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.

If we step back and consider the words around which critiques and debates have crystallized in recent years, some have been relatively clear, while others have been constantly in need of disambiguation. Even during the most drawn-out of debates over “nationalism” or “revolution,” and despite the arguments over definitions and typologies, we had the sense that we were all talking about the same thing—that is why the debates could move along, adding new perspectives, disputing whether this or that author had placed enough stress on class position, or industrialization, or ideas.

The history of tropical forest change over the last millennium is difficult to chart with any confident degree of accuracy. Indeed, systematic attempts even for the last hundred years have been made only recently. In general, more is known at present about the history of tropical forests in Asia and Southeast Asia than forests in Africa or South America. This lack of knowledge is partly due to the fact that the causal factors behind the erosion of tropical forests area are particularly difficult to disentangle. However, important connections can be made between European expansion, the penetration of capitalist economic forces, and the transformation of tropical environments.Above all, the spread of market relations in the tropics has served to encourage the rapid clearance of forests for agriculture. The history of global deforestation has probably been closely associated at many of its fastest stages with the dynamics of the forces of industrialisation and the expansion of a European-centered world-system.

This paper is a revisiting of the question of contemporary Islamism in Egypt. Its purpose is to rethink the main arguments and explanatory frameworks relating to Islamist activism in general and the militant and violent type in particular. It presents some new propositions about the phenomenon and provides elements for a deeper understanding. This revisiting is undertaken in light of certain developments over the last decade or so, which may be summarised as follows: 1) the heightening of Islamist violence, marked by confrontations with the government in and around Cairo and in the provinces of Upper EgyptThe 1990s have seen an intensification of violent clashes between the Islamists and the government, claiming over one thousand lives. The Islamist attacks have been aimed particularly at the tourism sector and the police. More than a hundred police officers and soldiers have been killed. For more details, see the annual reports of al-Taqrir al-Istratiji al-Arabi (The Arab Strategic Report). See also Nabil Abd al-Fatah and Diya' Rashwan, Taqrir al-Hala al-Diniya fi Misr 1995 (Report on the State of Religion in Egypt 1995) (Cairo: Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, 1997).; 2) the emergence of clear socio-spatial dimensions to Islamist activism. For the purposes of this article, my analysis pertains to these developments in the greater Cairo area.The rise of al-Jama‘a al-Islamiya in the Upper Egypt governorates of Qena, Asyut, Suhaj, Minya and Aswan must be examined in relation to the social fabric and spatial organisation of their cities and towns. The complexity of social organisation based on tribe and family and the hierarchies characterising social, economic, and political positions in the various provinces have yet to be studied in a comprehensive manner, and are beyond the scope of this paper. See Nazih Ayubi, Political Islam (London: Routledge, 1991), and Mamun Fandy, “Egypt's Islamic Group: Regional Revenge,” Middle East Journal 48, 4 (1994): 607–25.

Everywhere a disparity can be observed between the socioeconomic composition of the electorate and the composition of the elected, representative body, which acts as a legislature for the society. Microcosm and macro- cosm are never identical; the legislature never mirrors the population at large. This is a universal generalization. It holds true for all representative systems at all times. It is furthermore true that the character of this disparity differs cross-nationally and over time: each legislature is unique in this sense.

Americans who visited the young Soviet republic during the first dozen or so years of its existence were astonished at the degree of interest, fascination, respect, and even liking that their hosts displayed for them and the United States. “Ours is the only important Government which refuses to grant Russia political recognition,” one of them wrote, “and yet it is our country that Russia emulates and admires.” Another reported that “the word for industrialization is Americanization, and the passion to Ford-ize the Soviet Union is even stronger than the passion to communize it.”

