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.

George Lipsitz, reflecting upon a growing body of American studies scholarship on whiteness, claims we now have a better understanding of “how people who left Europe as Calabrians and Bohemians became something called ‘whites' when they got to America.” As a summary of whiteness studies the statement is accurate. The verb “to become” in Lipsitz's assertion emphasizes the importance of deconstructing race in order to analyze it as an ideological and historical process. The statement implies, however, that European society did not also employ unstable hierarchical racial taxonomies. Indeed, the notion that it was in the United States where people defined by a European region or nation of origin became a race, isolates American racial thought from its Euro-American matrix.George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White' Problem in American Studies,” American Quarterly 43, 3 (Sept. 1995): 370.

The most important advance in the understanding of ethnic and national identity has surely been the realization of its deeply relational nature. A nation or ethnic group is not a self-defined monad of some kind, but exists in and through its interactions with others (Duara 1996; Eriksen 1993:9–12, 111; Schwartz 1975:107–8).

In April of 2004, only a few months into my fieldwork, I was struck by the level and variety of doubt expressed by the physicians at the Midwest Sleep Disorder Center (MSDC). The MSDC is a group of physicians recognized in the field as experts in many areas of sleep medicine, especially parasomnias—such as sleepwalking, sleep-related eating, and REM behavior disorder. Dr. Richards, the clinic's senior researcher and a neurologist by training, began the weekly departmental rounds. Generally, these consisted of case studies presented by the assembled clinicians and fellows, but at times rounds wandered into more philosophical discussions or ribald joking. On this day, Dr. Richards asked Dr. Pym if he had seen any patients of note. Pym was trained as a pediatrician, and his patients, at both the MSDC and the neighboring Children's Hospital, were mostly adolescents and young children. Pym had been in Nicaragua for the previous three weeks as part of a volunteer program to provide medical aid to the rural poor, and so had no cases, but he took the opportunity to make some observations on sleep disorders in Central America. He remarked that most of the places he had been to had about eleven hours of night and thirteen of daylight, and with only intermittent electrical lighting in the evening, most people went to bed at nightfall and arose with the sun. As a result, he postulated, most of the sleep disorders that physicians dealt with in the United States were not found there. He went on to blame electric lighting for many of the sleep problems in the United States—including insomnia and advanced and delayed sleep phase disorders—since it negatively affected biological impulses to sleep. Pym claimed that sleep disorders were “rare” in Nicaragua. He said most children there slept with their parents, who attended to their sleep problems as they happened, and so they did not develop into more acute pathological forms. This led into a broader conversation about light and its effects on human sleep patterns, in which some of the discussion revolved around sleeplessness in intensive care units; apparently, Richards reported, many people never entered REM sleep while in the units due to lighting disruptions, which, he said, might account for “ICU psychosis,” as people hallucinated due to sleepiness. At this point, Dr. Blake, a young pediatrician, remarked in relation to the newness of sleep medicine, “We're all flying by the seats of our pants,” to which Richards said, “We don't know anything.”

The Iranian revolution of 1979 presents a case in which religion has stimulated profound social change, rather than serving only as a basis for social integration. Although scholars have recently been reminded of the revolutionary potential of religious commitments, the view that religion tends to inhibit large-scale social change continues to enjoy currency. It may be that, in the light of events in Iran in the last five years, observers of Islamic societies will now be tempted to overstress the revolutionary tendencies of that great world religion. Yet it is difficult to exaggerate the force and depth of feeling which Shi'i belief and practice has generated in Iran for the purpose of the structural transformation of society.

It has been observed by various authors that peasant agglomerations, the so-called ‘agro-towns’ that may number several thousand inhabitants, are fairly common in southern Italy. This pattern, which geographically separates the people from their land, is not restricted to the south of Italy; it is typical for most countries along the Mediterranean.

This article links up the disastrous history of fossil fuels with the celebrated ecology of mangroves. Building on ethnographic and historical research in Puerto Rico and St. Croix, it outlines the often neglected but quite consequential place of crude oil in the Caribbean. Following the construction of what became the second largest refinery in the world, I describe how the imperial energy networks of the United States first came to the Caribbean. Troubling a popular origin story of the Caribbean, colonial and industry leaders voiced a robust critique of the plantation in order to justify the introduction of these enclave refineries. Imperial energy networks welcomed an unprecedented problem to the region: coastal oil spills. The scientific and legal response to these spills brought new attention to the vital relationality of mangroves. Rather perversely, the destruction of the mangroves in the Caribbean—in which crude oil played the leading role—opened mangroves up to new forms of knowledge and care. While many claim that fossil fuels helped cultivate a modern disregard for the natural world, I show how the negative ecologies of fossil fuels also instigated new scientific and political appreciations for the liveliness of the natural world. This story of oil in the Caribbean has implications for scholarly debates around the so-called Anthropocene. Against scholarship that looks at the coming disaster of crude oil as an epochal break in thought and politics, this paper instead describes the long history of acknowledging and managing the disastrous qualities of fossil fuels.

