At the turn of the twenty-first century two countries—one at the center of Europe and the other at its periphery—officially declared converts to minority religions to be threats to national security. The first is Germany, where since early 2006 Minister of Interior Affairs Wolfgang Schäuble has repeatedly warned against the danger posed by German converts to Islam (e.g., Schmid 2007). Recently, after two German Muslims were caught collecting chemicals used to make explosives, the Christian Democrat Union (CDU) faction's leader Wolfgang Bosbach and its Bavarian Interior Minister Günther Beckstein suggested the government register and follow all who have converted to Islam (Küchen 2007). Bosbach said, “A convert registry only makes sense given that we know some of them may be radicalized after converting” (Ringel 2007).

This paper challenges the broad consensus in current historiography that holds the Indian stereotype of criminal tribe to be a myth of colonial making. Drawing on a selection of precolonial descriptions of robber castes—ancient legal texts and folktales; Jain, Buddhist and Brahmanic narratives; Mughal sources; and Early Modern European travel accounts—I show that the idea of castes of congenital robbers was not a British import, but instead a label of much older vintage on the subcontinent. Enjoying pride of place in the postcolonial critics' pageant of “colonial stereotypes,” the case of criminal tribes is representative and it bears on broader questions about colonial knowledge and its relation to power. The study contributes to the literature that challenges the still widespread tendency to view colonial social categories, and indeed the bulk of colonial knowledge, as the imaginative residue of imperial politics. I argue that while colonial uses of the idea of a criminal tribe comprises a lurid history of violence against communities branded as born criminals in British law, the stereotype itself has indigenous roots. The case is representative and it bears on larger problems of method and analysis in “post-Orientalist” historiography.

In the 1950s, French political geographer and social critic André Siegfried denounced modern mass tourism as “tourism de série . . . organized, almost mechanized, collective, and above all democratic.” Echoing derisory discussions of mass culture and mass consumption, Siegfried criticized modern tourism as a degraded aspect of cultural and social democratization, best exemplified by banal American hotel chains. Siegfried complained that modern tourism had essentially destroyed older regimes of pleasure and substituted only amusements. Someone who yearned for the older “aristocratic” era wherein wealthy leisured elites sojourned in grand hotels, he believed that the only hope for the future was with “people of refined taste, knowing how to distinguish . . . between filth and beauty.”André Siegfried, Aspects du XXe Siàcle (Paris, 1955), 107, 123–25 and 148.

Most of the extraordinary waves of terror which have swept many Latin American societies since 1970 have occurred in guerrilla-based insurgencies or even civil wars. Because of the massive body counts produced during these confrontations between revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries based in or linked with a government, human rights organizations have issued a long series of reports about terror—especially that which has been carried out by incumbent regimes and death squads—and which has been supplemented by the exposés of the guerrillas themselves. Amnesty International, the Human Rights group in the Organization of American States (OAS), and Americas Watch have been the major international actors documenting the wave of terror. Many independent national groups, such as El Salvador's “Socorro Juridico” and other human rights organizations linked with church bodies have undertaken that more perilous task at home.

In the aftermath of the February 1986 “revolution” that forced Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos out of the Philippines, the government of Corazon Aquino turned the presidential palace, Malacañang, into a museum and in doing so meant to put the Marcoses legacy of excess on display. A guidebook on the presidential palace describes one instance of that excessiveness, in which the doors leading to the Grand Staircase are said to have “depict[ed] the Philippine legend of ‘Malakas’ (Strong) and ‘Maganda’ (Beautiful), the first Filipino man and woman who emerged from a large bamboo stalk. Mrs. Marcos liked to think of President Marcos and herself in terms of these legendary First Filipinos.” They identified so thoroughly with this myth that they had portraits of themselves done as Malakas and Maganda in the palace—seminude and emerging from a forest of bamboo stalks (see Plate 1). In 1985 they even commissioned a group of Filipino academics to rewrite the legend that culminated in the celebration of the Marcos regime.

Confronted with the reality of cargo cults, postcolonial politics, disunited working classes, and the United Nations seminars on racism, theorists of different persuasions have found themselves in the last twenty years having to explain—or explain away—ethnic phenomena. In his recent article in this journal (CSSH 29:1, 24–55), G. Carter Bentley1 points out the deficiencies in the two pervading schools of thought on ethnicity and fruitfully advocates applying Bourdieu's concepts of “practice” and “habitus” to the study of ethnicity. This appropriation of Bourdieu's concept of the habitus to the study of ethnicity is surely innovative, and Bentley argues effectively that we should look at practice for an objective “handle” on ethnicity. Nevertheless, Bentley's approach suffers for two reasons.