Are industrial societies becoming alike? This crucial question, unfortunately sometimes treated as an assumption, has been of central theoretical interest since the appearance of the social sciences. The philosophes, with their optimistic belief in progress, were theorists of convergence because they believed in the perfectibility not of particular groups in society, but of all ‘mankind’. It was a radical, anti-relativistic notion to believe that Man not Men was the basic unit of study, the premise for speculation. For if Man acted the same everywhere, then forms of social organization must share essential analytic properties and be proceeding toward an equivalence of structural arrangements. Morally, good was to be found everywhere. Samuel Johnson remarked that ‘the King of Siam sent ambassadors to Louis XIV, but Louis XIV did not send ambassadors to the King of Siam’. But Johnson sent his literary imagination on a diplomatic mission to Abyssinia in Rasselas, presumably to clear his mind of such ethnocentric cant. The cult of the Noble Savage was not only an aspect of eighteenth-century Romanticism, but an indication that Europeans, even Frenchmen, had something to learn from the simple lives of their primitive contemporaries. Like the philosophes many thought that the state, in the form of the benevolent despot, assured continual improvement, and often saw middling groups of intellectuals as allied with or advisory to the king in this great enterprise. It did not seem improbable that societies would converge to a similar political structure—with a strong state, an intellectual elite, and a mature opinion publique, a phrase that originated in pre-revolutionary eighteenth-century France.

In recent years, a number of anthropologists have come to recognize that missionaries, who play a central role in many of the social systems that anthropologists study, have yet to receive the ethnographic and theoretical attention they deserve. Often, when anthropologists discussed missionaries at all, they treated them as part of the setting, much like rainfall and elevation: matters one felt obliged to mention, but peripheral to the real object of social anthropological description and analysis. There were, to be sure, exceptions, notably the body of anthropological literature that has dealt with the effects of missionaries on various areas of native life.

This article explores a forcible, wartime transfer of women and minors from one ethnic group to another, and its partial reversal after the war. I analyze the historical conditions that enabled the original transfer, and then the circumstances that shaped the reverse transfer. The setting is Istanbul during and immediately after World War I, and the protagonists are various influential agents connected to the Ottoman Turkish state and to the Armenian Patriarchate. The absence and subsequent involvement of European Great Powers determines the broader, shifting context. The narrative follows the bodies of women and children, who were the subjects of the protagonists' discourses and the objects of their policies. This is the first in-depth study to connect these two processes involved: the wartime integration of Armenian women and children into Muslim settings, and postwar Armenian attempts to rescue, reintegrate, and redistribute them. I explain why and how the Armenian vorpahavak (gathering of orphans and widows) worked as it did, and situate it comparatively with similar events. I highlight its uniqueness, and the theoretical possibilities that it offers toward understanding why and how women, children, and reproduction matter to collectivities in crisis.

The student of Aztec “aristocracy” in its colonial period (1519–1810) confronts an historical situation of which the abstract conditions are familiar from other (and often much better known) instances of conquest and long-term adaptation. Romans and Barbarians, Moslems and Christians, Whites and Negroes, and additional examples will immediately suggest themselves. The situation is one wherein a given society, previously independent, suffers subjugation under an external society to the extent that its whole hierarchy of class stratification is subordinated to a new and foreign upper class. The society is demoted as a whole, and whereas for lower classes this entails only a further degradation, for ruling classes the change is absolute, from a dominant to a subordinate rank. Theoretically, at least, one could expect stimulus and response in greatest degree and greatest incidence in the group whose position is most seriously affected.

It is commonplace to treat the 1860s and 1870s as a crucial period in the making of modern South Africa. These two decades saw the beginnings of the mineral-led industrial revolution that so dramatically transformed the political economy of the region; they marked a decisive moment in the assertion of colonial political hegemony over regional African kingdoms; and they witnessed a secular intensification in imperial involvement in the sub-continent. In light of their importance in understanding the history of white supremacy in twentieth-century South Africa, these social, economic, and political processes have been extensively analyzed. Yet, settler power and authority were not expressed only in terms of economic control or political conquest: in order to achieve the mature form of colonial proprietorship that distinguishes South Africa from most other nineteenth-century settler societies in Africa, cognitive as well as physical mastery had to be established over indigenous peoples and the natural environment. It is surprising, therefore that so little attention has been devoted to the conspicuous display of intellectual curiosity that accompanied growing colonial and imperial engagement in the African subcontinent at this time. This paper seeks to redress this imbalance.