Urban sociology impresses by the vastness of its field, its richness, the collections of data, the sophistication of its theories, and by its failure to provide sociological rules of wide application. Its subject matter does not lend itself to simple treatment and many of its principal theories had to be rejected after testing (yet we still carry several of these like millstones around our necks). At this pace progress is slow and we hold no hope of catching up with the current world urban growth. Urban sociologists must take Queen of Hearts' advice and run with all their might to stay in the same place.

The process whereby political independence came to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in America has been the object of a rich body of scholarly interpretation. Although most of this literature concentrates on the causes of independence, several authors, particularly those concerned with the Brazilian case, have tried to explain also the reasons for the differences in the political evolution of the two colonial empires. Without denying the value of some of these explanations, this essay argues that they are not entirely satisfactory and that an alternative, or at least supplementary, explanation can be found in the nature of the political elites that emerged in the two colonies as a consequence of differing colonial policies.

As anyone who has tried knows, the central problem in thinking about race in Brazil is how to. The almost quantum-theory-like indeterminacy of the ways Brazilians of different skin colors interact has exercised imaginations for decades, from fin-de-siècle scientific racists, to the eugenists of the 1920s, to interwar modernists who promoted the idea of racial democracy, to the Brazilian and later North American revisionists of the 1950s and beyond. The complexities of Brazilian race have not always been in the forefront of these debates. For much of the period up to the 1970s, scholars focused on debunking Brazil's vaunted myth of racial democracy—the national ideology claiming Brazil to be free of racial prejudice (Costa 1985). The effort was roundly successful. From this literature, we learned not only how wide a gap there has been between the ideal of racial democracy and the reality of racial and color prejudice in Brazil, but also the role elites have played in manipulating the myth to defuse racial and other social tensions (Hanchard 1994). Recently, some scholars have suggested that it is high time to look beyond the debunking agenda and take up once again the complexities of the Brazilian situation. Anthropologists have led the way, seeking to reveal “the range of contemporary understandings” of racial democracy and to explain something of its persistence as a tangible “dream” in the face of ongoing discrimination and prejudice in everyday Brazilian life (Sheriff 2001:8).

This article locates itself at the intersection of the social history of postcolonial migrations and the intellectual history of leftism and Third-Worldism in the aftermath of May ’68. It is the first study of the radical political group Révolution Afrique. From 1972 until its ban by the French government in 1977, this organization forged by African and French activists mobilized against neocolonial ideologies and policies on both sides of the Mediterranean. By tracing the organization's rise and fall through extensive archival research and in-depth interviews, the article explores the changing meanings of transnational activism by weaving together the biographical paths of the activists, the institutional and political constraints they faced, and the ideological framework within which they operated. During this short time frame, the transnational agenda that made sense among African workers and students in the early 1970s became irrelevant. The increasing repression of political dissent in Africa and France, the suspension of migratory flows, and the French government's implementation of return policies in the late 1970s forced the group's African activists to adopt a more national approach to their actions, or simply withdraw from high-risk activism. Despite the dissolution of Révolution Afrique, this collective endeavor appears to have been a unique experience of political education for African activists, transcending distinct social and national boundaries that until now have been left unexamined by social scientists specialized in the complex history of the relationships between France and Africa.

Despite a growing literature revealing the presence of millenarian movements in both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist societies, scholars have been remarkably reluctant to consider the role of messianic beliefs in Buddhist societies. Khruubaa Srivichai (1878–1938) is the most famous monk of northern Thailand and is widely revered as a tonbun, or saint. Although tonbun has been depoliticized in the modern context, the term also refers to a savior who is an incarnation of the coming Maitreya Buddha. In 1920 Srivichai was sent under arrest to the capital city of Bangkok to face eight charges. This essay focuses on the charge that he claimed to possess the god Indra's sword. Although this charge has been widely ignored, it was in fact a charge of treason. In this essay, I argue that the treason charge should be understood within the context of Buddhist millenarianism. I note the saint/savior tropes in Srivichai's mytho-biography, describe the prevalence of millenarianism in the region, and detail the political economy of the decade of the 1910s prior to Srivichai's detention. I present evidence to show that the decade was characterized by famine, dislocation, disease, and other disasters of both natural and social causes. Such hardships would have been consistent with apocalyptic omens in the Buddhist repertoire portending the advent of Maitreya. Understanding Srivichai in this millenarian context helps to explain both the hopes of the populace and the fears of the state during that tumultuous decade.

