CITIZENS The emergence and spread of the concept of citizenship as the body of persons making up the membership of a state and enjoying uniform political status, and the incompletenesses of its actualizations, forms an especially productive terrain for scholarship just now, as may be seen in the first two essays.

Inequality is a fundamental reality of the modern world-system as it has been of every known historical system. What is different, what is particular to historical capitalism, is that equality has been proclaimed as its objective, and indeed as its achievement—equality in the marketplace, equality before the law, the fundamental social equality of all individuals endowed with equal rights. The great political question of the modern world, the great cultural question, has been how to reconcile the theoretical embrace of equality with the continuing and increasingly acute polarization of real-life opportunities and satisfactions that has been its outcome.

This essay uses a discussion of three recent events in Yemen to dramatize the relationship between state power and the experience of citizenship in the aftermath of national unification in 1990.My analysis depends on readers understanding the differences I am registering among the terms “state,” “nation,” and “regime.” By “state” I mean a common set of institutions capable of distributing goods and services and controlling violence within a demarcated, internationally recognized territory. By “nation” I refer to a shared sense of belonging simultaneously with anonymous others to an imagined community. By “regime” I mean the political order of a particular leader or administration. For example, we tend to say “the regime of עAli עAbd Allah Salih,” but not “the state of עAli עAbd Allah Salih.” The first event is a “direct,” purportedly competitive presidential election on 23 September 1999, the first since unification and unprecedented in the histories of the former countries of North and South Yemen. The second is the celebration of the tenth anniversary of national unification on 22 May 2000, including the extraordinary preparations leading up to the event. The third is the public sensation following the arrest and prosecution of a man touted as Yemen's first bona fide “serial killer,” which occurred during the lead-up to the decennial celebration.

As in the vast majority of socialist states that arose with the Soviet Union's post-World War II hegemony over Eastern Europe, People's Republic of Romania nationalized (confiscated) a large number of privately owned houses. The declared intention of the state was to eliminate housing inequality and the private rental sector in urban areas. In 1950, the state appropriated both leased and family homes that were considered to have too much domestic space. The inhabitants of confiscated houses became tenants instead of owners. Tenants were made to live with the former owners in such expropriated domestic space. With the collapse of state socialism in 1989, former owners and their descendants began seeking to regain the property rights for these confiscated houses. In a limited number of cases they succeeded, although the majority of houses had been sold by the state to the sitting tenants at very low prices.

This article pursues conjectures raised in the conclusions of an earlier essay (Parkes 2001), where I suggested that Eugene Hammel's (1968) classic analysis of Serbian godparenthood might be extended to other kinds of constructed kinship attested in the historical ethnography of Europe and Asia. Hammel's notion of alternative social structures—configurations of mutually exclusive ties of patrilineal descent, affinal alliance, and godparenthood—was shown to apply to an analogous complex of descent, alliance, and fosterage or “milk kinship” in former mountain kingdoms of northern Pakistan. Milk kinship relations between descent lines established through infant fosterage constituted a similar system of unilateral ties of alliance between status groups. Indeed, fosterage in the Hindu Kush was a recognized institution of dynastic allegiance, tying all offspring of princely rulers to subordinate nobility, and thence interlinking successive status levels so as to form enchained factions of partisans, opposed as warring parties in the notorious succession disputes of these mountain kingdoms. In effect, milk kinship chains through fosterage comprised a structural analogue of asymmetric affinal alliance—whereby the transitive circulation of children replaced that of spouses interlinking descent lines of different status levels—just as did Serbian transactions of spiritual sponsorship according to Hammel.

Recent years have seen the emergence of a lively debate over the nature of “colonial knowledge”—those forms and bodies of knowledge that enabled European colonizers to achieve domination over their colonized subjects around the globe. Lying at the heart of the debate are two opposing evaluations of the role played by colonized subjects in the production of colonial knowledge. One position holds that the role of the colonized was negligible—at most, permitting some of them to serve as passive informants, providing raw information to the active European colonizers who produced the new knowledge by imposing imported modes of knowing upon the raw data of local society. In contrast, the other holds that indigenous intellectuals in reality contributed actively to the process, and that colonial knowledge was thus produced through a complex form of collaboration between colonizers and colonized, and an attendant process of epistemic confrontation and adjustment between European and indigenous knowledge systems. Although this debate has focused primarily on one colonial context—that of British India—it has important ramifications for the broader history of colonialism, and is complemented by contributions relating to other areas of European colonialism (Cooper and Stoler 1997:11–18).

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals Darwin makes brief reference to a “curious document” obtained from a South African man whom he described as the brother of a prominent chief (1965 [1872]:22). This document was received, not during the brief stop made by the Beagle at the Cape in 1836, but thirty-two years later as a written response to a questionnaire about emotion that Darwin had sent by post to various institutions and associates around the globe. He suggests that he found this response most interesting because it was the only one to come directly from a “native,” and was even more amazing in having come from the hand of one able to write down his own responses. It was from a man who referred to himself as “Christian Gaika, brother of Chief Sandilli.”