This article compares the strategies through which Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Indonesia have regulated religion and addressed questions of what constitutes “the religious” in the post-independence period. We show that the dominant approach pursued by the Indian state has been one of judicialization—the delegation of religious questions to the high courts—while in Indonesia it has predominantly been one of bureaucratization—the regulation of religious issues by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Contrary to the expectation that judicialization devitalizes normative conflicts while bureaucratization, more frequently associated with authoritarian politics, “locks” these conflicts “in,” we show that these expectations have not materialized, and at times, the effects have been reverse. Engaging the literatures on judicialization and on bureaucratization, we argue that what determines the consequences of the policy toward religion is less the choice of the implementing institution (i.e., the judiciary or bureaucracy) than the mode of delegation (vertical versus horizontal) which shapes the relationship between the policy-maker and the institution implementing it. Bureaucrats, judges, and elected politicians in multicultural societies around the world encounter questions of religious nature very similar to those that authorities in India and Indonesia have faced. How they address the challenge of religious heterogeneity has a profound impact on prospects of nation-building and democratization. It is therefore imperative that the consequences of the policy toward religion, and even more so the consequences of political delegation, be studied more systematically.

In November of 1934, Algerian Governor General Jules Carde asked the Algiers Police Prefecture to investigate a rumor circulating through the French bureaucracy that “natives” in the Arab cafés (café maures) of the city were tuning in to biweekly Arabic broadcasts transmitted by an unspecified Italian radio station that featured “commentaries unfavorable to France” and “openly attacked France's Muslim policy.” As the governor of three overseas French départements, Carde had already received notification that the airwaves over North Africa were becoming dangerous. A few months earlier, Jean Berthoin, the director of national security, or Sûreté, in France's Interior Ministry, warned regional prefects, “In a number of cities a large portion of the radio-electric industry—sales and the construction of devices—is in the hands of foreigners.” Berthoin feared that the dominance of France's radio-electric market by large, multinational firms would allow enemy agents to mask radio transmitters beneath the cover of radio sales and report clandestinely on troop maneuvers and defense preparations. He therefore instructed prefects to begin “discreet investigations” into the civil status, political affiliation, and nationality of radio merchants and their personnel. While ostensibly directed at metropolitan prefects, these Sûreté directives resonated in Algeria—a strategic periphery of “Greater France” and home to a sizeable European population of German and Italian descent and to multiple garrisons of France's indigenous-based African Army (Armée d'Afrique). By 1935, rumors about radio espionage and subversive auditory propaganda circulating through the Algerian colonial bureaucracy compelled Governor Carde to construct a colony-wide surveillance web to monitor radio sales, investigate Algerian listening habits, and assess the effects of radio propaganda on the “native mentality.”

Since the publication of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities almost a decade ago, historians and anthropologists have become accustomed to think of the nation—that bedrock of our existence as moderns—as an imagined entity.1 Yet it is problematic, at least to this author, that while the spotlight is (once again) on the nation, the other key actor in Anderson's formulation, the language through which a specific nation is subjectively conceived and imagined, appears to have been relegated to the sidelines. By proposing that languages, too, be considered cultural and symbolic entities that are themselves enrolled into projects of imagination, this essay assumes its beginnings in questions provoked by Anderson's analysis. Because languages themselves are subjected to multiple imaginations, how indeed can they enable the harmonious and contention-free imagination of communities? How indeed do they acquire the capacity to generate feelings of “contemporaneity,” “solidarity,” and “belonging,” as Anderson proposes? Do they not just as well have the power to scatter and disaggregate such sentiments? These are questions occasioned by more than just theoretical curiosity. In many parts of the world, the diverse imaginations that cling to languages have frequently sparked off contestation, divisiveness, and even violence, especially in multi-lingual pluralities like India, the focus of this article.

Asianisms, that is, discourses and ideologies claiming that Asia can be defined and understood as a homogenous space with shared and clearly defined characteristics, have become the subject of increased scholarly attention over the last two decades. The focal points of interest, however, are generally East Asian varieties of regionalism. That “the cult of Asianism” has played an important role on the Indian subcontinent, too—as is evident from the quote above—is less understood. Aside from two descriptive monographs dating back to the 1970s, there has been relatively little scholarly engagement with this phenomenon. In this article, we would like to offer an overview of several distinct concepts of Asia and pan-Asian designs, which featured prominently in both political and civil society debates in India during the struggle for Independence. Considering the abundance of initiatives for Asian unification, and, in a more abstract sense, discourses on Asian identity, what follows here is necessarily a selection of discourses, three of which will be subjected to critical analysis, with the following questions in mind:

• • What were the concrete motives of regional—in this case Indian—actors to appropriate the concept of Asianism? Is the popularity of supranational frames of reference solely to be explained as an affirmation of a distinctive identity vis-à-vis the imagined powerful West, or are there other motives to be found?