This article develops a theory of interdisciplinarity and examines relations between historians and sociologists in Germany and France over the course of the twentieth century, focusing in on several key moments of interdisciplinary activity. Interdisciplinary engagements are motivated by scholarly problems, field-specific interests and battles, and pressures and inducements coming from states, businesses, and scientific institutions. Analysis of the most productive moments of cross-disciplinary interaction suggests that they occur when disciplines are equal in power and when scholars are motivated by scholarly problems and disciplinary conflicts to move beyond their disciplines. More generative forms of interdisciplinarity are dialogic and processual, characterized by a fusion of perspectives; less productive forms are externally induced, involve asymmetrical partners, and are organized around division of disciplinary labor rather than an interpenetration of perspectives. The most productive interdisciplinary conjunctures result from serendipitous resonances and contingent synchronicities between subfields of semi-autonomous disciplines. It is thus impossible to produce the most fruitful forms of interdisciplinarity deliberately. The article examines three cases of symmetrical, processual interdisciplinarity involving sociology and history. Two of these cases were located in the French academic field, first between the wars, and then again after 1980. The other case of dialogic collaboration between historians and sociologists begins in Nazi Germany and continues after 1945 into the 1960s, leading to the formation of West German Historische Sozialwissenschaft. Examples of unbalanced interdisciplinarity include German “History-Sociology” during the Weimar Republic, in which sociologists’ opening to history was not reciprocated by professional historians and Historische Sozialwissenschaft after 1970.

Following Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), there has been considerable interest in studying gender images and engendered practices that emerged out of colonialism, both during the era of colonialism (Cooper and Stoler 1997; R. Lewis 1996; Stoler 1991; 1995; 2002), and subsequently (Altman 2001; Enloe 1993). Many of these studies have shown how colonized women were subject to the gendered and often sexualized gaze of Western men (Carrier 1998; Doy 1996; Grewal 1996; Yegenoglu 1998), and how colonized men were often regarded as either effeminate or “martial” by virtue of their birth into a particular group. Arguably, the latent ambiguity of regarding all colonized men as effete, and yet categorizing some colonized men as strong and aggressively virile, points to one of the many complex contradictions manifest in the cultural politics of colonialism. A similar point could be made with regard to nationalism, wherein women, and the image men want women to present of themselves, reflects masculine ambivalence about modernity (Chatterjee 1993). In any case, even when colonial discourse essentializes the virile masculinity of various subject groups—in particular the so-called martial castes of South Asia (Hopkins 1889; MacMunn 1977)—the putative masculinity of these groups is ascribed to breeding and latent “savagery,” and is rarely, if ever, conceived of as an achieved status, much less something an individual from some other group might achieve on the basis of training or practice.

For reasons which will appear, the problem of the avant-garde, as presented by Professors Ackerman and Kubler, has caught my interest in unexpected and, I hope, fruitful ways. Nevertheless, both on grounds of competence and because of the nature of my assignment, my present remarks are directed primarily to Professor Hafner's rapprochement of science and art. As a former physicist now mainly engaged with the history of that science, I remember well my own discovery of the close and persistent parallels between the two enterprises I had been taught to regard as polar. A belated product of that discovery is the book on Scientific Revolutions to which my fellow contributors have referred. Discussing either developmental patterns or the nature of creative innovation in the sciences, it treats such topics as the role of competing schools and of incommensurable traditions, of changing standards of value, and of altered modes of perception. Topics like these have long been basic for the art historian but are minimally represented in writings on the history of science. Not surprisingly, therefore, the book which makes them central to science is also concerned to deny, at least by strong implication, that art can readily be distinguished from science by application of the classic dichotomies between, for example, the world of value and the world of fact, the subjective and the objective, or the intuitive and the inductive. Gombrich's work, which tends in many of the same directions, has been a source of great encouragement to me, and so is Hafner's essay. Under these circumstances, I must concur in its major conclusion: ‘The more carefully we try to distinguish artist from scientist, the more difficult our task becomes.’ Certainly that statement describes my own experience.

The period 1905–1912 saw a number of nearly simultaneous revolutions or mass movements in Asian countries, which may be considered as the first wave of a revolutionary movement which continues to rock Asia. The Chinese overthrow of the Manchu dynasty, the Young Turk victory, and the Indian mass movement of 1905–1909 are probably the best-known in a series of events which also embraced smaller Asian countries and groups. The main reasons for their simultaneity were probably: the electric effect of the Russo-Japanese War, a startling Asian victory over a Western Power; the Russian Revolution of 1905, an inspiring anti-autocratic struggle which temporarily took Russia away as a bulwark for conservative governments in Asia; the intensification of imperialist pressures on Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which brought Asian economic and political reactions; and, possibly, the beginnings of economic crisis, which were reflected in Asia. Among these the Russo-Japanese War perhaps deserves to be singled out as the immediate spark, igniting highly inflammatory material in Asia as it did in Russia itself. Not only was Asian pride, hitherto battered by a continuous stream of Western conquests, bolstered by this victory, but the fact that the only Asian constitutional power defeated the only major Western non-constitutional power strengthened the fight for constitutional government as the panacea for internal ills and the “secret” of Western strength.

Perhaps the most vexing problem in philosophy and social theory concerns the relative importance of material and ideal factors for social action. Karl Marx, for instance, with his notion of base and superstructure and his materialistic interpretation of the dialectic process, made a clean break from the idealism of his Hegelian heritage (McLellan 1977:390; Swingewood 1991:62–63). Nevertheless, idealism proved resilient and later came to inform the thinking of both actor-oriented (that is, phenomenologist, ethnomethodologist, symbolic interactionist) and structure-oriented (that is Functionalist, Structuralist) theorists.