As in the vast majority of socialist states that arose with the Soviet Union's post-World War II hegemony over Eastern Europe, People's Republic of Romania nationalized (confiscated) a large number of privately owned houses. The declared intention of the state was to eliminate housing inequality and the private rental sector in urban areas. In 1950, the state appropriated both leased and family homes that were considered to have too much domestic space. The inhabitants of confiscated houses became tenants instead of owners. Tenants were made to live with the former owners in such expropriated domestic space. With the collapse of state socialism in 1989, former owners and their descendants began seeking to regain the property rights for these confiscated houses. In a limited number of cases they succeeded, although the majority of houses had been sold by the state to the sitting tenants at very low prices.

Within the Muslim world, revolts with a religious aspect or ideology have had a long history. My current comparative research on this topic indicates that these revolts, common in the early centuries of Islam, became less frequent thereafter. These revolts may generally be characterized as either “left” sectarian or “orthodox” revivalist. The latter revived after circa 1700. It is part of my thesis to see three phases to these modern revivalist revolts and to say that all three phases were, in different ways, tied to interaction with the West, although this was far from being their only cause. These three phases were the pre-colonial phase, early resistance to colonialism, and the recent Islamic revival. The scope here covers the whole Muslim world, and the approach is comparative.

Kinship studies have traditionally been the core of the anthropological enterprise, but the knowledge gained in studies of indigenous kinship systems has not generally been of interest to other disciplines. This essay intends to draw attention to some of the political and social implications of patterns of kinship relations by comparing two large historical culture areas, that of the frontier region of Inner Asia, and that of the peripheral tribes of the Middle East.

A tendency in studies of science in colonial Africa is to focus on the “big politics” of resource extraction, environmental control, and the governmentality of subject bodies. As a result, we now recognize that colonial science was a highly political enterprise in which the pursuit of knowledge was infused with the dynamics of starkly exclusionary societies and extractive regimes. Scientific improvements in medicine and agriculture yielded benefits that underwrote colonial projects and the construction of authoritative knowledge in medicine, racial biology, and social science created disciplinary power over Africans as scientifically objectified colonial subjects. It has been observed that the failure of science to heed indigenous knowledge led to a “misreading” of the landscape and inappropriate intervention. Recently, some historians have attempted to mitigate overly stark depictions of colonial science, making good cases that the practice of scientific ecology, agronomy, and medicine in colonial Africa had motivations and effects beyond the service of extraction and governmentality. They have rightly informed us that the assessment of applied sciences in colonial Africa cannot be reduced to their role in European domination. Clearly, these are critical issues that merit attention. Yet the focus on ways science did (or did not) support various colonial agendas may have impeded the development of a more representative understanding of Euro-American scientific pursuits in African colonies.

In many otherwise diverse societies, owners of large agricultural estates have paid their year-round workers with the use of a piece of land on which to produce their own subsistence crops. In a “preliminary report” Magnus Morner cited some eleven examples of this system in Europe, Latin America, and Africa. Although Mörner mentions different influences, he does not advance an argument to explain these systems. This essay seeks to contribute to our understanding of the political economy of these “labor rent” or “estate labor” systems. The paper is exploratory: previous approaches are considered, a theoretical framework is proposed, and some tentative hypotheses are presented. My evidence comes from three examples: the Insten system of East Elbian Germany from ca. 1750 to ca. 1860; the ‘izbah system of the Egyptian Delta from ca. 1850 to ca. 1940; and the pre-1930 inquilinaje system of Central Chile.

It is just fifty years since the distinguished legal historian, Adhémar Esmein, addressing an international conference in London, discussed the interpretation of the Roman law maxim Princeps legibus solutus est by the medieval glossators, and the influence of their teachings on the growth of French government. Esmein thought that the glossators had perverted a doctrine of classical constitutional law, which had merely exempted the emperor from the observance of certain legal rules, into a general principle of irresponsible absolutism. Certain French constitutional lawyers of the sixteenth century, he maintained, struggled stoutly against this doctrine but, none the less, its acceptance opened the way to various abuses in French public life ranging from the arbitrary decision of legal cases to the issuance of lettres de cachet. Esmein accordingly took advantage of the occasion to congratulate his English hosts on having escaped the glossators' baneful influence.

Murder has both an attractive and a repellent quality. The tingling, fearfully pleasurable sensation of reading or hearing about murders makes them popular in literature and in the media. George Orwell perceptively sums up this human reaction when he says of one of his characters, “Mother preferred the News of the World which she considered had more murders in it.” The fascination with split heads, spilled brains and dismembered bodies was a dominant theme of medieval as well as of modern literature.

