For comparative history to be meaningful, the phenomena compared must possess important and comprehensive unities of character. In his “Systems of Domination after Slavery: The Control of Land and Labor in the British West Indies after 1838”, which appeared in the October 1981 issue of Comparative Studies in Society and History, O. Nigel Bolland accepts this maxim in theory; he ignores it in practice.

This essay uses a discussion of three recent events in Yemen to dramatize the relationship between state power and the experience of citizenship in the aftermath of national unification in 1990.My analysis depends on readers understanding the differences I am registering among the terms “state,” “nation,” and “regime.” By “state” I mean a common set of institutions capable of distributing goods and services and controlling violence within a demarcated, internationally recognized territory. By “nation” I refer to a shared sense of belonging simultaneously with anonymous others to an imagined community. By “regime” I mean the political order of a particular leader or administration. For example, we tend to say “the regime of עAli עAbd Allah Salih,” but not “the state of עAli עAbd Allah Salih.” The first event is a “direct,” purportedly competitive presidential election on 23 September 1999, the first since unification and unprecedented in the histories of the former countries of North and South Yemen. The second is the celebration of the tenth anniversary of national unification on 22 May 2000, including the extraordinary preparations leading up to the event. The third is the public sensation following the arrest and prosecution of a man touted as Yemen's first bona fide “serial killer,” which occurred during the lead-up to the decennial celebration.

Students of peasant society recognize the importance of the market economy for understanding decision-making processes within the house- hold and the nature of articulation between the peasant sector and the national society. We intend to describe market behavior in Northeast Brazil and to relate such behavior to changes in the agricultural economy in general. The ultimate goal is to understand how peasants are integrated into the national economy as commodity producers and consumers of manufactured goods. By concentrating on the internal marketing system for food staples in Northeast Brazil we hope to refine earlier views of peasants and to suggest a definition of peasantry based on economic integration rather than on partial participation in the national culture.

The search for a conceptual framework for interpreting the political evolution of the new states has led to a renewal of interest in charisma. Some writers, such as Shils, have used the concept of charisma to explain the problem of political integration; others, such as Wallerstein and Apter, have used it to indicate how political integration may be furthered. The use of charisma as a conceptual tool for illuminating the problem of political integration is taking on the character of a theory, which we call the theory of charismatic legitimation. This paper attempts an evaluation of this theory. Charismatic legitimation is the process of creating loyalty for the new state through the personal influence of the charismatic leader. This crude definition could bear further clarification. But we shall seek clarification by examining the theory of charismatic legitimation rather than by framing more abstract definitions.

In 1866, the Atlantic Monthly published a fictional case study of an army surgeon who had lost all of his limbs during the Civil War. Written anonymously by American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, “The Case of George Dedlow” describes not only the series of wounds and infections which led to the amputation of all four of the soldier's arms and legs but also the after-effects of amputation. Reduced to what he terms “a useless torso, more like some strange larval creature than anything of human shape,” Dedlow finds that in disarticulating his body, amputation articulates anatomical norms. His observation of his own uniquely altered state qualifies him to speak in universal terms about the relationship between sentience and selfhood: “I have dictated these pages,” he says, “not to shock my readers, but to possess them with facts in regard to the relation of the mind to the body” (1866:5). As such, the story explores the meaning of embodiment, finding in a fragmented anatomy the opportunity to piece together a more complete understanding of how the body functions—physically and metaphysically—as a whole.

