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.

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.

This paper links memory to generations of meaning and argues that generational belonging mediates access to memory. Generations of meaning create memories because they connect experiences, beyond the lifetime of individuals, with the wider cultural existence of social communities. Such connections can be understood as a hermeneutic and relational process. Meaning is not a factor of causation, but is cumulative, as meanings are recollected across generational thresholds of experience. This paper conceptualizes such thresholds of experience through three lines of enquiry. First, generativity produces new carriers of culture and memory, which sustain perceptions of historical beginnings. Second, generational change is a condition of liminality and in-betweenness, which people work to transcend by mediating fractures and thus connecting past problem spaces to frameworks of anticipation. Third, narrative commitments emerge as memories are recollected across different temporalities, incommensurability, and forgetting. Memory is not the product of one determining generation, but relational, cumulative, and stretched out in time.

Most historians of the Mughal empire currently emphasize economic factors in their attempts to locate and measure the causes of imperial decline in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century India. Recent articles reiterate a standard set of tensions: those between monarch, military and service nobles (mansabdars), landholders (zamindars), and peasants. Existing theories attribute the Mughal decline to the nature of the monarchy, the breakdown of the mansabdari administrative system, and the challenges from newly established regional rulers. One influential analysis points to the increasing burden of taxation and consequent zamindar-peasant rebellions throughout the empire as the fundamental cause of decline. The nobility and the mansabdari system have received most attention, however. Historians have emphasized the strains caused by numerical expansion, inflation of noble ranks, and the ‘aristocratization’ of the mansabdars through conspicuous consumption and hereditary control of positions.

Since the year 2000, remembering the Holocaust and fighting anti-Semitism have come to be accepted as cornerstones of European identity. The flip side of this development has been racialization of Muslims by singling them out as the main contemporary anti-Semites. After discussing the emergence of the concept “Muslim anti-Semitism,” I scrutinize government-issued reports and anti-Semitism-prevention programs in Germany. I show how the recent wave of struggle against anti-Semitism depicts Muslims as outsiders who bring unwanted ideologies, evaluates their anti-Semitism as more dangerous than that of right-wing German nationals, and attributes to Muslims culturally transmitted psychopathologies that make Muslim nations prone to anti-Semitism. Experts locate the root of Turkish anti-Semitism in their “myth of tolerance toward Jews,” and of Arab anti-Semitism in their sense of a “false victimhood” and “desire for power and pride.” Educators focus on each nationality separately to distinguish these alleged group-specific myths and feelings. Efforts and money that go into producing nation-specific Muslim anti-Semitisms depict a new Germany that has fully liberated itself from any anti-democratic tendencies surviving from its Nazi past. It also obscures connections between anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim racism, both of which are active forces in mainstream German society.

Amongst the many problems economic historians have been studying recently in the context of industrialization, the interaction of rural industrialization and population change in a period preceding and accompanying the Industrial Revolution proper is one of the most exciting and promising ones. It is exciting because it enables us to shed light on one of the crucial questions in the whole complex of industrialization: why did some regions industrialize early and successfully and others did not? It is promising because here is a field where the employment of new methods and assiduous labor can lead to fairly exact results. Perhaps this is a point where finally a breakthrough may be accomplished which cuts the vicious circle in which much of the debate about the role of population change in the Industrial Revolution was caught for so long. Was it a precondition or a consequence, or both, and if either, in what respect?

The past thirty years have seen, particularly in the United States, a transformation in the public image of “Kongo,” an ill-defined entity (a tribe, a kingdom, a culture, a region?) on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa. The efforts of R. F. Thompson, professor of art history at Yale, and A. Fu-kiau, himself Kongolese, have done much to popularize a “Kongo” characterized more by its romantic appeal than by historical or ethnographic verisimilitude. Elsewhere in the Americas, the reputation of “Kongo” has suffered by comparison with “Yoruba,” another historically emergent Atlantic identity, based in West Africa. These identities, and the supposed contrast between them, are products of an increasingly complex trans-Atlantic discourse.

Hernando de Soto's recent book, The Other Path, argues that capitalism has not failed in Peru and Latin America, rather, it has not been tried. Basing his case on the observation that Latin American economies are strangled by arcane policies and regulations, de Soto goes on to bolster his point by providing a fresh and powerful look at the undeniable reality of the large “informal,” and thus unregulated, economic sector in Peru. As with any such generalization, how strongly does its explanatory value remain when measured against specific events, over long periods of time? This article seeks just such a perspective. It examines the impact of such regulations as mining codes and mineral taxation on the efforts of Chilean copper entrepreneurs to compete worldwide in the nineteenth century. De Soto may be correct in his contention that today's highly regulated economies keep Latin Americans from being as productive as their resources justify, but to extend this view into the past ignores earlier productive accomplishments, as well as significant efforts at different times and places to cast off Latin America's mercantile legacy.

