Anthropology Observed Rejection of the idea of scientific objectivity and deep engagement with the ethics of anthropology are threads of commonality that run through much anthropological writing today, and give anthropology a distinctive place among the social sciences. The first two articles address the tension between objectivity and ethics.

If there is anything that exemplifies a certain common style in ethnographically-oriented approaches to culture and society today, and sets them apart from other kinds of social science, it is the habit, irritating to colleagues in some other disciplines, frustrating to students, deemed perverse by potential funders, and bewildering to the public, of responding to explanations with the remark, “We need to complicate the story.” The words “reductionist” and “essentializing” are brandished with scorn. One important perspective is expressed by this remark by Jean and John Comaroff, two influential anthropologists with solid roots in longterm fieldwork, the sobriety of British social anthropology, and the tough-minded realism of the Marxist tradition: ethnography “refuses to put its trust in techniques that give more scientific methods their illusory objectivity: their commitment to standardized, a priori units of analysis, for example, or their reliance on a depersonalizing gaze that separates subject from object” (1992:8). These words, offered almost in passing, take a host of important arguments as settled. One is that it is no longer in much dispute that cultural anthropology is not merely at an “immature” stage, en route to something more akin to natural science. Most significant, perhaps, is the assumption that the separation of subject from object can be understood only in negative terms, that to say that a field of knowledge “depersonalizes” is ipso facto to discredit it. Yet in their own ethnographic and historical work the Comaroffs take their empirical materials very seriously and do not wholly reject the separation of subject from object—how could they? What is at issue, rather, is what kinds of “objects” and “subjects,” and what categories of analysis and comparison, are epistemologically appropriate and ethically legitimate for the study of social actions and self-understandings.

On 14 September 1908, at the Sixteenth International Congress of Americanists in Vienna, Alberto Vojtěch FričAlberto Vojtěch Frič used several variations of his name in his publications and correspondence, including Alberto Frič, Albert Frič, Adalbert Frič, and Vojtěch Frič. who had been sent to Brazil in 1906 to collect ethnographica for German museums, threw the otherwise orderly scientific proceedings into turmoil. During his presentation on the Bugres Indians of South America, Frič denounced the brutal treatment of the Kaingáng and Xokléng tribes at the hands of German colonists in the states of Santa Catarina and Paraná in southern Brazil. He complained to the Americanists that slavery, wide-spread murder, and bands of “human-hunters” could not only be found in the “independent states of the Congo”: “such acts and much worse” were being financed by German colonists living in the “civilized states of Brazil.” Frič revealed that German settlers were hiring paid killers to eradicate entire tribes of Indians and permitting the sale and clandestine enslavement of their children. He also protested that the Brazilian government was turning a blind eye to these atrocities, and he demanded that the congress act jointly to put an end to the violence.A. Frič, “Völkerwanderung, Ethnographie und Geschichte der Konquista in Südbrasilien,” in Verhandlungen des XVI Internationalen Amerikanisten-Kongresses (Wien, 1909), 63–67.

The object of this article is to explore a familiar paradox of folklore studies: the promotion of powerfully localist readings in the service of an inclusive national entity. In the logic of European nationalism, this might seem an irresolvable paradox. The object of the nation-state is to unify all potentially divergent cultural and social entities within a single framework, so that localist sentiment ceases to represent the threat of political separatism. In some nation-states, the most harmonious symbiosis of localism with nationalism appears in those regions that are stereotypically regarded as culturally and politically marginal and are consequently subjected to the double-edged opprobrium of being both “simple” and yet also corrupted by a vast range of allegedly foreign elements both culturally and “racially.” A study of these tension-laden matters must dodge among several levels in order to go beyond the limitations both of purely local ethnography and of national-level historiography. If the former too easily occludes the effects of larger events on local perceptions, the latter can, and often does, fail to account for the success of nationalist ideologies in securing loyalty unto death even—or perhaps especially?—from populations that are notoriously unwilling to accept state rule in more mundane matters of law and order.