Oku adults have a straightforward rationalization for the existence of folktales: the frightening cautionary tales of the child-eating monster K∂ηgaaηgu serve to warn children not to go to the fields or to stray too far from the house without their parents. But this rationalization is belied by the fact that adults in this chiefdom of the Cameroon Grassfields do not tell folktales to children. Rather, folktales are most often told by children amongst each other, with no adult involvement, and they are consequently learned by younger children from older ones. This is an unusual situation in West Africa, where the norm is for adults to tell folktales to children. For all we know, adult-to-child storytelling may have been the normal practice in the Grassfields in the past, but if it ever was, this practice has now passed into desuetude, and today adults look with mild scorn on folktales (f∂ngaanen, ∂mgaanen pl.) and generally remain aloof during storytelling sessions. Storytelling in the Grassfields is therefore a child-structured form of play in Schwartzman's (1978) sense: it is an activity mediated by children without adult input. Prior to the introduction of schooling in the Grassfields, children used to be made to guard the crops against birds and monkeys, an activity that left them to their own devices in the fields for long periods of the day (Argenti 2001; see also Fortes 1938; Raum 1940). In some cases, children actually slept in small shelters that they built in the fields, and they would consequently stay away from their homes and adult supervision for days at a time. It was in this context, away from the censorious gaze of adults, that children's illicit masking activities developed (Argenti 2001). It may also be in this context that children were able to indulge in prolonged bouts of storytelling without fear of reproof by adults, in whose eyes children should be seen but not heard. Today, children no longer guard the fields, and they have therefore taken to telling their folktales at home.

Do revolutions affect one another? Certainly, in light of the Òvelvet revolutionsÓ of the past decade, the contagious effect of revolutions cannot be denied. Less remembered is the wave of constitutional revolutions of the early twentieth century that swept across Russia (1905), Iran (1906), the Ottoman Empire (1908), Mexico (1910), and China (1911). This short-term wave was couched within a long-term one that began with the American, Polish, and French Revolutions and included such other exemplary cases as the European revolutions of 1848 and the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Both waves, long and short, ended with the Russian Revolution of 1917 that initiated a new and different model of revolution (Sohrabi 1995).

Economists have, in the past generation, become deeply concerned with the problem of economic growth. Of late years, as traditional economic models have demonstrated inadequacies, economists have become increasingly interested in the social and cultural inputs necessary for growth in economic productivity. Human, value-related factors, particularly education, role definition, and the place of science and technology, have taken a place beside the more traditional categories of the economist and economic historian. But these human factors, important though all admit them to be, are, especially in historical contexts, not usually amenable to quantitative methods of datagathering. It is difficult, on the one hand, to evaluate and sample such elusive factors, and on the other hand to define their precise role in social change.

Few issues in late-nineteenth-century Armenian/Turkish history straddle so many of the “questions” of the period as does the mass conversion of Armenians in the 1890s. The topic is enmeshed in the much-contested “Armenian Question,” the birth of Armenian nationalism, the so-called “Eastern Question,” and the rise of Turkish nationalism. This article will deal with these conversions by situating them within the larger context of the “Armenian Question” generally. Although important research has been done on the mass conversions during the genocide of 1915, surprisingly little has focused on the massacres of 1894–1897. Even more surprising is the lack of research to date into the issue of mass conversions during the latter period, and nothing has been written based on Ottoman archives. My aim here is to make a contribution towards filling this lacuna.

In an article published posthumously, in the Revue de la Méditerranée in 1951, Augustin Berque, the intellectually accomplished but professionally somewhat unrecognized former Director of Native Affairs at the Government-General of Algeria, examined difficulties in the public management of religious affairs, and the failures of policy toward successive, competing spokesmen for Islam in France's colonial possessions. In concluding his assessment of this thorny question, Berque addressed his reader as in an imaginary dialogue: “And so? Oh, I quite agree with you! The one great remedy is our laïcité, which would leave to the Faith its secret oratory, intimate and inviolable. But [what are we to do] in the meantime?” There remained at the time a tenacious assumption that the empire, at least in Africa, might still endure into the unforeseeable future and that institution of a rational, public secularism as a lasting benefit of France's rayonnement civilisationnel could still be anticipated as an ultimate goal. But, of course, “the meantime” was in fact all the time that Berque and his colleagues had, and it was running out much faster than they imagined. That as late as 1951 the well-informed, scholarly, and policymaking readers of the Revue could still be expected to imagine the relationship between imperial and Islamic authority in these terms suggests an extraordinary capacity for self-delusion, or a remarkable intractability in the terms of a debate that had been near the top of the colonial policy agenda for almost half a century.