Julya paces the parquet, blond hair coiled severely, hands clasped atop padded buttocks encased in a boxy gray, ill-fitting suit. She sputters abuse at her audience: fifteen classmates sprawled on the floor, their teacher seated in a chair, and a video camera. Moscow, November 2002. The Americans prepare to invade Iraq, Putin serves his third year as president, and these students begin their first term at the Russian Academy for Theatrical Arts (RATI/GITIS). Inside its walls, Julya depicts the head of her high school, an older woman in a town two hours north. She yells: “I REQUEST that TODAY at the meeting with ZhshzhshshzhshuGAnov you ALL be there!” (Zjuganov is the leader of the Russian Communist Party.) Some students slap the parquet laughing. Their teacher is less impressed.

The neoliberal reforms sweeping the globe are generating strikingly analogous transformations in diverse politico-economic and ideological landscapes, especially through the spread of democratic-liberal political regimes and an emphasis on the “virtues of the invisible hand”—rather than the state—in the investment of a huge mass of mobile capital (Fishlow 1990:64; Amin 1995; Gill 1993). We are witnessing an increasingly dominant and profitable global capitalist economy with a “highly coercive capacity to ensnare enormous numbers of peoples within its grasp” (Blim 1992:5; Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994; Sachs 1995; Mittelman 1996; Dirlik 1994; Diskin and Koechlin 1994; Hojman 1994).

This essay probes the role of commodities in the crafting of state power, working from the vantage point of contemporary Ghana, a polity at once post-socialist and staunchly neoliberal, least-industrialized and highly cosmopolitan. Among the many commodities which Ghana's citizens and state bodies identify with and rely upon, cars are of critical significance. In what follows, I explore the raft of interventions surrounding car importation and allocation imposed by Ghana's Customs Service, and the resulting public critique, in an effort to capture the shifting contours of state authority in the context of an electoral and economic transition spurred by neoliberal reform.

Lewis H. Morgan's Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) is credited with inventing the anthropological study of “kinship” from a comparative perspective (Trautmann 1987). Since Émile Durkheim's critique of 1898, Morgan is also said to have reduced kinship to biology in keeping with Anglo-American cultural assumptions about “blood relations” given in nature. Yet, on closer inspection, Morgan's “consanguinity” proves to be fraught with contradictions. Debates about the degenerative effects of mixing bloods in marriage—consanguinity with affinity—encompassed not only miscegenation but also “consanguineous marriages,” such as Morgan's own marriage to his first cousin (his mother's brother's daughter) in 1851.

Strikes became legal in France more than a century ago. Since their first partial legalization in 1864, the right to strike has waxed and waned, the great federations of labor have sprung from conflicts within France's modern industries and bureaucracies, and the proportion of strikes leading to shootings, beatings, sabotage or imprisonment has diminished. The strike has appeared to modernize, to take on new sophistication as a means of regulating conflict, to go from savage to civilized.

How best might one address the relationship between trade and state building in early modern South Asia? The question is hardly a new one. To some, like Anand Ram ‘Mukhlis’ (d. 1751), a Khatri from northern India who, though not Muslim, had been educated in Persian letters and accounting (siyâgat), trade was more honourable and safer than statecraft or government. The fortunes of the nobility were fluctuating ones, and the means by which they had been accumulated were of a questionable legitimacy. Doubts of this sort did not of course prevent his Khatri brethren from entering into government service during the later Mughal period, and several of them can be counted among the a'yân (notables) of the reign of the Mughal, Muhammad Shah (1719–48) (Alam 1986:169–75). They maintained a tradition begun in the reign of Ak-bar with the famous Raja Todar Mal (d. 1589), also a Khatri from the Punjab.

1. The Classic Khmer and the Classic Maya civilizations had cult centers but not true cities. They both arose in areas which were regionally undifferentiated.

2. Easy transportation and heavy trade were lacking because of the areawide uniformity of crops and the difficult terrain. Consequently, urban centers were not and could not be supported.

3. Both areas did produce a surplus and therefore could support civilized life. The social orders of each were so set up that through religious sanctions this surplus, which included labor, could be utilized for the creation and support of huge cult centers. Such a kind of organization might be considered as unilateral (mechanical) in the Durkheimian sense.

4. In contrast, true cities arose in productive agricultural areas which were regionally specialized, with symbiotic interdependence of a Maussian nature. Trade and trade routes were highly developed so that commodity prices were sufficiently low to enable large groups of persons engaged in commerce to live together and yet make a profit on their activities. Internally specialized civilizations of this sort have been termed organic.

5. It is suggested that among the organic civilizations, the state may have had its origin in the regulation of trade; among the unilateral civilizations, in the compulsion of tribute and corvee labor.

To possess something is an unpredictable combination of the following: to have, to own, to know, or to control. Land, stories, resources, equanimity, and loyalty are all examples of materially incommensurate things a person might possess. Even without material wealth, for example, one might be said to be in possession of a wicked sense of humor or a good memory or despite all else, one's own life story. Possessing one's own life story, however, is not a given. Thinking of one's life as a story, as something that can be narrated, involves social processes and conventions operative well beyond individual processes of reflection or experience. Narrating one's life, then, is to situate oneself and to be situated in dialogue with society.1 As such, whether one's narrative is consensual with or contradictory to social norms, such narration signals possession of shared structures of possibility, including normative understandings of history, memory, knowledge, and truth. To narrate one's life is not just an issue of how, but also a matter of if.

