In February 2000, twenty years after their victories brought Rhodesia's ruling white regime to the conference table, veterans of Zimbabwe's war of liberation began to occupy some of the large privately owned commercial farms that controlled Zimbabwe's most valuable land. During the next few weeks, thousands of people followed suit: by May, nearly a third of the country's large-scale commercial farms had been seized (New York Times, 27 May 2000; Moyo 1998). Armed with a court order, landowners demanded that the “squatters” be evicted, but the police demurred, and President Mugabe refused to order them to carry out the court's instructions. A few weeks earlier, voters had rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have strengthened the President's powers to seize white-owned land, without compensation, for redistribution to land-hungry blacks. Angry over the deteriorating economy, rising levels of corruption, and Zimbabwe's costly involvement in Congo's civil war, a majority of those who voted were unwilling to increase the President's powers, even if they supported the cause of land reform. When the veterans took matters into their own hands, Mugabe lost no time in associating with their cause. He, in turn, was accused by Western governments, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, and the international press, of sacrificing the rule of law in order to save his own political skin.

A Favourable Horoscope: ‘If a son is born when the Sun is in the terms of Mercury, he will be successful and have great power … He will be brave and tall and will acquire property and moreover will be married to his own sister and will have children by her.’

Central to much recent work in both anthropology and history is the concept of agency. This essay examines some problems with this concept that arise when we look for it across historical and ethnographic contexts. This study focuses on how agency is expressed in differences among the powers that people impute to spoken words and the kinds of subjects to which they attribute the authorship of words. In this article I want in particular to show how attention to the intersections between speech practices and speakers' beliefs about language can shed light on the historical and cultural worlds in which those speakers act.

The problem of agency is often raised by anthropologists and historians in the effort to be inclusive, to take account of “all the players in the game” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991:9). Furthermore, the question of agency increasingly reflects an ethical imperative. As Talal Asad has recently remarked, “The doctrine of action has become essential to our recognition of other people's humanity” (1996:272). The anthropologist's quest for local agency is often portrayed as an antidote to earlier assumptions about tradition-bound natives and timeless structures or to triumphalist narratives of empire and modernity.

The problem with Prakash, O'Hanlon and Washbrook conclude, is that he tries to ride two horses at once—one Marxist, the other poststructuralist deconstructionist. ‘But one of these may not be a horse that brooks inconstant riders. …’ So, they say we must choose only one to ride on, not both because the two, in their view, have opposing trajectories. One advances historical understanding and progressive change, the other denies history and perpetuates a retrogressive status quo. Posed in this manner, the choices involve more than a dispute over which paradigm provides a better understanding of the histories of the third world and India. At stake is the writing of history as political practice, and the only safe bet, from their point of view, is Marxism (of their kind), not the endless deferral and nihilism of deconstruction and postmodernism. Having set up this opposition, O'Hanlon and Washbrook's either/or logic has no place for the productive tension that the combination of Marxist and deconstructive approaches generates. They are uncomfortable with those recent writings that employ Marxist categories to analyze patterns of inequalities and exploitation while also using deconstructive approaches to contend that Marxism is part of the history that institutionalized capitalist dominance—approaches which argue that although Marxism can rightfully claim that it historicizes the emergence of capitalism as a world force, it cannot disavow its history as a nineteenth-century European discourse that universalized the mode-of-production narrative.

Looking at any wall map or atlas, we see a world composed of states. The earth's surface is divided into distinct state territories. Each is demarcated by a linear boundary, an edge dividing one sovereignty from the next. The division is accentuated when each territory is blocked out in a separate color from neighboring states, implying that its interior is a homogeneous space, traversed evenly by state sovereignty. Our world is a jigsaw of territorial states, and we take this picture for granted. Thus our historical atlases show medieval Christendom also divided into demarcated and homogeneous territories, though perhaps less neatly (see, for example, McEvedy 1992). Only the configuration is different. Familiar to us, such a depiction would have been utterly unknown to people at the time, who rarely used maps to represent geographical information and did not imagine states (or rather realms) as enclosed spaces. The transformation of their world into ours—the way the state was put on the map—is the subject of this essay.

