how novel intellectual trends and cultural forms, like self-help, become Islamic, instead of limiting their analysis to how Islam is reshaped by modern Euro-American thought, institutions, and practices.

This article seeks a deeper understanding of inheritance by examining how kinship and personhood propel, and are altered by, schooling. It foregrounds kinship's and personhood's transformative and historical dimensions with an eye to their complexity and unevenness. The post-1945 generation in the central Philippines considers schooling (edukasyon) as their inheritance from their parents, who had few or no educational credentials themselves. This view reflects edukasyon’s increased value after the war, how people both judge and emulate the old landed elite, and the ongoing salience and elaboration of hierarchical parent-child ties. Alongside this view, children are recognized as completing, redeeming, and compensating for their parents. Attainment of edukasyon is seen to require not only personal striving but also solidarity and sacrifices among siblings. Yet, edukasyon also fosters autonomy and at times severs kinship ties. Finally, as an inheritance, edukasyon both depends upon and generates inequality, with long-term intergenerational implications.

Drawing on never-before-utilized archival and oral sources, “Making Peasants Chèf” contends that decades of peasant marginalization from political power created the social and political conditions for the rise of the infamous tonton makout militia under the dictator François Duvalier. After coming to power in 1957, Duvalier militarized and rearmed peasants in exchange for their loyalty. Thousands of previously ostracized peasants enlisted in the dreaded makout militia to access status and political power. This explains why the peasant-based militia formed an arm of state repression. With the support of an armed peasantry, Duvalier successfully repressed the political opposition, allowing the regime to stay in power for almost three decades.

Explaining why restraint of violence becomes a strategy for armed groups has recently attracted the attention of researchers, especially political scientists. The emergent literature generally argues by way of macro-level statistical correlation, in which a single factor, such as the desire of armed groups to adhere to international norms about human rights or the existence of high levels of political education among fighters, is believed to explain the presence of restraint. Missing in this approach are close analyses of actual historical episodes of restraint. We thus lack comprehension of how those with ideas about restraining violence translate their thoughts into actions, especially in contexts such as civil wars. This article addresses this weakness by examining the history of a Balkan community wracked by intercommunal violence during 1941 to explain the puzzling practice of restraint in the midst of waves of retaliatory violence. Rather than identify a single factor, this micro-comparative case study reveals that a cluster of mostly endogenous factors, shaped significantly by ongoing violence, explains the successful practice of restraint. Methodologically, this article stresses the need for researchers of restraint to employ microhistorical and comparative methods. They hold the greatest potential to illuminate what remains insufficiently explained in the extant political science literature: the contingent local processes whereby a desire for restraint or escalation of violence—the existence of which may be conditioned by longer-term historical developments—becomes a reality in certain moments.