Traditional law—Hindu, Muslim and customary—has been almost entirely displaced from the modern Indian legal system. Today, the classical dharmaśāstra component of Hindu law is almost completely obliterated. It remains the original source of various rules of family law. But these rules are intermixed with rules from other sources and are administered in the common-law style, isolated from śāstric techniques of interpretation and procedure. In other fields of law, dharmaśāstra is not employed as a source of precedent, analogy or inspiration. As a procedural-technical system of laws, a corpus of doctrines, techniques and institutions, dharmasastra is no longer functioning. This is equally true of Muslim law. 3 The local customary component of traditional law is also a source of official rules at a few isolated points, but it too has been abandoned as a living source of law.

Entrepreneurship in Africa can be analyzed from a number of perspectives. One approach, undoubtedly the most popular among economic anthropologists and sociologists, has been to conduct group surveys of the attitudes and behavior of small-scale traders and market-stall operators against the background of specific urban or rural settings. These studies have emphasized the importance of religion, ethnic group affiliation, family or clan structure, specialization, and the development of long-distance trading networks through migration or diaspora. Another type of study pioneered by Polly Hill, and since taken up by other field economists and historians, has been to analyze the individual innovation, cooperative effort, and adaptation of traditional institutions involved in the development of export crop agriculture (groundnuts, cocoa, coffee) by small farmers in Africa.

The term “ethnic cleansing” vaulted to international prominence in 1992, shortly after Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history. Popularized during the narrow window of optimism between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Ussama Bin Ladin, the phrase was used to describe events in the recalcitrant states that had not gotten the message that liberal democracy was the way of the future. The product of a particular time and place—Yugoslavia in the contemporary era—ethnic cleansing was generalized into an analytic category, stretched across the globe and the twentieth century, and, on occasion, transformed into a transhistorical characteristic of humanity. In this sense, the category of ethnic cleansing is too large: scholars and journalists have vitiated the term's explanatory power by grouping together sundry events.

In the period 1894–96, when the Ottoman Empire was ruled by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, tens of thousands of Armenians were massacred. Nineteen years later, when the empire was weakened by disintegration and war, some one million persons—half of the Armenian population—were killed with the active participation of the Committee of Union and Progress, the ruling party of the day. The massacres and the genocide—for that is what the second act of violence has come to be called—must rank among the most terrible catastrophes of our era. Two questions come to mind: why did these things happen, and what is there to be learned from the Armenian case? We shall attempt to answer these two questions, keeping in mind that for historical events of such complexity and magnitude there are no final answers, merely more or less credible, more or less convincing, formulations. And given the obvious limitations, this article will focus on the massacres alone.

Knowledge has become a central problematic in recent work on cross-cultural encounters and the processes of empire building. In an array of contexts—from Spanish America to colonial South Africa, from Ireland to occupied Egypt, the American West to British India—anthropologists and historians have highlighted the ways in which “colonial knowledge” facilitated trade, the extraction of rent and taxes, conversion, and outright conquest. This scholarship has demonstrated how these new forms of understanding produced on imperial frontiers facilitated the actual extension of sovereignty and the consolidation of colonial authority: for Tzvetan Todorov, Bernard Cohn, and Nicholas Dirks alike, colonialism was a “conquest of knowledge.” Scholarship on empire building in the Americas has placed special emphasis on the place of literacy in the dynamics of conquest. Walter Mignolo in particular has argued that European understandings of the power of literacy encouraged Spaniards in the New World to discount the value of indigenous graphic systems and disparage Mesoamerican languages as untruthful, unreliable, and products of the Devil. For Mignolo, the dark side of the new knowledge orders born out of the Renaissance was a new interweaving of literacy, knowledge, and colonization in a new cultural order he dubs “coloniality.” In the North American literature, too, literacy has been seen as a crucial element in imperial intrusion and conquest. James Axtell, for example, has argued “The conquest of America was in part a victory of paper and print over memory and voice. The victors wrote their way to the New World and inscribed themselves on its maps.”