Sitting on the banks of the shallow riverine waters separating the northern border towns of Dajabón of the Dominican Republic and Ouanaminthe of Haiti, one can see children wade, market women wash, and people pass from one nation to another. They are apparently impervious to the official meaning of this river as a national boundary that rigidly separates these two contiguous Caribbean island nations. Just as the water flows, so do people, goods, and merchandise between the two countries, even as the Dominican border guards stationed on a small mound above the river watch. The ironies of history lie here, as well as the poetics of its remembrance. This river is called El Masacre, a name which recalls the 1937 Haitian massacre, when the water is said to have run scarlet red from the blood of thousands of Haitians killed by machetes there by soldiers under the direction of the Dominican dictator, Rafael M. Trujillo (1930–61).

The Ottoman Empire was the last great Muslim world empire to survive into the age of modernity. The Ottoman state, together with its contemporaries, Habsburg Austria and Romanov Russia, was engaged in a struggle for survival in a world where it no longer made the rules. As the nineteenth century approached its last quarter, these rules were increasingly determined by the successful and aggressive world powers, Britain, France, and after 1870, Germany. As external pressure on the ottoman Empire mounted from the second half of the century, the Ottoman center found itself obliged to squeeze manpower resources it had hitherto not tapped. Particularly nomadic populations, armed and already possessing the military skills required, now became a primary target for mobilization. This study is an attempt to come to grips with the “civilizing mission” mentality of the late Ottomans and their “project of modernity” as reflected in their provincial administration. It is the view of this writer that sometime in the nineteenth century the Ottoman elite adopted the mindset of their enemies, the arch-imperialists, and came to conceive of its periphery as a colonial setting.My definition of colonialism here closely follows the Leninist position as in “Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism.” In my view, this is still one of the best and most succinct definitions of imperialism. After showing how the partition of the word accelerated in the 1880s, Lenin concludes, “It is beyond doubt therefore, that capitalism's transition to the stage of monopoly capitalism, to finance capital, isconnected with the intensification of the struggle for the partitioning of the world.” V. Lenin, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1977), 224.

This paper was prompted by a personal question that has puzzled many former Soviet people, myself included, since the late 1980s: How to make sense of the sudden evaporation of the colossal and seemingly monolithic Soviet system and way of life, in which we grew up and lived? What was it about the Soviet system that made its “collapse” appear completely unimaginable and surprisingly fast not only to most Western Sovietologists but also to most Soviet people? The experience of the unexpectedness and abruptness of the collapse is reflected in diverse materials I have collected in Russia in the past ten years. This question is not about the “causes” for the collapse but about its “conditions of possibility”: what conditions made the collapse possible while keeping that possibility invisible? To begin addressing this question, we must analyze how the particular “culture” of Soviet socialism invisibly created the conditions for the collapse and at the same time rendered it unexpected. The period when these conditions emerged, the approximately thirty years preceding the beginning of perestroika (the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s), I shall call Soviet “Late Socialism.”

State naming practices and local, customary naming practices are strikingly different. Each set of practices is designed to make the human and physical landscape legible, by sharply identifying a unique individual, a household, or a singular geographic feature. Yet they are each devised by very distinct agents for whom the purposes of identification are radically different. Purely local, customary practices, as we shall see, achieve a level of precision and clarity--often with impressive economy--perfectly suited to the needs of knowledgeable locals. State naming practices are, by contrast, constructed to guide an official ÔstrangerÕ in identifying unambiguously persons and places, not just in a single locality, but in many localities using standardized administrative techniques.

Perhaps the fiercest conflict within the social sciences today is one that is not even articulated as a recognizable “debate.” Nevertheless, this conflict has generated bitter divisions between academics who only a decade ago might have stood together on the left or the right and has forged equally strange alliances. I am referring, of course, to the split between epistemological and ontological positions which are usually described as radical constructivism and realist positivism. The recent debate provoked by Alan Sokal's article in Social TextSee Alan D. Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries—Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text (Spring-Summer 1996), 217–52; and idem, “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca (May-June 1996), 62–64. The key response is Stanley Fish's article, “Professor Sokal's Bad Joke,” in The New York Times (Opinion–Editorial page, May 21, 1996); see also the responses in the July-August 1996 issue of Lingua Franca; Michael Albert, “Science, Post Modernism, and the Left,” in Z Magazine (July-August 1996); Steven Weinberg, “Sokal's Hoax,” New York Review of Books (August 8, 1996), 11–15; and Tom Frank, “Textual Reckoning,” In These Times (May 27, 1996). I am grateful to Michael Rosenfeld for references to the latter two pieces. brought into sharp focus the growing sense of distrust and anger that divides these academic camps. And, yet, the heterogeneity of each supposed grouping suggests that the dichotomous model masks what is actually a much more complex, multi-dimensional field. On the one hand we find a motley assemblage of positions variously characterized as constructivism, culturalism, neo-Kantian idealism, and postmodernism; the other pole throws together a set of even stranger bedfellows, including rational choice theorists, survey researchers, and traditional historians alongside “realist” philosophers of various stripes.

