Of the many contributions of Max Weber to the social sciences, his theory of charisma has received the greatest attention. It has been applied to Hitler and the Nazi Party, to Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, to presidents in democracy, and to rulers of dictatorial parties in newly formed nations. In addition, the scope of the term charisma has been widened considerably. Charisma should not be limited to supernatural powers but include any kind of human genius and creative activity. Nor need personal and institutional charisma always follow each other but can run concurrently during the reign of the charismatic leader.

Over a century ago, Tocqueville named slavery as the source of the American prejudice against the Negro. Contrary to the situation in antiquity, he remarked: “Among the moderns the abstract and transient fact of slavery is fatally united with the physical and permanent fact of color.” Furthermore, he wrote, though “slavery recedes” in some portions of the United States, “the prejudice to which it has given birth is immovable”. More modern observers of the American past have also stressed this causal connection between the institution of slavery and the color prejudice of Americans. Moreover, it is patent to anyone conversant with the nature of American slavery, particularly as it functioned in the nineteenth century, that the impress of bondage upon the character and future of the Negro in the United States has been both deep and enduring.

Revolutionary ideologies of both the left and the right have led to genocide and mass murders of unprecedented scope in this century. The survey by Harff and Gurr shows that genocides and politicides—killings of people in groups targeted because of organized political opposition—between 1945 and 1980 may have caused in this same period over twice as many deaths than wars. Such state killings claimed up to 2.6 times the number of lives lost in the aftermath of natural disasters between 1967 and 1986 (1987). Similarly, Rummel argues that four times as many people have been killed in democides, or state mass murders, of citizens in the twentieth century than have been killed in wars (1992).

The conflict in Palestine has been the subject of numerous international investigative commissions over the past century. These have been dispatched by governments to determine the causes of violent conflicts and how to resolve them. Commissions both produce and reflect political epistemologies, the social processes and categories by which proof and evidence are produced and mobilized in political claim-making. Using archival and ethnographic sources, my analysis focuses on three investigative commissions: the King-Crane (1919), Anglo-American (1946), and Mitchell (2001) commissions. They reveal how “reading affect” has been a diagnostic of political worthiness. Through these investigations, Western colonial agents and “the international community” have given Palestinians false hope that discourse and reason were the appropriate and effective mode of politics. Rather than simply reason, however, what each required was maintenance of an impossible balance between the rational and the emotional. This essay explores the ways that affect as a diagnostic of political worthiness has worked as a technology of rule in imperial orders, and has served as an unspoken legitimating mechanism of domination.

In an intriguing essay on colonialism in India, Appadurai (1993:316) draws attention to the importance of “number in the colonial imagination.” He argues that previous work on the colonial history of India has focused on modes of bureaucratic classification but has paid less attention to issues “of numbers, measurement, and of quantification in this enterprise” (Appadurai 1993:316). His argument suggests that the capacity to count, whether bodies or resources, was intrinsically connected with particular classificatory schemes such as castes or races. In their related ways each engendered an “illusion of bureaucratic control and a key to a colonial imaginaire in which countable abstractions . . . at every imaginable level and for every conceivable purpose, created sense of a controllable indigenous reality” (Appadurai 1993:317; cf. Anderson 1991:163–78; Gellner 1983:139–40; Kula 1986:120–22). Together these colonial procedures “had the effect of redirecting important indigenous practices in new directions” (Appadurai 1993:316). Subsequent (often violent) events in Indian colonial and postcolonial history, Appadurai argues, attest to this illusion, and the disjunction between the imagination of the governed and the governing.

Two young men met on a quay at the port in Conakry, Guinea in 1946. One, waiting dockside, was Mamadou Madeira Keita, a low-level civil servant and archivist. Years later, when he was a political prisoner in the Malian Sahara, some would argue that he was “the first francophone African ethnographer.” The other, descending the gangplank, was the Frenchman Keita had come to meet. Georges Balandier was unknown then, but would soon become a leading figure in the fields of sociology and anthropology. The encounter between Keita and Balandier was foundational for both men. Conakry incubated a canonical intervention—Balandier's 1951 article “La Situation Coloniale”—that some attribute an ancestral role in a particular francophone tradition of postcolonial thought. Conakry, and Guinea at large, was also the crucible in which a powerful anti-colonial politics were forged by Madeira Keita and his allies. In this particular corner of West Africa, anti-colonial politics and an emergent, politically engaged social science conditioned each other, like the two strands of a double helix, each a necessary yet ultimately contingent element of the other's structure. Though these links did not last long, they had important effects. This article, by emphasizing the contingencies of the two men's intertwined biographies, seeks to carry out Balandier's dictate to emphasize the “concrete” nature of this particular situation in order to understand how and why anti-colonial politics and an innovative sociology converged and ultimately diverged.