Could Britons in India commit murder? More precisely, could they be prosecuted and sentenced for doing so? As these epigraphs suggest, the Raj was deeply preoccupied with elaborating minute taxonomies of violence and death. In a variety of ways, British violence toward indigenes was made an object of policy initiatives by the Government of India. Defining violence, both indigenous and foreign, was one key task of the Raj, along with clarifying the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate violence. But this boundary shifted constantly over the colonial period, and indeed, it has continued to do so ever since. Given the extensive legal violence of colonial conquest, when and why were specific acts of white violence defined as murder?

Events of the last two hundred years have led many scholars to divide the societies of the world into contrasting pairs, such as developed—under-developed, advanced—backward, traditional—modern. Central to these concepts are not only ideas about the level of technological development, but the very character of the societies and cultures which are compared and contrasted as well. Professor Edward Shils has recently remarked that the traditional society is one in which, among other things, there is a strong attachment to the past, by which behavior is determined and validated. Solutions to problems old and new are determined by the past of the society, and modernization quickens when ties to the past begin to be cut and new criteria for determining and validating behavior are invoked.

In 1868, a clergymen told the annual congress of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science that “he had long lived in the town of Liverpool, and had been placed in circumstances there which made him frequently regret that there were no places in which women could find employment. The great want was of employment for every class of women, not only for the higher class, but for those placed in humbler circumstances.” At earlier conferences, however, a number of speakers described the abundant opportunities for female employment in other Lancashire towns. Census figures make it clear that the reason lay in the different industrial bases of these towns.

There was a time when Western political science was somewhat sensitized to the historical perspective from which “exploited men” might view the making of modern world order. During the Cold War, and with the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement especially, debates in the Western Academy made regular reference to what might be called the “development/security nexus.” Many political scientists claimed that the peculiarities of “Third World” development could engender security threats for the “First World.” But it was further acknowledged that Third World politicians (especially at the Bandung Conference in 1955) could see their post-colonial development threatened by a West that, still exhibiting racial hierarchies domestically, might wish to retain these hierarchies internationally.2

In recent years the study of the ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ has become a very fashionable subject. Everett M. Rogers stressed the fact that his book on the ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ was based on 506 diffusion studies published in the last decades. Of course quantity is not necessarily synonymous with quality and brilliant ideas are not a function of the number of titles printed. The first of the major conclusions reached by Rogers after perusing the 506 diffusion studies is that ‘innovativeness of individuals is related to a modern rather than a traditional orientation’. One may doubt whether such an extraordinary conclusion was worth the input of energy and goodwill that allegedly went into its production, but there is no doubt that innovations and their diffusion are a topic of major relevance in the study of social development. Innovations are to history what mutations are to biology. Actually, innovations show a remarkable tendency to cluster in time and space, and this incidentally suggests that attention should not be devoted exclusively to the eccentric individual genius of the innovators, but should also be extended to the anonymous forces of the environment.

“What do you really want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?” was a question asked of the anthropologist Karl Weule by more than a few of his fellow passengers on board a ship bound for the German colony that is today Tanzania, in 1906. At least this was what Weule himself recalled after he returned from a journey during which he was caught up, and participated in, the counterinsurgency operations that followed one of the greatest anti-colonial uprisings that Africa had ever seen, the Maji Maji uprising. One elegant woman, Weule wrote, demanded: “And what do you want, Herr Professor, from all these tribes? Simply to collect for your museum in Leipzig? Or does the anthropology of today also have other, higher goals?” Anthropology did indeed, Weule explained, have “other, higher goals”: “The museum you speak of, my dearest, exists out in reality, as even the most hard-hearted Philistine would have to admit. … But how will anthropology be able to assert its much-contested status as a science, when it knows nothing higher and better than simply to bring together bows, arrows, spears, and thousands of other things? This collecting and preserving is really just … the elementary branch of our work. The other, higher part is the study [Aufnahme] of mental culture [geistige Kulturbesitzes].”

The Canadian government recently concluded a series of land claim and self-government agreements with many First Nations in the Yukon Territory. A result of First Nation claims to land and sovereignty in the region, these modern treaties grant First Nations some real powers of self-governance. They are framed in the idiom of sovereignty, but they also compel First Nation people to accept—in practice if not in theory—a host of Euro-American assumptions about power and governance that are implicit in such a framing. This article focuses on a central premise of the sovereignty concept: territorial jurisdiction. The Yukon agreements carve the Yukon into fourteen distinct First Nation “traditional territories.” Although many assume that these territories reflect “traditional” patterns of land-use and occupancy, indigenous society in the Yukon was not composed of distinct political entities each with jurisdiction over its own territory. Thus, the agreements do not simply formalize jurisdictional boundaries among pre-existing First Nation polities; rather, they are mechanisms for creating the legal and administrative systems that bring those polities into being. The powers these agreements confer come in the territorial currency of the modern state, and territorialization processes they engender are transforming First Nation society in radical and often unintended ways. One significant aspect of this transformation is the emergence of multiple ethno-territorial identities, and corresponding nationalist sentiments. I examine these processes by focusing on two cases of contemporary boundary making among Yukon First Nations.

