The city of Lima resembles other Latin American capitals in having drawn very heavily in recent decades on rural migration, but is peculiar in the extraordinarily large number, running perhaps into the thousands, of associations formed by migrants on the basis of common regional origin. These associations have been the subject of investigation by the American anthropologists Mangin and Doughty, and also by a number of Peruvian scholars. These studies are based on the familiar theory of a rural-urban continuum with close integration at the rural pole and a syndrome of anomie at the urban pole. They postulate that the regional associations create solidarity among rural migrants in the city and enable them to foster modernization in the regions from which they came. In this article it will be argued that these postulates cannot survive the test of empirical criticism.

In a recent article in this journal, Peter Schneider, Jane Schneider and Edward Hansen (1972) examine the role of regional elites and noncorporate groups in the European Mediterranean and proceed to elaborate a model that should allow us to understand more clearly the dynamics of social and economic change in underdeveloped peripheral regions. The two areas which they have selected for detailed consideration, and which consequently form the empirical basis for a model of broader applicability, are Western Sicily and Catalonia. Sicily I know only from the literature, but my impression is that it can more realistically be regarded as an underdeveloped peripheral region with the structural attributes described and analyzed by the authors. Catalonia, though, is a different matter, and it is to the Catalan case that I will be addressing myself.

Accounts of first contact in Papua New Guinea have aroused considerable interest over the years (Hides 1936; Leahy and Crain 1937; Nelson 1982; Connelly and Anderson 1987; Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991). No doubt, this has been in part because these accounts have an intrinsic drama and popular romantic appeal (intrepid explorers enter remote mountain valleys and discover vast populations of previously unknown tribes who had never seen white men before and believed they were supernatural beings). More recently, anthropologists and historians have begun examining these sorts of events to explore how historical and cultural forces unique or intrinsic to quite different societies become transformed when they come into contact with each other, a process, that Sahlins has termed the “structure of the conjuncture” (Sahlins 1980, 1985; Dening 1988). Accounts of the period immediately following first contact in Papua,1 during which Australian government officers extended political control over the newly discovered native Papuan tribesmen, however, are usually narratives of European (Australian) colonial history, with little sense of Papuan experience.

Colonial law as an arena for cultural contestation and hegemonic process has displaced an older view of law as a tool of imperial domination. Rich studies based on archival work in local judicial and notarial archives in Africa and the Americas, complemented by a wide range of sources from colonial and metropolitan archives, emphasize the role of indigenous peoples in shaping legal institutions, practices, bodies of law, and ideas about justice. We now understand that colonial legal culture was forged in diverse configurations of conflict and alliance that played out in remote village tribunals and metropolitan courts of appeal. However, the tyranny of the archives persists in that the written evidence favors—in descending order—the perspective of European legal thinkers and reformers, the functionaries of intermediate institutions like the magistrates and lawyers who operated in district courts, and litigants who included European settlers and native people. In colonial courts, the voices of native litigants and witnesses tend to be highly mediated through translation and transcription.

This article analyzes the growing interest in Jews and all things Jewish in contemporary Poland—from the spectacular popularity of festivals of Jewish culture to the opening of Judaica bookstores and Jewish cuisine restaurants; from the development of Jewish studies programs at various universities and the creation of several museums to artists’ and public intellectuals’ engagements with Poland's Jewish past and Polish-Jewish relations more broadly. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, over sixty formal interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish activists, and informal conversations with participants in various Jewish-centered initiatives, I argue that this cultural phenomenon is related to the attempt by specific political and social groups to build a pluralistic society in an ethnically and denominationally homogenous nation-state. I build on the literature on nationalism and symbolic boundaries by showing that bringing back Jewish culture and “resurrecting the Jew” is a way to soften, stretch, and reshape the symbolic boundaries of the nation that the Right wants to harden and shrink using Catholicism as its main tool.

In tracing a discourse history for the emergence and enregisterment of Bozal, a Cuban speech style that robustly indexes the historical persona of the African slave, this paper proposes that such discourse “genealogies” are more accurately reconstructed not through a linear, teleological metaphor of “speech chains” but through a more reticulated, multiply stranded web of interdiscursive connections. Bozal, in contemporary Cuba, characterizes the voices of African deities and spirits of the dead who possess their devotees to speak during folk religious ceremonies. I consider a deeper history of theatrical “blackface” influences on religious performances of spirit possession, a discourse history that destabilizes facile notions of “authentic, African” cultural sources in Cuba. I argue that rather than reflecting direct memories of actual speech by African-born slaves, once upon a time, Bozal's enregisterment began with, and always involved, double-voiced representations of imagined social types—what recent scholarship has described as “mock” forms disparaging the speech of racialized Others. The “Bozal slave” was a figure caricatured for comedic effect, proliferating into a whole set of stock theatrical characters, some of which became focal points for building nationalist sentiment in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba. The lesson for understanding the role of Bozal or any “Africanizing” voice in performance today is clear: we must always consider the mediating effects of metacultural practices in shaping our understanding of the social meaning of speech styles.

