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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In recent years, much scholarship has revealed how archives and archival artefacts mediate processes of knowledge extraction, production, and representation. Yet, there remains a certain assumption of the archive's transparent availability as a given location for disciplinary work. This essay asks how less visible forms of mediation organize the critical conceptualization and experience of archival inquiry. It examines these conceptual questions through a focus on the 1971 JVP (Janata Vimukti Peramuna—People's Liberation Front) insurgency, a pivotal but now neglected event in Sri Lanka's political history. I explore how an authoritative monograph on the insurrection and its archive have mediated its problematization and enabled its nationalist recuperation. I ascertain the political stakes of returning to the event by locating the supervening context for my own interest in the insurgency, a discursive archive of the disciplinary conceptualization of Sri Lankan political modernity, its characteristic preoccupations, and their effects. I suggest that the event of 1971 offers a locus from which to examine a normative narrative that this archive yields. Recounting how these stakes animated my experience of the liberal archive, the paper's final section asks how different forms of archive implicate distinctive ethical practices and subjects of reading. I pursue this question through the representation and reading of 1971 within what I term the JVP's own pedagogical “archive.” I conclude by reviving a postcolonial concern with the critical stakes of disciplinary investigation and suggest a different approach to the problem of “ethnicized” postcolonial modernities.

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.

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.

The venerable conservative credentials of “communitye” have been challenged vigorously and often in recent years. Perhaps nowhere has its conceptual renovation gone further than in studies of peasants and social change. Where once the solidarity of peasant communities was analyzed as an impediment to economic development and societal modernization, a growing body of work now portrays such solidarity as the basis of revolutionary upheaval from eighteenth-century France to contemporary Vietnam.

The article systematically assesses U.S.-Native relations today and their historical foundations in light of a narrow, empirical definition of colonial empire. Examining three core elements of colonial empire—the formal impairment of sovereignty, the intensive practical impairment of sovereignty through practices of governance and administration, and the continuing otherness of the dominated and dominant groups—we compare contemporary U.S.-Native political relations to canonical instances of formal colonial indirect rule empires. Based on this analysis, we argue that the United States today is a paradigmatic case of formal colonial empire in the narrow, traditional sense, one that should be better integrated into the comparative, historical, and sociological study of such formal empires. Furthermore, this prominent contemporary case stands against the idea that the era of formal colonial empire is over.

Must a viable nation be made up largely of one language group? If this is true, then there are almost insuperable difficulties in the way of establishing a European political community. Recent events in India, Canada, Belgium, Nigeria and several other areas give one cause to think that there may be some basis for drawing that conclusion.

Sectarianism is an orphan of history.This paper was originally presented to the Davis Seminar at Princeton University's Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, in November 1998. I am grateful to the participants in the seminar as well as my colleagues at Rice University, whose criticisms helped make this essay more coherent. That, at least, seems to be the consensus of the scholarship on Middle Eastern religious violence. Unlike recent studies of communalism in India and Spain,For the case of India, see Gyan Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). For Spain, see David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). which have explored the cultural and discursive aspects of sectarian violence, analyses of Middle Eastern religious mobilizations have long been, and remain, preoccupied with the alleged failure of the Middle East to modernize—with its failure, in other words, to replicate a secular Western path of development.

The year 1848 witnessed the first great outburst of German political caricature in modern times. In imitation of more illustrious French and English examples, a host of satirical journals sprang up, most of which sought to spice their collections of anecdotes, topical poems and witticisms with at least one full-page cartoon of political content. The treatment of political topics varied considerably from journal to journal, but generally speaking the tendency is to “play it for the laughs”, and it is not so much to the satirical journal as to the satirical print, which in its frequent anonymity and its lack of editorial restrictions enjoyed a freedom undreamed of by more sophisticated publications, that we must look for really uninhibited political comment. Numerically, these prints far exceeded anything the previous centuries had brought forth and in their numbers and in the opinions they express they provide the historian with valuable insights into the climate of public opinion in the “Year of Revolutions”. Individually, however, referring as they often do to otherwise forgotten events and personalities — who are mostly not named but simply represented — these prints can present the historian with almost insuperable problems of interpretation. Presumably for this reason, they have never, so far as I am aware, been subjected to detailed examination and evaluation. Veit Valentin, one of the few men who would have been fully equal to the task, did promise to give an account of them in the third volume of his Geschichte der deutschen Revolution von 1848/9, but so far as I have been able to ascertain, this promised third volume never appeared, and such information about the cartoons of 1848 as is available is largely restricted to the honourable mentions recorded in general histories of caricature and the two short studies produced by the prolific, but somewhat erratic, Eduard Fuchs, 1848 in der Karikatur (Berlin, n.d. [1898]), and Ein vormärzliches Tanzidyll, Lola Montez in der Karikatur (Munich, n.d. [1904]).

