This article offers biographical sketches of the Jewish members of the Bolshevik revolutionary élite. It explores how their commitments to socialist universalism and eventual identification with Bolshevism were influenced by experiences and identities as Jews in fin de siècle Tsarist Russia. Situating them within a comparative historical sociology of ethnicity and identity across the Empire, I consider the ways in which ambiguities of assimilation, ethnic exclusion, and ethnocultural marginality influenced their attraction to Bolshevik socialism. In doing so, I revise the traditional argument that that the Bolsheviks of Jewish origin were highly assimilated “non-Jewish Jews” whose Jewishness played no role in their political radicalism. Instead, the claim is made that for the Jewish Bolshevik élite ascriptive Jewishness was a social fact mediated by ethnopolitical context, and therefore a dimension of varying significance to their radicalism, even for those for whom Jewishness was not a claimed identity.

The German fascination with the American Indian is legion, enduring, and much more than a current, post-modern enchantment with ‘the primitive.’ Indeed, the special and continuing relationship between Germans and Indians is well known, and in recent years it has received considerable scholarly attention. One striking aspect of this relationship is the seemingly endless effort by scholars, museum curators, pedagogues, and dilettantes of all fashions to control the discourse on ‘Indianness’ in Germany by denouncing popular clichés and attempting to replace them with new versions of ‘the authentic Indian.’ Their ongoing efforts to harness concepts of authenticity while policing this discourse are hardly surprising; indeed they have become predictable. But the lack of self-reflection with which most people participate in this process is remarkable. Few laymen or scholars seem to notice that they are the latest participants in a repetitive process that has been going on in German-speaking lands for close to 200 years, and even fewer seem to notice the ironic turn it has recently taken.

Radiation is a workplace hazard that eludes the sensing body, or seems to. After Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, Kai Erickson described radiation as “an invisible threat,” “the very embodiment of stealth and treachery.” The first generation of Canadian nuclear power workers, from their four decades of experience around reactors has a different sense of the matter. They describe a physical awareness of the morphology and topography of radiation, a cultivated bodily knowledge that informed their actions as they produced power. They describe a “feel and a touch for the plant,” framed in theoretical studies, made through attentiveness and alert expectation, honed by being out and about in the station, being its intimate, “listening to its very cries.” By their telling, “doesn't feel right” ceased to be a metaphor about their workplace circumstance, and through study and practice, became a bodily effect, a report from the somatic. Key to work safety for Canadian nuclear workers were close study of the theory of ionizing radiation, adeptness with both the instruments which made radiation apparent and the calculations that made the readings on dials into qualitatively and spatially distinctive workplace presences, and skill in choosing, donning, building, and removing physical barriers between their bodies and radiation fields. Through this knowledge and practice, Canadian nuclear workers came to embody the hazards of the job. This working knowledge of the insensible enabled them to be responsible for their own radiation protection and for the safety of those with whom they worked.

As Marcel Mauss (1967: 46) famously remarked, western societies draw a “marked distinction… between real and personal law, between things and persons.” Writing at the height of self-conscious early twentieth-century western modernism, Mauss was at pains to point out that it was “only our Western societies that quite recently turned man into an economic animal” (ibid.: 74), and that such a distinction was, historically speaking, a contingent elaboration. Commenting on Mauss' insights, James Carrier (1995: 30), thus, speaks of, “an increasing de-socialization of objects, their growing cultural separation from people and their social relationships” and the development of conceptions of “alienability and impersonality of objects and people in commodity relations” as characteristic of this moment. But Carrier is not entirely happy with the uses made of such insights by students of westerns societies. His intent, rather, is to qualify Mauss' famous distinction between forms of enacting object-relations as social relations shaped by sharply contrasting modes of gift or commodity exchange. Carrier, thus, expends much energy on expounding the extent to which “blocked exchanges” (Walzer 1983) “singularized goods” (Kopytoff 1986), conceptions of “market-inalienability” (Radin 1987) and “inalienable possessions” (Weiner 1992) are not random pre-capitalist survivals fortuitously lingering on within western cultures, but constitutive of forms of sociality indispensable to them. Of course, Carrier is largely concerned with dispelling the economistic fictions of forms of “occidentalist” discourse that systematically project a normative language of market functions and failures onto social practices which regularly produce, rather than merely accidentally throw up, what economists call “externalities” inhibiting optimal market allocations. Nevertheless, it is striking that both Mauss and most of his critics (Carrier being merely an example) take a principal, ontological distinction between people and things for granted. As a result, we are treated to sets of contrasting representations of how cultures (capitalist or other) construe such fundamental realities into different configurations of subjects and objects, so that the mystifications of one social formation or cultural order illuminate those of the other—to ultimately prove a Cartesian point.

In the international press Nigeria is represented almost exclusively as a state in crisis. Recurrent military coups, ethnic and religious sectionalism, a civil war, a series of bloody riots and local unrest (of which the Niger delta situation is the best-known example), economic turmoil, and the re-imposition of the Islamic criminal code in many northern states have all been used to paint a picture of chaos and collapse. Journalists and government officials alike tend to find the roots of Nigeria's problems in intractable ethnic conflict, the collapse of oil prices in 1983, structural adjustment mandated by the International Monetary Fund in 1986, and hatred between Muslims and Christians. The trouble with Nigeria is also understood to illustrate the trouble with Africa. With 25 percent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria appears as representative of Africa. Potentially wealthy from its oil revenue, it symbolizes Africa's promise denied.

The rapid and pervasive changes of the past decade and a half have thrown the political field wide open across the former Soviet bloc. An extensive array of actors has laid claim to the mantle of the postsocialist state, seeking to siphon off its resources, to leverage its putative power, and often to do both in the same breath. At the same time, others have fled the institutional and discursive purview of the state, taking advantage of the near disappearance of centralized authority in the early 1990s to stake out powerful non- and quasi-state domains. The density of these strategies, which in practice have been complementary as often as contradictory, has made for nothing short of an ethical thicket for postsocialist citizens and state functionaries alike.