Historically, the abolition of slavery marked the signal moment that established a legal distinction between people and property: people could not be property. If slavery had been based on the potential equivalence or interchangeability of people and property, its abolition asserted an absolute legal and moral difference between them. Yet, these dichotomous ways of thinking about persons and things emerged alongside and in tension with a third way of thinking that they now obscured, in which property and personhood were closely linked—in which property tied people to communities, to particular histories, and to personal status; property was what was ‘proper’ to the person. While the trade in and ownership of persons has been broadly condemned, this connectedness of property and personhood has remained crucial to modern notions of the individual, privacy, and subjectivity. Indeed, the story of the emergence of the modern legal subject is often told as the progressive, if inevitably incomplete, process of publicly superceding this linkage of property and personal status, and limiting it to a demarcated private sphere. Such formulations construe the family as a domain where persons and things will necessarily continue to be linked, where relationships will inevitably blur affective, moral, and material claims, and where relationships of status will continue to prevail.

In his groundbreaking Nationalism Reframed, Rogers Brubaker challenges conventional understandings of nations and nationalism by advancing a distinctive, if not innovative, approach to the subject. Drawing on recent theoretical developments that problematize the realist ontology implicitly assumed in previous literatures, Brubaker calls for an institutionalist approach to the study of nations and nationalism. As he points out, nation and nationhood can be better understood not as substance but as institutionalized form, not as collectivity but as practical category, and not as entity but as contingent event (1996:18). He then employs this approach to analyze the breakdown of the Soviet Union. According to Brubaker, nationhood and nationality were institutionalized in the Soviet Union in two different modes: political-territorial and the ethno-personal. While the incongruence between these two modes led to tensions and contradictions within Soviet society, the dual legacy of such an institutionalization, manifesting itself as unintended consequences, eventually shaped the disintegration of the Soviet Union and continues to structure nationalist politics in the successor states today.

This small but extraordinary document casts light on the ways in which slaves and former slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who, though illiterate or barely literate themselves, nevertheless used writing to press for what they wanted or thought they had a claim to. Poor Brazilians generally could not read or write, nor could many who were far better off, but slaves and former slaves are the subject here because written culture impinged on them in particular ways. In many of their writings freedom is a repeated theme—getting it and using it—but not the only one. Occasionally, a slave appealed through the courts to be removed from an abusive master's authority. Former slaves who accumulated property of their own might pass it on to heirs named in a will. Petty commerce and personal business involving money and receipts drew unlettered slaves and freed people into countless informal written transactions.

This essay examines the relationship between Western notions of modernity and Wahhabi-inclined Islamic reform in Ghana and Burkina Faso (Upper Volta until 1984) during the early decades of independence. I will highlight ways in which Western/secular education facilitated the early diffusion of this genre of reform. Over the past decade or so, historians have explored the extent to which the appeal of the Wahhabi movement in urban West Africa, toward the end of French and British colonialism, can be traced to Muslim attempts to find a middle ground between Western “modernity” and authentic spiritual purity. In what follows, I employ comparative, ethnographic, and historical analyses to draw attention to the pivotal roles Western-educated urban Muslim professionals played in the development of this reform. Despite the active participation of these professionals in transforming the Wahhabi message into urban mass movements, scholars have paid scant attention to the factors that drew them to the Wahhabi doctrine in the first instance.

In this analysis of monetary and debt practices among the Rejang from Lebong in Sumatra, Indonesia, I compare the results of my own research with examples of monetary practices from elsewhere in the Malay archipelago and from Kenya. Phenomena like “hot money,” “war-debts,” ethnically exclusive credit circles, and gender-specific monetary practices reveal an underlying differentiation in notions of debt. Not all kinds of debt are expected to be repaid in the same measure. These different debt practices correspond to different regimes of transaction and result in distinct kinds of social integration. I will argue that in Lebong, differences in monetary practices along gender and ethnic lines can be traced to the way Rejang men, as well as the state's power elite, refuse to make contracts the universally accepted basis of transactions.

Dominica is the northernmost of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. Its capital is Roseau. The official language is English, but for most of the island's predominantly Negro population of about 80,000 the language of everyday life is a French-based Creole called patois. Dominica was granted full independence from Britain on 3 November 1978. From November 1977 to December 1978, I lived there in a fishing village called Casse. Casse has about 800 inhabitants.