The Ottoman Empire was the last great Muslim world empire to survive into the age of modernity. The Ottoman state, together with its contemporaries, Habsburg Austria and Romanov Russia, was engaged in a struggle for survival in a world where it no longer made the rules. As the nineteenth century approached its last quarter, these rules were increasingly determined by the successful and aggressive world powers, Britain, France, and after 1870, Germany. As external pressure on the ottoman Empire mounted from the second half of the century, the Ottoman center found itself obliged to squeeze manpower resources it had hitherto not tapped. Particularly nomadic populations, armed and already possessing the military skills required, now became a primary target for mobilization. This study is an attempt to come to grips with the “civilizing mission” mentality of the late Ottomans and their “project of modernity” as reflected in their provincial administration. It is the view of this writer that sometime in the nineteenth century the Ottoman elite adopted the mindset of their enemies, the arch-imperialists, and came to conceive of its periphery as a colonial setting.My definition of colonialism here closely follows the Leninist position as in “Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism.” In my view, this is still one of the best and most succinct definitions of imperialism. After showing how the partition of the word accelerated in the 1880s, Lenin concludes, “It is beyond doubt therefore, that capitalism's transition to the stage of monopoly capitalism, to finance capital, isconnected with the intensification of the struggle for the partitioning of the world.” V. Lenin, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1977), 224.

The most important advance in the understanding of ethnic and national identity has surely been the realization of its deeply relational nature. A nation or ethnic group is not a self-defined monad of some kind, but exists in and through its interactions with others (Duara 1996; Eriksen 1993:9–12, 111; Schwartz 1975:107–8).

In the summer of 1996, when French policemen stormed Paris' Eglise Saint-Bernard, evicting dozens of African immigrants and activists who had taken refuge in the church, people in both France and West Africa surged with anger. Many of those immigrants had lived in France for years, often with an ambiguous legal and bureaucratic status (hence their moniker sans-papiers, those without papers), and they had occupied the church in order to demand the regularization of their status.The sans-papiers' story is complex; see Balibar et al. (1999), Dubois (2000), Fassin et al. (1997), Goussault (1999), Rosello (1998), and Siméant (1998). Each of the leading spokespersons has written a memoir (Cissé 1999; Diop 1997; Sané 1996). My analysis most closely resembles that of Dubois. However, while his interest lies in the implications of the “culturalist” stance within the sans-papiers movement and in the colonial origins of universalism, I am pursuing the deployment of a particular argument materially grounded in the colonial period. Mine is also the only study of which I am aware that analyzes how the dispute was understood in the immigrants' countries of origin. West African, French, and international protests of the high-handed and violent government action called on both universal and particular arguments to support the rights of the sans-papiers. Editorialists lambasted the French government for disregarding the “Rights of Man” and for forgetting the sacrifices of West African soldiers—the tirailleurs Sénégalais—in the defense of France.The point had already been made by Konaté: “Everything has its price, including having been the country of the Enlightenment and a colonial power” (1994).

If in the 1970s modernization theorists predicted the demise of paid domestic work, developments during the last two decades have proven them wrong. Both in the North and in the South the number of those engaged in paid domestic work has grown rapidly. In some cases, like China and India, intra-state migration is predominant. Elsewhere, in the United States, Canada, and Western-Europe, as well as in growth areas such as the Gulf States, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, the presence of large numbers of migrant domestic workers from abroad has been particularly striking. In fact, in a number of cases the growth of domestic labor as a field of employment has led to the feminization of outmigration. By the late 1990s, there were between 1.3 and 1.5 million Asian women working in the Middle East. Whereas in the 1970s women formed about 15 percent of the migrant labor force, in the mid-1990s almost 60 percent of the Filipino migrant labor force was female, and women constituted approximately 80 percent of the Sri Lankan and the Indonesian migrant labor force (Gamburd 2000:35).