This paper introduces the concept of “nation-state science” to describe the scientific work of ethnoracial classification that made possible the ideal of the homogenous nation-state. Swedish scientists implicitly defined their nation for Continental Europeans when they explicitly created knowledge about the “Lapps” (today's Sámi/Saami). Nation was coupled to state through such ethnoracial categories, the content of which were redefined as Sweden's geopolitical power rose and fell. These shifts sparked methodological innovations to redefine the Lapp, making it a durable category whose content was plastic enough to survive paradigm shifts in political and scientific thought. Idiosyncratic Swedish concerns thus became universalized through the scientific diffusion of empirical knowledge about Lapps and generalizable anthropometric techniques to distinguish among populations. What Sweden lost during the nineteenth century in terms of geopolitical power, it gained in terms of biopower: the knowledge and control of internal populations made possible by its widely adopted anthropometric innovations. Nation-state science helps unpack the interrelationships between state-building, nation-making, and scientific labor.

In recent years, there has been a growing realization that the contemporary social organization of homosexuality into lesbian and gay worlds is a socially and historically unique development and that the traditional academic construction of “the homosexual” has participated in this reifying process (Foucault 1978; Hocquenghem 1978; McIntosh 1981; Weeks 1981; Plummer 1981; Faderman 1981). This article seeks to contribute to this understanding by proposing a set of structural characteristics seen as preconditions to the existence of the gay world and by exploring theoretical leads, especially Marxist feminist initiatives, to make sense of these structures. The study of homosexuality has been so long dominated by psychiatry, biology, and theology that the usual tools of analysis provided by political economy (construed broadly) have not been employed to analyze it. This essay puts forward some structural linkages which set homosexuality within the context of the larger histories of gender, family, and production.

In Eastern Europe, succeeding generations of intellectuals have been at the forefront of first creating and then demolishing the communist regime. Because communism was ultimately based on ideas (“logocracy,” says C. Milosz), the abandonment of these ideas by intellectuals turned dissidents was a critical factor in the regime's demise. As Daniel Chirot (1991:20) emphasizes, communism died more from ideological exhaustion and “utter moral rot” than from its economic malaise or the pressure of organized opposition movements. The dissident intellectuals, powerless as they seemed to be, delivered the decisive blow when they denounced the regime's underlying ideology as ritualized lies out of touch with reality.

Colonial pharmacists bio-prospected, acclimatized, chemically screened, and tinkered with plants and their parts, hoping to create products to supply colonial public health care, metropolitan industries, and imperial markets. This article's approach is to examine the trajectories of expertise of two French colonial pharmacists, Franck Guichard and Joseph Kerharo, to illuminate the history of modern medicinal plant research. Both men studied medicinal plants as part of their colonial duties, yet their interests in indigenous therapies exceeded and outlived colonial projects. We take this “overflow” as our point of departure to explore how science transformed medicinal plant values in French colonial and postcolonial contexts. Our focus is on the relationship between value and space—on the processes of conceptual and material (de-/re-)localization through which plant value is calculated, intensified, and distributed. We study and compare these processes in French Indochina and French West Africa where Guichard and Kerharo, respectively, engaged in them most intensively. We show that their engagements with matter, value, knowledge, and mobility defy easy categorizations of medicinal plant science as either extractive or neo-traditionalist. By eschewing simple equations of scientists' motivations with political projects and knowledge-production, we argue that approaching plant medicine through trajectories of expertise opens up grounds for finer analyses of how colonial power and projects, and their legacies, shaped scientific activity.

Early in his tenure in office, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto announced that his agrarian reforms would affect the lives of the common people of Pakistan more than any other measure contemplated by his avowedly socialist and populist regime. Almost seven years later, the martial law regime of Zia-ul-Haq issued a White Paper on the performance of Bhutto's government (which Zia ended with a coup in July of 1977), charging that the land reforms were in practice yet another example of that Government's cynical posturing, sinister manipulation, favoritism and victimization, corruption and abuse of power. The irony is that a centerpiece of Bhutto's program for the “salvation” of Pakistan should appear in a White Paper which attempted to add legitimacy to the execution of the popular ex-Prime Minister. A further irony is that Bhutto himself came from a background which could only be called “feudal” in the terms of Pakistani political discourse, and surrounded himself politically with scions of similar families. What was meant by Bhutto's pledge to eradicate feudalism via land reform and what are we to make of it?

