SYSTEMS OF CONSANGUINITY AND AFFINITY Kinship, so prominent in the previous issue, returns in this. Gillian Feeley-Harnik reevaluates Lewis Henry Morgan and his works, seeing his pioneering anthropological kinship studies and his researches on the beaver as aspects of a unitary vision comprehending the landscape and its inhabitants. She proposes a “natural history of kinship,” the aim of which is to break out of the box which Durkheim built and David Schneider dismantled, in the critique of Morgan's supposed biological notion of kinship: the impossible project of asserting that kinship is purely social, abstracting humans from their landscapes, their animal relatives, their bodies. She finds that Morgan's ideas of relationships were more linguistic and social than physiological, but also entangled with a wide range of geological and zoological phenomena, earthy and watery. Understanding his work in his own terms, “his example may inspire us to search for new ways to integrate phenomenological, political-economic, and ecological analysis into the study of how people understand their life processes.”

Lewis H. Morgan's Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) is credited with inventing the anthropological study of “kinship” from a comparative perspective (Trautmann 1987). Since Émile Durkheim's critique of 1898, Morgan is also said to have reduced kinship to biology in keeping with Anglo-American cultural assumptions about “blood relations” given in nature. Yet, on closer inspection, Morgan's “consanguinity” proves to be fraught with contradictions. Debates about the degenerative effects of mixing bloods in marriage—consanguinity with affinity—encompassed not only miscegenation but also “consanguineous marriages,” such as Morgan's own marriage to his first cousin (his mother's brother's daughter) in 1851.

In his magisterial studies on the Islamic educational system, George Makdisi (1961, 1981, 1990) traces three stages in the development of the madrasa (Islamic school) into colleges for the study of the Koran, the Traditions of the Prophet, and jurisprudence. These three stages, first suggested by Pedersen (1986), are the following: first, the development of teaching circles (halgas) for various subjects in mosques from the earliest times to the tenth century; second, the emergence of the “mosque-inn colleges” toward the end of the tenth century; and, finally, third, the development of the “madrasa colleges of law,” in which the functions of the mosque and the inn (or hostel, khān) were combined in an institution based on a single deed of endowment (Pedersen 1986: 1123). Makdisi includes the official establishment of the madrasas by the great Seljuq vizier, Nizam al-Murk, in the second half of the eleventh century in this stage. In the twelfth century, the college as developed in the Islamic world was, according to Makdisi, first imported into Europe by the Knights Templar of the Levant who founded the Inns of Court in London. The Inns of Court were attached to churches, as khāns had been attached to mosques. Somewhat later, one John of London who must have seen madrasas in or on the way to Jerusalem, endowed the College des Dix-Huit in Paris for 18 poor students in 1180. In the mid-thirteenth century, the first 3 colleges of Oxford were founded as charitable trusts. (Makdisi 1981:224–30; 1990:311–7). Whatever the merits of this argument for the world-historical importance of the madrasa as the prototype of the European university, the significance of its development in medieval Islam cannot be doubted. The subject is of particular theoretical interest because of the intricate connection between the evolution of the institutions of higher learning and the character of law and government. This connection can illuminate the dynamics of social agency in pre-modern Islamic society.

The madrasa is one of the many institutions which have seen recurrent attempts at reform in Muslim societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the eleventh century, when it first emerged as the principal institution of higher Islamic learning, the madrasa has undergone many changes, adapting in varying degrees to local cultures and changing times.On the madrasa in medieval Islam, see George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus 1190–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Given the centrality of this institution in the preservation and production of knowledge as well as in the formation of the religious elite, the madrasa is crucial to the construction of religious authority. Profound changes in Muslim societies in modern times have not necessarily marginalized this institution, but such changes have frequently raised questions about the position and function of the madrasa in society and of the ‘ulama reared in it, about whether this institution ought to be reformed, and if so, to what end, how, and by whom.

The highest stage in the history of the labor movement came with the unionization of the Fordist-Taylorist factory system.The concept of the “Fordist-Taylorist factory system,” first developed in Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 277–318, was popularized in the 1970s by France's “regulation economists” (Boyer, Aglietta, Lipietz, Coriat). It refers to those mass-production metal-fabrication plants based on the assembly-line techniques devised by Henry Ford and managed according to the “scientific” principles worked out by Frederick Winslow Taylor. The U.S. auto industry of the 1920s and 1930s best exemplifies this form of production. Neither before nor since has labor achieved a comparable influence. In the United States and France, this stage was reached in the same period and through roughly similar means. In June 1936, a massive wave of factory occupations swept across the Paris metal industry, forcing employers to introduce one of the world's most progressive systems of industrial relations. Six months later, sit-in strikes in Flint, Michigan, defeated the open shop at the General Motors Corporation, opening the way to the subsequent unionization of America's mass-production sector. These two events, the dominant peaks in the history of the modern labor movement, have rarely been viewed in the same light, yet they were part of a unique set of circumstances affecting not merely the fate of unionism, but that of industrial society.Most accounts of the French and American occupations make reference to the other national case, but the only actual attempt to compare them is to be found in Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 125–8. Notwithstanding his definitive study of the Flint occupations, Fine's treatment of the Paris strikes, based on a few English language sources, examines only their general contours, not the structural and contingent factors linking them with the Flint movement. Cf. Val R. Lorwin, “Reflections on the History of the French and American Labor Movements,” The Journal of Economic History, 17 (March 1957).