• • What were the results of these processes of appropriation, and how were these manifested politically and culturally?

• • What tensions resulted from the simultaneous existence of various nationalisms in Asia on the one hand and macro-nationalistic pan-Asianism on the other?

This essay is a preliminary attempt to place nineteenth century Ottoman conversion policies in a comparative context in relation to both earlier Ottoman centuries and other imperial polities, viz.: the Spanish and Russian. The present study has three aims. First, to ask some practical questions about the fact and nature of the conversion process. Second, to try to ascertain whether there is some pattern to the various cases occurring in the archival documentation for the turbulent years between the declaration of the Tanzimat in 1839 and the Reform Edict of 1856. And third, to put the late Ottoman attitude to conversion and apostasy into a broader comparative framework than has hitherto been attempted.This paper is the first fruit of a larger project that will examine conversion and apostasy in the late Ottoman Empire from the Tanzimat era through to the end of the Empire in 1918.

The origin and spread of money-based commodity markets is normally attributed to a natural evolution from barter and is usually seen as a solution to problems of exchange. I want to propose that markets to a considerable degree develop historically out of a different set of dynamics. These are concerned with the state-building tasks of territorial conquest and control, and are closely related to specific modes of war fighting. In this connection, markets develop not only to facilitate exchange per se but also to facilitate the mobilization of resources and their management across space and time. This need to manage resources geographically and temporally contributes not only to the spread of commodity markets but also to the development of markets in land and in labor.

Stamp collecting and industrial capitalism in the United States emerged simultaneously in the mid-nineteenth century. England issued the first government postage stamp in 1840, and other nations quickly adopted the idea. The United States printed its first official stamp in 1847, although it was preceded by the provisionals issued by local postmasters. Postage stamps were a product of the industrial revolution. The adoption of the prepaid penny post in England, while opposed by the General Post Office, was widely supported by large merchants who understood that a low-cost, single-rate system was vital to the communication demanded by an increasingly national market. The adhesive label was originally conceived by the English postal reformer, Rowland Hill, as a convenience for illiterates who would not be able to write addresses on the official envelopes that he preferred as proof of prepayment. Within a decade, almost every major nation in the world had borrowed this device, which became a symbol of the economic transformation of the nineteenth century. I would argue that the collecting of these tokens was a microcosmic performance of the system that created them. Stamp collectors took on many of the key roles of actors in the market economy and played out various conflicts embodied in the larger society in the philatelic arena.

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.

If we regard corruption as the use of public office or authority for private advantage and gain, then corruption is always latent in centralized polities; but even when manifest, it is not always easy to isolate from other conditions of its context for formal analysis. The Hausa of Northern Nigeria, whose history is fairly well known, and who have long traditions of political centralisation, provide data well worth study from this point of view. The Hausa language contains several terms denoting political conditions and practices of interest in this connection. Zalunci refers to oppression, tilas to compulsion, zamba to oppression and swindling, rikice to fraud and confusion alike, ha'inci to bribery, cin hanci to taking bribes, yi gaisuwa to making greetings or gifts, tara to fines, cin tara to taking (keeping?) fines, wasau to forcible confiscation of property, munafunci to treachery and breaking of political agreements, hamiya to political rivalry, kunjiya to a faction or group of supporters, barantaka to clientage, chapka to allegiance, loyalty, fadanci to courtiership, jekadanci to political agency, kinjibibi and kutukutu to differing types of intrigue, character assassination, and so on. Clearly if an extensive vocabulary describing cows indicates a people's preoccupation with cattle, this Hausa vocabulary indicates parallel preoccupation with political organisation; but to my knowledge, Hausa lacks a term for the concept of political corruption outlined above.