This paper addresses the rising suicide rate in Greece since the economic crisis began in 2008. By 2011, Greek and international media were reporting the Greek suicide rate as the fastest rising in Europe; dozens of “spectacular” public suicides were taken as symptoms of an “epidemic.” In this paper, I explore different accounts of this “epidemic”: statistical studies and press reports on suicide since the crisis; notes written by people who committed or attempted suicide in public during the crisis; and narratives of suicidality from psychiatric patients before the crisis, in dialogue with local psychiatric epidemiologies. These accounts summon three axes of comparison around suicide in Greece: historical difference, defined by the economic crisis and the time before; locale, contrasting the public sphere of media coverage and consumption with a particular region distinguished by its “suicidogenic” features; and evidence, moving from the public discourse on suicide to clinical ethnographic research that I conducted in northeastern Greece a decade ago. I show that each way of accounting for suicide challenges the epistemologies and evidence at work in the others; the tensions and the interactions among them are signs of indeterminacy in suicide itself, taken as an object of inquiry. In the public discourse on the Greek crisis, the many meanings of suicide have been condensed and fixed as a politics of protest. Yet, I argue, comparison among epistemologies of suicide and recognition of its indeterminacy generate a space for thinking about suicide beyond the publicity of the crisis.

This paper is derived from the authors' detailed studies of two groups of nineteenth-century families—eighteen families in Argentina and twenty-four in Chile. The studies revealed such remarkable similarities in the evolution of the two groups that it is possible to propose a broad generalization in respect to the social organization and national formation of both countries: there was, in each country, a three-generation sequence during which a number of families came together to form clusters that became the controlling entities of a region. Their base for political and economic control was either the existing capital city or a city that had been designated as the capital by these families.

In this essay I hope to come closer to an understanding of how Mau Mau insurgents created a world in the Aberdares forest composed of individuals and groups who contested the means for which positive social value could be attained.Mau Mau is the name given by whites to the Central Kenyan insurgency that became openly violent in 1952. Most Mau Mau violence was centered in and around the Aberdares Forest, which separated the European “White Highlands” from the African Reserves. Though not entirely a Kikuyu movement, most forest fighters were Kikuyu, and Mau Mau has often been referred to as a “Kikuyu civil war” because so much of the violence was directed at African (mostly Kikuyu) elites and because many Kikuyu (such as chiefs, elites, and Homeguards recruited by the colonial government to fight Mau Mau insurgents) took an active role in denouncing or quelling it. As John Lonsdale (1992) and Bruce Berman (1991) have shown, Mau Mau framed and informed debates about morally appropriate lifeways among a people who were never a cohesive “tribe” and who experienced radically different living and working conditions under colonialism. The world they created was replete with power, and this power was congealed in certain objects and the ability to use them. Many of these objects were literally stolen from the institutions which made up the colonial regime (schools and offices, for example). They circulated within and among groups of insurgents (itungati) in the forest and in some way represented and embodied the enchanted power of the colonial state apparatus.Most authors translate itungati as “freedom fighter” or “guerilla.” Lonsdale (1992) has indicated that the term literally means “rear guard” and probably refers to the self-conception of the original Mau Mau leadership as the rear guard, vis è vis literate nationalists like Jomo Kenyatta, in the struggle for independence. Yet the circulation of these objects into new social space (Mau Mau camps), whose constitution they contributed to, both changed the meaning of these objects and clarified and accelerated divisions within the movement.

This study seeks to illuminate patterns of refugee settlement in the Bengali Muslim diaspora since 1947, which replicate global trends identified by Aristide Zolberg in new nation-states. Based on historical research and oral testimony gathered from over two hundred migrants in different settings in India, Bangladesh, and Britain, it suggests why some Muslims crossed borders after India's partition and others did not; why most moved only short distances within the delta; and why so many huddled in the shadow of the new national borders and so few traveled to the West. I uncover the subtle interplay between migrants' agency and structures of coercion, and between histories of mobility and of affect, in the shaping of migration choices, and explain how the recurrent patterns identified by Zolberg were produced in a regional context of critical but unexplored significance. The essay explores the impact of nation-state formation on older forms of mobility in the region, and the continuing interconnections between local micro-mobilities and regional, national, international, and trans-oceanic migrations. I suggest that the concept of “mobility capital” can help to explain not only patterns of migration, but also patterns of staying on. I conclude by questioning “cumulative causation theory,” which has inadvertently lent credence to fears that the developed countries of the West will be “swamped” by immigrants drawn from ever-expanding migratory networks based in the “third world.”

The argument that the presence or absence of widespread literacy constitutes the central criterion to distinguish “savage” from “domesticated” society, presented by Goody in a number of works (1968, 1977, 1986, 1987), makes close associations between alphabetic literacy and the growth of knowledge and between restricted literacy and traditional societies. In this essay, I will challenge these associations by presenting material from medieval Europe, in which the milieu of restricted literacy is creative, and from Muslim Africa, in which widespread literacy does not lead to criticism or the revision of basic religious tenets. Second, I will deal with some of the reasons for the vitality of Islamic reform in West Africa, concerning myself principally with the impact of Western education on village society and the response of reformers through the promotion of Arabic literacy. A consideration of Western education and acculturation is vital for an understanding of scriptural reformed Islam's appeal. The latter issue will emerge from the material to be presented, but I will deal exclusively with the literacy debate for the moment.