In the mines of Guanajuato, Mexico, when miners drill and dynamite for metallic ore, they dislodge other substances. Among these are elements and compounds known as “minerals,” sold and collected in their own right as scientific specimens or aesthetic collectibles. These minerals often fetch thousands of dollars at mineral shows and collector showrooms in Tucson, Arizona and other mineral collecting hubs. In this process, minerals move from byproducts and even waste to highly valued commodities in their own right.

Historians dislike nomads. This feeling is perhaps understandable, since our sedentary habits keep us from a full comprehension of people whose prosperity depended so much on continual movement and opportunistic raiding. The primary historical sources reinforce this dislike with their universally pejorative attitude: their authors were sedentary beings also who saw nomads as predators and described them from a safe distance. Why should we impeach these witnesses in the absence of an alternative body of sources containing the nomadic perspective? It is ironic that the very practices which led to the nomads' success have doomed them to ignominy in our modern eyes. Why should mounted archers have preserved archives? Paper, always heavy, would restrict mobility, range, and speed of horses. In short, travelling light gave military advantages to the nomads, but it also gave their history into the hands of their settled prey.

The current intellectual climate is marked by a dual retreat, faltering and uneven, from the excesses of neo-liberalism and postmodernism. First, the idea that the world is, and should be made as far as possible, like a perfect market, virtualism for Carrier and Miller (1998), is losing ground, giving way to an understanding organized around the more-or-less pervasive presence and influence of market imperfections and the need for the non-market to correct them. Second, obsessive interpretative and relativist deconstruction of the world associated with the cultural turn across the social sciences is increasingly conceding to a renewal of interest in material culture—how reality is both construed and created. Over the past decade, the extraordinary rise to prominence of two concepts in particular has symbolized these developments. In the lead, serving as a filter for a highly diverse range of approaches and topics, is globalization.For brief overview, see Fine (2002a, ch. 2; 2002b). Close behind in timing, weight, and scope is social capital, the counterpart in most respects to globalization at the national or lower levels of community.See Fine (2001) for a comprehensive and critical account.

This essay examines the relationship between contemporary racialized subjects in Germany and the process of Holocaust memorialization. I ask why youths from these contexts fail to see themselves in the process of Holocaust memorialization, and why that process fails to see them in it. My argument is not about equivalences, but instead I examine the ways in which the monumentalization of Holocaust memory has inadvertently worked to exclude both relevant subjects and potential participants from the process of memorialization. That process as a monumental enterprise has also worked to sever connections between racialist memory and contemporary racism. The monumental display of what presents itself, at times, as moral superiority does not adequately attend to the everyday, mundane, repeatable qualities of racialized exclusion today, or in the past.

Despite the enormous diversity of research within the anthropological tradition, a common unifying theme has been the “reach into otherness” (Burridge 1973:6), the venture of discovering humanity through the exploration of other cultures. From the inception of anthropology as a distinct domain of knowledge, this ethnographic curiosity has been staged within a comparative frame of reference (Hymes 1974). Early inquiries into different customs and social forms were based on the writings of European travelers, whose observations about people in distant lands provided the narrative material for constructing a plausible vision of their own world. Initially, insights into the workings of society remained implicit, hidden beneath the projected images of “otherness.” By the second half of the eighteenth century, these encounters with the unfamiliar through travel and commerce had begun to generate a conscious desire for societal self-knowledge among Europeans. The haphazard collection of ethnographic information was gradually transformed into a reflective methodology.

Debate over the rise of agrarian capitalism in Europe has established the historiographic chronology, locus, and conceptualization of European development. Proponents of contending schools (the “commercial” or the “political”) have focused on the late medieval through early modern period in England as the crucial time and place of the transformation but argue whether agrarian capitalism derived from economic or political structures (Ashton and Philpin 1985).' Neither school has questioned the common methodology of mapping social and cultural transformation onto a structural matrix. Steps taken by historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists to decenter the European narrative of development have faltered at this same structuralist dilemma.

The problem of entrepreneurship has been one of the central interests of economic theorists since the industrial revolution. Discussions of the entrepreneur in such theory tended to a large extent to focus upon the basis of entrepreneurship. This argument is typified by Schumpeter's criticism of Marx's handling of the problem of primitive accumulation; Schumpeter argues against the rejection by Marx of superior intelligence and energy as explanatory factors in entrepreneurial success.