The concept of the barbarian in early India arises out of the curious situation of the arrival of Indo-Aryan-speaking nomadic pastoralists in northern India who came into contact with the indigenous population (possibly the remnants of the urban civilization of the Indus) and regarded them as barbarians. The earliest distinction made by the Aryan speakers was a linguistic distinction and, to a smaller extent, a physical distinction. The Indo-Aryan speakers spoke Sanskrit whereas the indigenous peoples probably spoke Dravidian and Munda. However the distinction was not one of binary opposition—in fact it admitted to many nuances and degrees of variation, hence the complication of trying to trace the history of the concept. The distinction was rarely clearly manifest and based either on language, ethnic origins or culture. Political status, ritual status and economic power, all tended to blur the contours of the distinction. Added to this has been the confusion introduced by those who tend to identify language with race and who thereby see all speakers of Sanskrit as members of that nineteenth-century myth, the Aryan race.

Phenomena identified as spirit mediumship seem to be world wide and to be recognizable from an early period in human society. Attention has been paid to them by writers of classical antiquity of whom, from an anthropological point of view, Jane Harrison was one of the most noteworthy. Influenced by Durkheim and by Rivers, she recognized the importance of collective elements in religion and of the need for a knowledge of the social structure to gain an understanding of any particular cult. Robustly she argued, “What a people does in relation to its gods must always be one clue, and perhaps the safest, to what it thinks.” Knowing that her attempt to build a bridge between anthropology and the classics was viewed sceptically in some quarters, she countered trenchantly “It is only a little anthropology that is a dangerous thing.”

In October 1933, two motorcars drove out of Peshawar towards the Khyber Pass carrying a small delegation of Indian Muslims summoned to meet the Afghan ruler Nadir Shah in Kabul. While Nadir Shah had officially invited the travelers to discuss the expansion of the fledgling university founded a year earlier in Kabul, the Indians brought with them a wealth of experience of the wider world and a vision of the leading role within it of Muslim modernists freed of Western dominance. Small as it was, the delegation could hardly have been more distinguished: it comprised Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), the celebrated philosopher and poet; Sir Ross Mas‘ud (1889–1937), the former director of public instruction in Hyderabad and vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University; and Sayyid Sulayman Nadwi (1884–1953), the distinguished biographer and director of the Dar al-Musannifin academy at Azamgarh. The three were traveling to Kabul at the peak of their fame; they were not only famous in individual terms but also represented India's major Muslim movements and institutions of the previous and present generations. Ross Mas‘ud, grandson of the great Muslim modernist Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), had fifteen years earlier been the impresario behind the foundation of Osmania University in the princely state of Hyderabad. A decade earlier, Sulayman Nadwi, the heir of the reformist principal of the North Indian Nadwat al-‘Ulama madrasa Shibli Nu‘mani (1857–1914), had been among the leading figures of the pan-Islamist, Khilafat struggle to save the Ottoman caliphate. And eighteen months earlier, Muhammad Iqbal had represented India's Muslims at the Round Table Conference in London that would shape India's route to independence.

The world exposition stemmed from the specific context of nineteenth-century Europe, but by the end of that century, its practice had already spread to the colonies as the imperial powers organized a number of colonial expositions. The colonial exposition was meant to represent colonialism as fundamental to the progress of both the metropole and the colony. The ideas of “progress” and “modernity” were represented in such a way that colonial subjects would acknowledge the benevolent contribution of imperial rule to the development of the colony. This historical practice attracted not only nations that had already achieved imperial status, but also nations such as Japan that were aspiring to become an imperial power.