As demonstrated by the above lyrics, the Shakers (known officially as the “United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing”) were not favorably disposed toward the bonds of marriage, family, and kinship. Started as a Quaker splinter group under the charismatic leadership of Ann Lee in Manchester, they emigrated to the United States, gathered further adherents there, and became a communal sect in 1787. Within the next sixty years, they grew to more than 4,000 members in sixteen villages in New England and the Midwest.Stein 1992:87–89. True to their view of God as androgynous, and their founder as the female equivalent of Jesus Christ, women had a comparatively strong position in the sect, and there were equal numbers of male and female office holders on all hierarchy levels.The question of how much gender equality existed among the Shakers is subject to some debate. The division of labor as well as many gender stereotypes remained conventional (Brewer 1992), and after the death of the initial leaders Ann Lee and Lucy Wright, male members dominated the leadership (Stein 1992:132–33, Brewer 1986:51) until they became a small minority in the later years (Stein 1992:339). Brewer concludes that true gender equality was not achieved, nor even aimed at (1992). Compared to their female contemporaries, however, “Shakeresses” were able to keep their private lives free from male interference to a considerable degree (Humez 1991). Besides, male Shaker complaints about “pettycoat government” do not only suggest a patriarchal striving for power, as Humez argues (1991), but also the imperfect realization of these tendencies. Female Shakers also made important contributions to the early women's rights movement (Stein 1992:258–68, 310–12). Genders, however, were strictly separated, and celibacy was obligatory in the “gospel relations” between members.Brewer 1986; Stein 1992.

Prior to anti-globalization demonstrations in places like Seattle and Prague, the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army for National Liberation, EZLN), better known as the Zapatistas, became a leader in the struggle against neoliberal economic policies and a model for peaceful change in the twenty-first-century. June Nash's erudite book Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization provides a local ethnographic analysis of the “fissuring and fusing” of the Zapatistas in the context of national and international influences. For example, female Zapatistas, who comprise 40 percent of the EZLN, are not only fighting for national and international autonomy but also for female representation and power in their local patriarchal indigenous communities. These women do not see indigenous rights and women's rights as mutually exclusive; they strive to change the world more radically than most of their male counterparts and in so doing they display how revolutionary movements can simultaneously be agents of change and subjects of reform. Nash adeptly argues that “indigenous peoples will become the chief protagonists of change in the coming millennium” (26) partly because they articulate a plausible alternative to neoliberalism (based on the right of self-determination, moral authority as a means to power, collective strategies for survival, and multiethnic and nonhierarchical worldviews). In fact, the Zapatistas are already changing the face of civil society in Mexico, and their savvy communication skills (led by Subcomandante Marcos) buttresses and protects their organization by attracting those outside the country to their goals and techniques.

In this “exercise in the sociology of anthropology” (p. xii), Susantha Goonatilake portrays contemporary anthropology of Sri Lanka as “worse than anything colonial anthropology wrought, and, in fact, worse than the colonial writings of the 19<+>th and early 20<+>th centuries” (xiii). Goonatilake focuses his attacks on selected works by Gananath Obeyesekere, Richard Gombrich, Bruce Kapferer, and Stanley Tambiah, and in the last chapter widens his critique to include almost every other scholar of Sri Lanka. While Goonatilake offers very good summaries of these texts and provides some pointed critiques, especially of Tambiah's more explicitly political writings, his analysis does not add up to an effective dismissal of post-colonial anthropological thought on Sri Lanka. While Goonatilake's book seems to try to be a Sri Lankan version of Ronald Inden's Imagining India, he undermines this ambitious project with his personal political animosities and his misreadings of anthropology.

As the intriguing title of this extraordinary study of Mende social life and history suggests, things are seldom what they seem. Indeed, the cover illustration of the inner side of a Poro society mask suggests this hidden complexity. Inscribed with magic squares which refer to passages from the Qur'an which give its wearer special powers and protection, this mask also hides an individual's identity while presenting a public face. However, Mariane Ferme focuses not on masks and masquerade ritual but rather on an examination of the underlying cultural logic of “strategies of concealment” associated with everyday things, such as hammocks and fishing nets. It is through an analysis of these unassuming things, Ferme argues, that the social dynamics as well as the historical and political economy of this region may best be understood. While this study took place in a small Mende village in southeastern Sierra Leone beginning in 1985—before the “War of Theft” of the 1990s began—it provides a means for understanding how everyday conflict occurs and how it may escalate in unpredictable, contestable, and violent ways, of particular relevance for contemporary Sierra Leone. For, as the author observes, “The valuing of a whole range of cultural skills aimed at producing and interpreting deferred meaning is partly the product of a violent history—reflecting regional and global forces” (7).