This article is a comparative elaboration of Eugene Hammel's pioneering analysis of “fictive kinship,” Alternative Social Structures and Ritual Relations in the Balkans (1968). In place of godparenthood, I examine the structurally similar institution of fosterage or “milk kinship” as documented in former mountain kingdoms of the Hindu Kush in northern Pakistan. Comparable structures of interdomestic allegiance and tributary patronage organized through milk kinship are attested more fragmentarily elsewhere in the Middle East and Central Asia, and there is further evidence that such hierarchized foster relations also extended into many peripheral regions of premodern Europe (E. Goody 1982:280–1; Parkes n.d.). Hammel himself mentioned Serbian “kinship by milk” (srodstvo po mleku)—“meaning the fictive kinship relationship between two children suckled by the same woman, but otherwise unrelated” (1968:31 n.27)—with reference to Filopovich's (1963) earlier survey of South Slavonic ritual kinship. Yet Hammel did not pursue the possible analogies of such fosterage ties with kumstvo godparenthood: as structurally equivalent institutions of constructed kinship, once orchestrating transitive chains of interdomestic allegiance and tributary governance in peripheral polities throughout Eurasia.

The subject of this paper is the question of the stem family, in the sociological literature and in anthropological studies of Ireland. The notion of the stem family is said to derive from the work of the nineteenth-century French sociologist Frederic Le Play (1806–82). Le Play divided the history of the family into three stages. Ancient societies were supposedly characterized by what he called the ‘patriarchal’ family, in which all the sons were retained within the household, over which the oldest member of the family ruled and in which any number of generations resided. Most of the world's population were said however to have experienced their primary socialization in the ‘stem’ family. The stem family was a threegenerational structure which functioned to retain its original location (land and/or house) by means of dispersing most younger members, while preserving the main family stem by a principle of single inheritance. Parents married off and kept within the group only those children nominated as successors. Finally, there was the modern, ‘unstable’ family which formed upon marriage and dissolved upon the death of the parents.

Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, one of the most pervasive media images consisted of East Germans on a frenetic, collective shopping spree. For many western Germans, as well as for much of the world, the “triumph” of capitalism and democracy seemed to be reflected and confirmed in the “consuming frenzy” (Konsumrausch) of the “Ossis” (East Germans). Although these images of consumption following the collapse of socialism were new, they were structured by and contributed to a dominant narrative of “democratization” and national legitimacy in which access to consumer goods and consumer choice are defined as fundamental rights and democratic expressions of individualism. Indeed, many observers have since suggested that the transitions of 1989 were not about demands for political or human rights, but for consumer rights (e.g., Bauman 1992; Borneman 1992; Drakulic 1991). They were also, I would add, about consumer rites—about the making of citizen-consumers.

The profusion of fresh flowers in Italian graveyards amazed nineteenth-century travellers from America used to more severe practices. In England, too, flowers were sparse. Nor was their paucity unintentional. Strong sentiments were involved, for despite the increasing pomp of Victorian funerals, much ambivalence was displayed about elaborate rituals and offerings in the Anglo-American world—“a green grassy turf is all I crave,” wrote Beattie in the Minstrel. Even Loudon, the great architect of the new rural cemeteries in England, was reluctant to make a place for flowers in his plans.

Anthropologists have been interested in African societies and cultures for several decades. Few will dispute the contributions which British social anthropologists and others have made to the understanding of African institutions, especially in the domains of kinship and marriage, political organization, and most recently in urban studies. Many of these studies, however, have been avowedly synchronic; they are intended as descriptions of societies at a single time level. Even in those cases where the anthropo- logist has been privileged to conduct research within the same society over an extended period of time, the problems of social and cultural change which he documents generally involve modifications of ‘traditional’ institutions and behavior in the context of colonialism, postcolonialism, and world capitalism. While such studies are extremely important, the processes they describe do not exhaust the limits of the study of change in African society.

South Africa's liberation, marked by the first democratic elections of 1994, ushered in an unprecedented expansion of large-scale redistributive arrangements. In the post-apartheid period, the collection of money into a central fund administered anonymously and bureaucratically has gained social and political importance, particularly for poor and lower-middle-class Africans. This is most evident in a rapid expansion of government social assistance—from 1997 to 2006 the number of beneficiaries of social grants increased from three to almost eleven million, and today at least a quarter of South African households receive welfare payments. Social assistance “has been the fastest-growing category of government expenditure since 2001, and now amounts to R70 billion [almost US$7 billion in 2006] a year, about 3.4 percent of gross domestic product.” The centrality of redistribution is clear in current debates over the establishment of a Basic Income Grant (BIG) for all South Africans. Political liberation has also brought an increase in redistribution through development projects such as the National Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) grants.