The struggle to control nature takes many forms. In the State of Maine, one current struggle for control has been focused on declining stocks of Atlantic salmon. The varied participants in the debates and struggles over Atlantic salmon include federal and state governments and many of their bureaucracies, large international timber corporations, small local businesses, salmon farmers, dam owners, blueberry growers, commercial fishers, recreational fishers, scientists, and a raft of environmental organizations. In different ways, these participants all have a stake in the fate of Atlantic salmon, but they do not have the same power to effect ecological change or to define the debate in terms most favorable to their wishes.The primary sources on the debate include, “Review of the Status of Anadromous Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) under the U.S. Endangered Species Act,” 60 Federal Register 50530 (July 1999); “Proposed Endangered Status for a Distinct Population Segment of Anadromous Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) in the Gulf of Maine,” 64 Federal Register 62627 (17 Nov. 1999); “Comments of the Maine Salmon Rescue Coalition in Opposition to the Proposal to List Atlantic Salmon as Endangered Under the Endangered Species Act” (12 Apr. 2000); and “Comments of the State of Maine in Opposition to Proposed Endangered Status for a Distinct Population Segment (DPS) of Atlantic Salmon in the Gulf of Maine, 64 Federal Register 62627 (November 17, 1999),” (14 Apr. 2000). The published and unpublished documents concerning the endangered species listing have been collected by the Services, and are available for inspection at the National Marine Fisheries Service, Gloucester, Massachusetts, and at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Hadley, Massachusetts.

The parts of a machine are elastic, indeed, flexible. But does this mean that there really isn't any mechanism at all, since the parts of the machine function as if made of butter? (And now think of a mechanism, say clock-works, made of materials which are far more flexible still than ours, so that the movements would be strangely irregular—would a mechanism like that have to be useless, or couldn't it actually be used?) —Wittgenstein, Last WritingsLudwig Wittgenstein. 1990. Last Writings of the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. I. Preliminary Studies for Part II of Philosophical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), I, §878:112–13.

This volume of essays on the history of ethnographic collecting in Melanesia should open up debates about the agency of indigenous people in the process of collecting for European museums during the height of empire. It should also add more fire to the often spirited discussions about the repatriation of objects from these institutions. Although in his introduction O'Hanlon approaches the question of repatriation gingerly, the essays in this volume have provided him with the material to critique some of the assumptions behind contemporary arguments in its favor. As O'Hanlon stresses, and Nicholas Thomas revisits in his brief epilog, so much of the scholarship produced on colonialism during the last four decades has been focused on qualifying the ways in which colonial relations were relations of dominance. This focus has become almost tautological, so that scholars and others interested in ethnographic artifacts collected during the colonial era have tended to identify them a priori with dispossession. This, O'Hanlon argues, has left little room for considering the agency of non-Europeans in the world-wide networks of exchange that touched Melanesia (or other places) during the age of empire. It has also radically curtailed our appreciation of the kinds of ethnographic work that can be pursued in museums. This volume is meant to correct that imbalance by throwing into question the “unidimensional popular stereotype of dispossession and cultural obliteration” (3) associated with collecting. It encourages us to rethink some aspects of colonial encounters, the history of metropolitan museums, the history of anthropology and, by implication, the politics of repatriation.

Matthew Connelly's thoroughly researched and gracefully written volume adds an important dimension to our understanding of Algeria's struggle for independence. While the Algerian revolution has been the subject of numerous scholarly accounts, relatively little attention has been paid to the nature and context of the diplomatic efforts that played such an important role in the outcome of the conflict. It is here that Connelly makes an important and highly original contribution.

In reading across disciplinary boundaries, it is always interesting to encounter a work defending what was once taken for granted in one's “home” discipline. Lockert's study begins with what may be a provocative statement for anthropologists but apparently is not for political scientists: “only a few contemporary students of comparative politics employ culture as a prominent explanatory variable” (ix). Lockert explains that while culture was significant to comparativist scholars in the 1950s and 1960s, a more deductive approach using rational choice theory has become increasingly popular since the 1980s. Throughout the book, Lockert seems to be in dialogue with rational choice and institutional theorists, responding to anticipated criticisms and pointing out how culturally informed theories can be more complete.

On page one of his 1887 essay Gemmeinschaft and Gessellschaft, Ferdinand Tønnies distinguished two sorts of relationships resulting in associations conceived of as things or beings: “The relationship itself, and also the resulting association, is conceived of either as real and organic life—this is the essential characteristic of the Gemeinschaft (community); or as imaginary and mechanical structure—this is the concept of the Gessellschaft (society).” Whether Benedict Anderson was making specific reference to the passage in the title of Imagined Communities (1983), it is in any case a passage critical to specifying the significance of his evocative phrase. Reading Anderson through Tønnies we can see that an imagined community would not simply be a group that is not real in the conventional sense, whatever real might mean in this case. According to Tønnies' logic, an imagined community would be a formalized abstract translocal social-system conceptualizing itself as a concrete face-to-face local group, like, say, a family. The phrase would not delineate an evolutionary phase according to the logic of classic social thought (community[rarrtl ] society[rarrtl ] imagined community); it would identify the figure in terms of which an “association” is conceived of as “a thing or being,” which is to say, it would identify a metaphor. One thing Anderson is apparently saying, then, is that this particular metaphor, society conceived as community, and not the concept of society alone, is of primary significance for understanding political representation, sentiment, and mobilization in late modern times.

Thomas Blom Hansen has in short order but with considerable deliberation published two detailed examinations of the rise of, and dynamics within, communal politics in contemporary, democratic India. Hansen assembles a variety of theoretical tools from a selection of disciplines to explore the roots of Hindu chauvinist politics and the violence it has engendered in the past few decades. Although he does not apply his analysis to consider other religious polities, both books offer reflections useful in deliberations regarding the nature of democracy and the unpredictable internal forces that are mastered by no one, yet which often master nations.