ANTHROPOLOGY AND POWER Power relations—of masters and servants, of chiefs and tribesmen—continue to provide anthropology with one of its richest terrains, recent notable examples in CSSH being Nicholas B. Dirks, “The Policing of Tradition: Colonialism and Anthropology in Southern India,” 39:182–212 (1997), and Lisa Weeden, “Acting ‘as if': Symbolic Politics and Social Control in Syria,” 40:503–23 (1998). Two essays in this issue propose new ways of looking at them.

At no time has there been more fascination with the contrast that memories of colonialism afford between the “elegance” of domination and the brutality of its effects.Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” in Culture and Truth, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 68. While images of empire surface and resurface in the public domain, colonial studies has materialized over the last decade as a force of cultural critique, political commentary, and not least as a domain of new expert knowledge. One could argue that the entire field has positioned itself as a counterweight to the waves of colonial nostalgia that have emerged in the post-World War II period in personal memoirs, coffee table books, tropical chic couture, and a film industry that encourages “even politically progressive [North American] audiences” to enjoy “the elegance of manners governing relations of dominance and subordination between the races.”Ibid. Still, Nietzsche's warning against “idle cultivation of the garden of history” resonates today when it is not always clear whether some engagements with the colonial are raking up colonial ground, or vicariously luxuriating in it.Freidrich Nietzsche, “The Uses and Advantages of History,” Untimely Meditations, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996[1874]), 68.

Image and reality interplay in the chiefship of the Basseri tribe of southern Iran. We know the Basseri through the influential and rightly esteemed ethnography, Nomads of South Persia, by Fredrik Barth. Barth's account of the Basseri chief is vivid and striking, and, in placing the chiefship within the complex society of Iran, was an original contribution to the ethnographic literature. And yet there appear to be certain subtleties of the Basseri chiefship, which, while implied in the historical and ethnographic information provided by Barth, are not included in his explicit description. As a result, Barth overstates, I believe, the degree of the Basseri chief's power, and underestimates the extent to which the chief depended upon the consent of his tribemen.

During the early Meiji period of the 1870s and 80s, Japanese leaders were in the process of constructing a new state. The old regime of the Tokugawa shogunate had been overthrown in 1867, and its “feudal” ways were to be replaced with institutions that valued another, “Western” set of priorities—including applied science and industrial capitalism, constitutional law and deliberative assemblies. This program of institutional change, called “civilization” or “enlightenment” by its proponents, enlisted a range of foreign consultants, from engineers and military officers to teachers and legal experts. Equally important were Western books, the translation of which had begun under the old regime. Among the works that made a powerful impression on Japanese readers at the start of the Meiji period were William and Robert Chambers' Political Economy, Samuel Smiles' Self-Help, and John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. The “liberal” tradition defined by these authors provided an introduction for the works of Herbert Spencer. Although his reputation today most often places him among conservative or libertarian political philosophers, it was Spencer's liberal defense of natural rights that initially interested Japanese readers in the 1870s. For Spencer's appearance coincided with a growing advocacy of “people's rights” in Japan, as private citizens pressured the authoritarian oligarchy ruling Japan to grant them the rights to freedom of speech, press, and assembly, and to participation in governmental process through the institution of a national assembly.

Historians have documented extensively the fascination of many American intellectuals with the Soviet Union and fascist Italy during the 1920s and 1930s (Diggins 1966; 1972; Feuer 1962; Filene 1967; Warren 1993). They have also drawn a compelling analogy between the sympathetic attitudes of American intellectuals toward Soviet Russia and the sympathy of a later generation of intellectuals towards Cuba, China and North Vietnam (Skotheim 1971: 96–106; Hollander 1981; Caute 1988). However, little effort has been made to examine whether the forgiving attitudes toward fascist Italy might also have had a historical analogue in the form of forgiving attitudes toward other, non-communist, dictatorships.

It is rare that circumstances in world history are favorable to the creation of a new kind of global political entity. Nationalism and the nation-state were novelties in the nineteenth century, as E. J. Hobsbawm (1990) convincingly demonstrates, but their connection with modernity was concealed by nationalist identifications with natural ties, permanent homelands, archaic cultures, and timeless bonds of common history. A similar global movement, which I refer to here as “indigenism,” has gained momentum over the last few decades largely out of the notice of observers, pundits, and theorists of international events. This movement, it is true, is smaller in scale, more fragile, less turbulent than the nationalist upheavals of the past two centuries, but it nevertheless has the potential to influence the way states manage their affairs, and even to reconfigure the usual alignments of nationalism and state sovereignty.

It was the official line of Suharto's regime that Indonesia is a nation which has no indigenous people, or that all Indonesians are equally indigenous.Sarwono Kusumaatmadja (1993), Minister of State for the Environment, addressing an NGO forum. The internationally recognized category “indigenous and tribal peoples” (as defined in International Labour Organization convention 169) has no direct equivalent in Indonesia's legal system, nor are there reservations or officially recognized tribal territories. Under Suharto the national motto “unity in diversity” and the displays of Jakarta's theme park, Taman Mini, presented the acceptable limits of Indonesia's cultural difference, while development efforts were directed at improving the lot of “vulnerable population groups,” including those deemed remote or especially backwards. The desire for development was expressed by rural citizens through the approved channels of bottom-up planning processes and supplications to visiting officials. National activists and international donors who argued for the rights of indigenous people were dismissed as romantics imposing their primitivist fantasies upon poor folk who wanted, or should have wanted, to progress like “ordinary” Indonesians. Nevertheless, a discourse on indigenous people took hold in activist circles in the final years of Suharto's rule, and its currency in the Indonesian countryside is still increasing. With the new political possibilities opened up in the post-Suharto era, now seems an appropriate time to reflect on how Indonesia's indigenous or tribal slot is being envisioned, who might occupy it, and with what effects.This paper was first submitted to CSSH in November 1997. It was revised and resubmitted in November 1998, after the fall of Suharto, during a period when hopes for progressive change and skepticism about reformasi were present in equal measure. The situation in November 1999, as I make final revisions before the journal goes to press, has changed again in ways that I cannot fully explore. Most notably, the indigenous peoples' platform was highlighted by a national congress held in Jakarta in March 1999, and the founding of an indigenous peoples' organization, AMAN (Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara). See the special issue of Down to Earth, October 1999. Improved prospects for some kinds of legal recognition under the new government make reflection on the issues I raise in this article even more important.

Sectarianism is an orphan of history.This paper was originally presented to the Davis Seminar at Princeton University's Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, in November 1998. I am grateful to the participants in the seminar as well as my colleagues at Rice University, whose criticisms helped make this essay more coherent. That, at least, seems to be the consensus of the scholarship on Middle Eastern religious violence. Unlike recent studies of communalism in India and Spain,For the case of India, see Gyan Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). For Spain, see David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). which have explored the cultural and discursive aspects of sectarian violence, analyses of Middle Eastern religious mobilizations have long been, and remain, preoccupied with the alleged failure of the Middle East to modernize—with its failure, in other words, to replicate a secular Western path of development.

Currently, one of the most important issues in resource management is: under what conditions will people conserve the resources on which their livelihood depends? In all too many cases, overexploitation is the rule. All around the world fish stocks, forests, grasslands, air, soils, wildlife, and water quality have been seriously degraded by human beings. Environmental disaster is not inevitable, however, for in many cases those who are dependent on resources, and their governments, have acted to generate effective rules to manage those resources at sustainable levels (Anderson and Simmons 1993; Berkes 1989; McCay and Acheson 1987; Ostrom 1990; Pinkerton 1989; Ruddle and Akimichi 1984).