This paper examines two intertwined processes that shaped post-war Tehran. One was a ravenous demand for electricity, part of a surge in popular expectations for consumer goods and higher standards of living. The other was the construction of the Karaj Dam to meet that demand. Consumerist expectations, especially among Tehran's bourgeoning middle classes, developed together with a West-centered but ultimately global maturation of mass consumer culture, with the cultural Cold War, and with the shaky post-1953 regime's politics of promising higher living standards. The Karaj Dam became possible when that regime frightened its patron—the U.S. administration that dreaded Soviet influence—into helping pay for the project despite reservations in the U.S. Congress and among technical specialists. The dam was not simply a top-down state (or U.S.) project—it was also caused by and in that sense belonged to Tehranis. I draw on archival and published primary sources, images, and secondary literature to tell a story of society-state and domestic-global interactions that characterized many Third World countries. This paper builds on past studies of relationships between the Cold War and Third World development, and of the transnational history of development/modernization. But it transcends their focus on elites, and that of other scholars’ on subaltern victims, and argues that analyses of Third World development and the Cold War must include the middle classes and, conceptually, social history.

To an historian or anthropologist familiar with land problems in Fiji, nothing would have been less predictable than the urban discontents over land rights since independence, for these disturbances, in an ethnically plural society whose colonial history is marked by hostility between Indians and Fijians, were among the Fijians themselves. During the whole of the colonial period, from cession of the islands to Britain in 1874 to independence in 1970, the coexistence of Europeans, Indians (first imported as indentured labor), and Fijians had been forged out of land law. Successive colonial administrations labored for four decades around the turn of the century to secure for Fijians a precapitalist system of property rights that would become a bulwark against encroachment by a white planter and settler community. The system “by law established” subsequently became the basis for hostility between several generations of rural Fijian landowners and a growing number of landless Indian peasants. By the time self-government arrived in the mid-1960s, Indian access to land and Fijian resistance thereto was the most important issue threatening the stability of the new state, and government-commissioned reports and legislative acts pointed to this conflict of interest as the most significant problem for an independent Fiji. But the authoritative history written from commission reports and based on administrative policy often conceals another history, that formed by the experience of everyday life, where opposed groups confront each other over interests not always visible to legislators and judges, and often less so to scholarly observers.

Public practices for the suppression of witchcraft are periodically performed throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Anthropologists have generally sought to interpret such practices rather than explain them. This interpretation rests on assumptions about what such practices might mean for social actors rather than on the actual social processes which make their public performance possible. In the anthropological view, the performance of anti-witchcraft practices amounts to an expression of discontent with aspects of social and economic life deriving from the terms of Africa's engagement with the contemporary world. Antiwitchcraft practices and the witchcraft discourse of which they are part are understood to constitute locally constructed critiques of social transformation and modernity. But, whatever the coherence of the symbolic logic expressed in anti-witchcraft practices, such accounts fail to explain why large numbers of people participate in such practices from time to time or how such practices become public.

In recent years, approaches to legal pluralism have shifted dramatically. One shift comes from within a school of fieldwork-oriented anthropologists, historians, and sociologists known as the law-and-society movement.The Law and Society Review, and to a lesser extent, Law and Social Inquiry, are the main outlets of the movement. Studies of legal pluralism are published in these journals and increasingly so, since its founding in 1981, in the Journal of Legal Pluralism. Before the turn, law-and-society scholars viewed local, national, and transnational legal systems as coexisting but essentially separate. Criticisms of the inherent stasis of this formulation and its failure to explore interactions between the systems or power inequalities among them motivated the shift (Griffiths 1986; Starr and Collier 1994; Merry 1988, 1992). The new legal pluralism, as it is called, now includes an expanded range of normative ordering systems, often labeled private governance, found in all societies, not only those with colonial histories but also those produced by transnational processes (Galanter 1981; Merry 1992). It addresses the dialectic, mutually constitutive relations of these systems rather than their separateness (Arthurs 1985; Benda-Beckman andStrijbosch 1986; Fitzpatrick 1983; Henry 1985; Vanderlinden 1989).

“Western” societies today are by and large post-Christian, in the sense that many people do not seriously identify with a religious denomination or sect, major public discourses—particularly academic ones—are secular, and Christian institutions and values are no longer naturalized in public politics.My secular sense that Australia is among the most secular societies in a largely secular “Western” world is evidently shared by committed Christians. A leading Anglican minister refers to Sydney as “a godless city” and differentiates “our Christian counter-culture” from “the world's culture” (Age Good Weekend [Melbourne], 22 Aug. 1998:12). In the United States, confrontation and competition from a host of born-again contenders can force post-Christian religious indifference into quasi-fundamentalist rivalry for the moral and political high ground, but mainstream academic discourses remain as resolutely secular as they have been at least since World War I. Given that this period has seen the heyday of anthropology's disciplinary professionalization,George Stocking locates anthropology's “classical” period from about 1920 to about 1965 (1992:93–4). it is not surprising that its dominant orientations have often been unreflectively sociopolitical, even though its usual proclaimed objects of study were, until relatively recently, putatively “traditional” “societies” with “cultures” aptly categorized as “religious.”