A comparative study of assimilation like the present one has shown that the structural or environmental factors in the larger society are principally responsible for the differential rates of assimilation. Historically, the United States has been racist in its treatment of nearly all immigrants. Eastern and Southern Europeans were judged inferior along ethnic/racist lines (Gordon 1964), let alone those with more pronounced physical characteristics such as blacks, Latins or Asians. The legal structure erected in the United States, which includes the historical anti-ethnic legisla- tion, discriminatory immigration policies and racist miscegenation laws, reflects the attitudes and perceptions of the host society. The long years of unfair policies and discriminatory practices implemented against the Chinese produced feelings of rejection among them. In Lima, by contrast, the Hispanic cultural tradition does not emphasize racial differences. Although therere is a subtle racism in Lima, there is no miscegenation law, and children born of marriages between Chinese and Peruvians become important factors in the assimilation of the Chinese.

In this paper I shall analyse the rituals for Sanni Yaka (‘the demon of Sanni’). Sanni Yaka is also known as Kōla Sanniya and is a pantheistic deity who incorporates eighteen other demons known as Dahaaṭa Sanni (eighteen Sanni) or simply as Sanni Yakku (Sanni demons; Yakku is plural of Yakā). The rituals performed for the Sanni Yakku appear in a large-scale ceremony known as the Sanni Yäkuma, ‘the demon ceremony of the Sanni’. In my analysis I shall emphasize the dramatic aspects of the rituals, where the demons appear on stage in masked representations. In these rituals a great deal of comic dialogue and obscenities prevail. Their significance has been missed by Wirz who describes one of these rituals, the dolaha pelapāliya (spectacle for the twelve gods) in the following terms: ‘This scene is called simply ‘pelapāliya’, which may best be translated as ‘dance suite’, or ‘musical show.’ … In reality, it is only interposed for diversion and has no deeper meaning’ (1954: 59). A highly sophisticated anthropologist presumably refers to similar comic humour when he says that ‘after more hocus-pocus, Riri Yaka is eventually told that by the orders of the Buddha (Budu anin) and the power of the gods (deviyangē balē) he must accept the dola (offering) and remove his curse from the patient' (Ames, 1964: 42). Almost identical words are spoken to Kōla Sanniya in the Sanni Yäkuma ritual, but we shall interpret and unravel the symbolic meaning of these humorous ritual dramas and consider their evolution and social functions.

This essay can best be considered an anthropological venture in the field of recent and contemporary Spanish historiography. Our aim is twofold: an understanding of the nature of Spanish historical interpretation as it is elaborated by national historians; the examination of certain phases of intercultural contact critical in the formation of a distinct Spanish cultural form.

The hometown associations (HTAs) formed by international migrants sharing a place of origin are considered the quintessential “transnational” institution linking migrants to family and townspeople who stayed behind. Scholars of transnationalism present HTAs as the expression of a new kind of “transnational community” or “transnational social field” that is redefining what it means to belong to a community by including people who are physically absent but who make their presence felt through regular visits and remittances and by sponsoring charity and development projects in their hometown. New transportation and communication technologies stretching the limits of space and time are said to be the driving forces that allow migrants to belong to a single community anchored in multiple, distant geographic localities. Such migrants transcend the old boundaries of territorial belonging that depended on a sedentary population, and call into question basic social scientific concepts like “citizenship,” “community,” “nation-state,” and “migration.” Even the most recent transnationalism literature, which has retreated from some earlier claims of novelty to rediscover transborder practices of older migrations, continues to claim that new conceptions of membership are necessary to understand both new and older practices (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 1994; Levitt 2001; Portes and Landolt 2002; Smith 2006).

One of the most persistent of all New World dreams, El Dorado has acquired new life over the last two decades throughout much of the Amazon Basin. Many of the same golden visions that led Orellana and his men to plunge ahead down an “ocean-river” in the sixteenth century continue to prompt large numbers of people in Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and, above all, Brazil to leave their families and set out for makeshift mining camps to seek their fortunes amidst a sea of mud. This discussion focuses on representations of gold miners or garimpeiros by themselves and others. I argue that although miners unquestionably draw on a much larger oral tradition, their stories stand apart from those told by a more general population in their tendency to portray gold as an active, female agent and in their relative lack of interest in clear-cut morals. In addition, while the vision of nature and natural forces as female and the fixation on violence as a (if not the) key element of life in the garimpo would appear to corroborate precisely those images of miners that reach a national and international public, this surface agreement cloaks important underlying differences that underscore the fundamental multiplicity of metaphor.