Weber, in his comparative studies of religion, characterized millennial eschatologies (embodying beliefs in a just redistribution of fortune through a future revolution in this world) as one possible type of solution to a problem of meaning which he considered central to all religious traditions—the problem of explaining the world's imperfections. Taking this type of solution as his point of departure, he arranged the other types in a logical order. Thus when the supervention of the messianic kingdom in this world appeared to be unduly delayed, a second type of solution became necessary and possible, a solution in terms of other-worldly expectations of heaven and hell. This second solution itself entailed difficulties of its own: when heaven and hell were conceived as intermediate realms of existence, there still remained problems regarding the eternity of salvation (and damnation); and, when they were conceived as eternal realms of existence, there arose, especially in the context of theistic beliefs, the difficulty of reconciling the punishment of human errors with the conception of a benevolent and powerful creator of the world who would ultimately be responsible for these human actions himself. The third, fourth and fifth types of solutions were seen as responses to this problem, a problem which in Christian theology came to be known as ‘theodicy’ or the problem of reconciling the two fundamental attributes of God, universal benevolence and omnipotence, in view of the existence of evil. The third type of solution, best exemplified in the Protestant doctrine of predestination, preserved God's omnipotence and resolved his lack of benevolence by placing him beyond the ethical claims of his creatures.

In 1940, Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, first suggested that the Muslims of India were not simply a religious community but a nation. But it was only after the triumph of the Muslim League in winning the overwhelming majority of Muslim seats in the 1946 Indian provincial elections, particularly in the two largest Muslim-majority provinces, Bengal and Punjab, that Jinnah could argue convincingly to others that he, and the Muslim League, represented the voice of that nation. In critical ways, the elections of 1946 thus laid the foundations for the emergence of Pakistan. For a good discussion of the 1946 elections in the Punjab, see I. A. Talbot, “The 1946 Punjab Elections,” Modern Asian Studies, 14:1 (1980), 65–91. A state predicated on the existence of a Muslim nation, Pakistan occupies a position of unusual importance in the history of the Muslim world and of colonial nationalism, for it represents the first post-colonial nation created on the basis of a self-consciously Muslim nationalist program.

As a concept, ethnogenesis presupposes a category of individuals that are not a group becomes a group. Most accounts of ethnogenesis exhibit two features: they confuse ethnogenesis with the resilience of ethnicity, and they describe the “emergence” of ethnic groups as a response to external circumstances. This paper deviates from these perspectives by adopting a primordial approach, arguing that internal rather than external forces generate group cohesion. I establish three related propositions: First, while the debate between the so-called “circumstantialists” and “primordialists” suggests that these perspectives can be used interchangeably depending on scholarly preference, I argue that a “primacy” holds in favor of the primordial perspective. Second, I assert that this primordial perspective must be redefined, since ethnogenesis always incorporates “external” elements, thus changing and adapting to specific social and physical ecologies. Consequently, an ethnic group is constituted by the content of the ethnicity which functions as “boundaries.” Third, I contend that the emergence of primordial (though adjusted) ethnicity is not a “natural” process but instead requires actors that shape it, and that the initiatives of ethnic leaders are crucial in this regard. These propositions are established through a comparison of British Indians in the three former Caribbean plantation colonies of Suriname, Guyana, and Jamaica.

From 2007–2012, a dramatic upsurge in maritime piracy off the coast of Somalia captivated global attention. Over three hundred merchant vessels and some three thousand seafarers were held hostage with ransom amounts ranging from $200,000 to $10 million being paid to release these ships. Somali piracy operated exclusively on a kidnap-and-ransom model with crew, cargo, and ship held captive until a ransom was secured. Ransom, unlike theft or seizure, requires willing parties and systems of exchange. Ransom economies, therefore, bring together disparate actors and make visible the centrality of protection as a mode of accumulation and jurisdiction. As an analytic, this article proposes an anthropology of protection to undercut divides between legality and illegality, trade and finance, piracy and counter piracy. It argues that protection is key to apprehending processes of mobility and interruption central to global capitalism.

A century ago the phrases “darkest Africa” and “the dark continent” were encountered often in European and American literature. The darkness, one would suppose, was in the minds of the writers, signifying their general ignorance of African geography and ethnography. Yet I doubt if many who spoke of darkest Africa thought of it in quite those terms. For most of them, the darkness was in the minds of the Africans themselves; a metaphor for their moral backwardness and for their ignorance of the higher arts of civilization. African darkness thus contrasted with European and American enlighten-ment—and the contrast provided moral justification for Europe's mission civilisatrice.