As a result of colonial wars with indigenous peoples, especially in Africa and North America, a distinction seems to have arisen in Western military culture between ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’ enemies. The behavior of civilized enemies in battle appeared rational and constrained by rules. Savage enemies, on the other hand, evinced emotional and unregulated violence. Above all, they were distinguished by an excessive brutality they seemed to display towards their enemies in customs such as cannibalism and the taking of body parts as trophies (see, for example, Marks 1970: 246). In short, the differences between civilized people and savages in warfare were especially evident in their behavior toward enemy dead.

The household as a unit of analysis has achieved wide currency in social science circles in recent years. Researchers have shown that in many contexts, both rural and urban, the household is the locus of important productive processes. It has also been demonstrated to be the context within which many decisions related to productive strategies are made and where income is pooled and then allocated. Testimony to the growth of interest in household-based analyses is provided by the recent appearance of a number of edited volumes (Netting et al. 1984; Smith et al. 1984) and review articles (Yanagisako 1979; Guyer 1981; Schmink 1984) on the topic.

Egyptian professional men have worked hard since 1900 to create professional organizations similar to those of Western countries. These bodies—of lawyers, doctors, engineers, journalists, and teachers—have struggled to further their own economic interests and prestige, raise professional standards, influence the country's politics, and—less consistently—to serve the public. They have molded into institutional form the growing self-consciousness of professions which were either lacking or quite different in the traditional Islamic world. The lawyers came first, forming the first predominantly Egyptian professional syndicate in 1912. After the failure of the other professions' efforts to channel the heady nationalist enthusiasm of the 1919–24 years into the establishment of other syndicates, the movement subsided, producing only occasional flurries of interest until World War II. A burst of activity then set up the medical, press, and engineering syndicates in quick succession (1940, 1941, 1946). The formation of the teachers syndicate and other less important ones under the Nasser regime in the 1950s rounded out the movement. This article will trace the growth and sequence of professionalization in these five occupations, with particular attention to the establishment of syndicates, which represented the culmination of long years of gradually emerging self-consciousness. Less important professions will be mentioned only in passing.

What is the status of Islamic traditions of discourse and practice in Turkey as it is ever more self-consciously heir to the Islamic heritage of the Ottoman Empire, and yet has seen such dramatic social, economic, and political transformation during the last two centuries? In recent years a considerable and ever-increasing proportion of scholarly and popular effort has been directed on the part of self-identifying Islamist (İslâmcı) writers in Turkey toward addressing these issues by way of genealogies of contemporary social forms and practices—critical histories of the present. Simultaneously, methodological debates about the nature of sources and interpretation have begun to appear with increasing regularity in monographs, journals, and even dailies. These two concerns with the status of the present and correct method are not solely the concern of Islamist writers in Turkey; indeed, they are arguably the prevailing mode of history and social science writing in Turkey today. As we shall see, informing both of these currents is an interrogation of the grounds from which authoritative, normative discourses on Islamic practice can be elaborated in the wake of empire and sovereign reform on the near-margin of industrial capitalism. At stake are not only discourses, or ‘representations’ of Islamic tradition. Like other traditions, central to Islam is the discursive elaboration of normative judgments about correct practice; indeed, these discursive elaborations are important Islamic practices. The critical work currently flourishing in Turkey is thus conceived by its practitioners as an important form of contribution to the elaboration of Islamic traditions and entails important diagnoses of the status of enabling conditions for Islamic practice in the contemporary world. This article argues that attending to these interrogations indicates how the study of changes in Islamic discourse and practice in Turkey has profound implications for the issues of power and agency in modernity and Islam more broadly. Particularly in the context of Turkey's intensified juridical, economic, and political restructuring in dialogue with the European Community, an understanding of these currents in the Islamic discursive culture of Turkey offers insight into the oft-commented but poorly understood structure of the relationship between Turkey, Europe, and modernity.

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.”

Following a few introductory comments on the concept ‘subculture’ and the likelihood of universally similar responses to the industrialization experience, some generalizations are offered here about a dockworker subculture and the conditions that create it. The generalizations are in the form of propositions, not operational hypotheses—certainly not verified generalizations. They are based primarily on written sources, though the author has conducted interviews in San Francisco and Karachi. In conclusion the problems involved in making this type of cross-culture, cross-time proposition into a verifiable hypothesis are briefly suggested.

Driving past the strip malls of Hollywood, Florida, visitors know they have entered the Seminole Reservation when they approach blocks of modest houses punctuated by the thatched roofs of backyard chickees (from chiki, or home, in Mikasuki). On Seminoles' rural Big Cypress Reservation, chickees dot the landscape as storage sheds, front yard spots to sit and socialize, and shelters for taking lunch breaks away from the punishing Florida sunshine. Chickees also convey “Seminoleness” in some tribal casinos' interior design, as vendors' booths at Seminole festivals (figure 1), and even on the Seminole tribal flag, with its chickee logo (figure 2). More than any other element of the built environment, chickees mark space as distinctly Seminole.