Workers have figured prominently in a series of political confrontations that have changed the face of modern China. From the May Fourth Movement of 1919 to the June Fourth Massacre of 1989, working-class participation has proven critical. Although these famous milestones in Chinese history are, for good reason, usually regarded as student—rather than labor—protests, the involvement of members of the working class was far from incidental. The spectacle of workers marching outside their factory gates to engage in protest not simply as laborers, but also as citizens, has been a notable feature of Chinese contentious politics at critical junctures throughout the twentieth century. This phenomenon, moreover, carries implications that extend beyond the borders of China itself. Worker participation in the watersheds of Chinese political history turn out to hold international ramifications as well.

Looking at any wall map or atlas, we see a world composed of states. The earth's surface is divided into distinct state territories. Each is demarcated by a linear boundary, an edge dividing one sovereignty from the next. The division is accentuated when each territory is blocked out in a separate color from neighboring states, implying that its interior is a homogeneous space, traversed evenly by state sovereignty. Our world is a jigsaw of territorial states, and we take this picture for granted. Thus our historical atlases show medieval Christendom also divided into demarcated and homogeneous territories, though perhaps less neatly (see, for example, McEvedy 1992). Only the configuration is different. Familiar to us, such a depiction would have been utterly unknown to people at the time, who rarely used maps to represent geographical information and did not imagine states (or rather realms) as enclosed spaces. The transformation of their world into ours—the way the state was put on the map—is the subject of this essay.

Stereotypes about gender relations in late Colonial Mexico — whether expressed as academic assumptions or in popular culture — are the targets of Steve J. Stern's important book, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico. Stern unravels these mythologies through a careful analysis of patriarchy, both the patriarchy of daily life and the patriarchal practices of governance. A central plank of the study is to gage the links between them, and Stern probes the interplay between gendered relations in the household and in the broader sweep of colonial power.

Philip Bull's book is best described as a thoughtful essay on Irish nationalism and the land question. The basic argument can be summarized as follows. The Irish and the British had two incompatible models of land tenure, the Irish customary model, which recognized the proprietary rights of tenants, versus the British capitalist model, which recognized only the absolute property rights of owners. In the period immediately after the Great Famine, British legislators sought to strengthen the position of Irish landlords, hoping that they would make the investments necessary to modernize Irish agriculture. When it became clear that this was not working, the British shifted to legislation that recognized the fights of Irish tenants but repeatedly did too little too late, with the result that land agitation in Ireland became increasingly more radical and fused with the movement for Irish self-government. Since most landlords were Protestant and most tenants were Catholic, the fusion of the national question with the land question made the nationalist movement sectarian. The resolution of the land question by the Wyndham Act of 1903 offered the opportunity to separate the two and therefore also the opportunity to broaden support for Irish nationalism to include Protestants as well as Catholics. But the failure of Irish nationalist leaders to take up this opportunity preserved the sectarianism of the nationalist movement. In this way the fusion of the land question and the national question determined “the breakdown of pluralism in modem Ireland” (p. 4) and helped to bring about the partition of the country, which “is the most tangible legacy of the land question” (p. 191).

Like the city streets, performative commemorations, and cacophony of democratic politics it chronicles, this book teems with energy. Manifestly uneasy with the constraints imposed both by older forms of political history and newer anti-narratives which abjure attempts at authoritative statements, Mary Ryan probes the fashioning of a democratic public in New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco before, during, and after the Civil War.

In his latest book, David Hackett Fischer has set himself the challenging task of linking to the more general cultural history of the Atlantic world the record of price fluctuations therein from the high Middle Ages. To this intriguing task he has had to bring not only the exceptionally broad erudition of a notable university teacher and researcher but also his more recently acquired mastery of the vast literature on price history. His handling of this challenge is quite impressive, even if specialists may disagree with his synthesis or interpretation of specific points. Readers of CSSH should find his pages both challenging and thought-provoking as he explains why price fluctuations in different parts of the Atlantic world tended to be linked, even synchronous. Thus, both the common patterns he detects and the diversity he attempts to explain are of considerable comparative interest.

This is no ordinary intellectual history of civil society's polysemous elaboration. Colas deploys psychoanalytic, philological, and sociological approaches to explain the mutual dependence of civil society and fanaticism in theology and philosophy from Aristotle and Augustine to Marx and Gorbachev. The civil society-based critique of Marxism-Leninism in theory and practice is familiar and provides the book's contemporary resonance. Attention to the ambiguities and transformations of civil society through translation, from koinonia politike through die burgerliche Gesellsehaft is valuable. Most important, however, is the argument about fanaticism's historical significance in making civil society.

Stereotypes about gender relations in late Colonial Mexico—whether expressed as academic assumptions or in popular culture—are the targets of Steve J. Stern's important book, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico. Stern unravels these mythologies through a careful analysis of patriarchy, both the patriarchy of daily life and the patriarchal practices of governance. A central plank of the study is to gage the links between them, and Stern probes the interplay between gendered relations in the household and in the broader sweep of colonial power.