In this essay I offer a thesis about secularism as a modern historical phenomenon, through a consideration of state politics, law, and religion in contemporary Egypt. Egypt seems hardly a place for theorizing about modern secularity. For it is a state where politics and religion seem to constantly blur together, giving rise to continual conflict, and it thus seems, at best, only precariously secular. These facts, however, go to the heart of my thesis: that secularism itself incessantly blurs together religion and politics, and that its power relies crucially upon the precariousness of the categories it establishes. Egypt's religious-political ambiguities, I argue, are expressions of deeper indeterminacies at the very foundation of secular power. In what follows, I elaborate my thesis, how it differs from other, similar sounding arguments, and the shift in perspective on secularism that it entails. I begin with a famous Egyptian apostasy case.

The thesis underlying this essay may be summarized as follows: The modern European concepts frontier, state and nation are interdependent but they are not necessarily applicable to all state-like political organisations everywhere. In default of adequate documentary materials most historians of South-East Asia have tended to assume that the states with which they have to deal were Nation-States occupied by named “Peoples” and separated from each other by precise political frontiers. The inferences that have been made on the basis of these initial assumptions sometimes conflict with sociological common sense. It is not the anthropologist's task to write history, but if history is to be elaborated with the aid of inspired guesses then the special knowledge of the anthropologist becomes relevant so as to point up the probabilities.

The politics of meritocracy at the Indian Institutes of Technology illuminates the social life of caste in contemporary India. I argue that the IIT graduate's status depends on the transformation of privilege into merit, or the conversion of caste capital into modern capital. Analysis of this process calls for a relational approach to merit. My ethnographic research on the southeastern state of Tamilnadu, and on IIT Madras located in the state capital of Chennai, illuminates claims to merit, not simply as the transformation of capital but also as responses to subaltern assertion. Analyzing meritocracy in relation to subaltern politics allows us to see the contextual specificity of such claims: at one moment, they are articulated through the disavowal of caste, at another, through caste affiliation. This marking and unmarking of caste suggests a rethinking of meritocracy, typically assumed to be a modernist ideal that disclaims social embeddedness and disdains the particularisms of caste and race. I show instead that claims to collective belonging and to merit are eminently commensurable, and become more so when subaltern assertion forces privilege into the foreground. Rather than the progressive erasure of ascribed identities in favor of putatively universal ones, we are witnessing the re-articulation of caste as an explicit basis for merit and the generation of newly consolidated forms of upper-casteness.

The study of education can be to complex societies what the study of religion has been to societies variously characterized by anthropologists as ‘simple,’ ‘cold’ or ‘elementary.’ Recognizing this potential, sociologists and social anthropologists have recently indicated a renewed interest in the study of how schooling, especially higher education, implicitly defines and transmits a culturally valued cognitive style, ‘a set of basic, deeply interiorized master-patterns’ of language and thought on the basis of which other patterns are subsequently acquired (Bourdieu 1967: 343; see also Cole, Gay, Glick and Sharp 1971).

I want to begin this paper with two simple points. One is that nations are established by constructing a core or mainstream—the essential, natural, soul of the nation, as it is claimed. The other is that minorities are constituted along with the nation—for they are the means of constituting national majorities or mainstreams. Nations, and nationalisms, are established by defining boundaries. However, these are not always—or perhaps, ever—sharply or easily defined. Nationalisms have therefore commonly moved along the path of identifying the core or mainstream of the nation. Alongside this emerge notions of minorities, marginal communities, or elements,Brackette F. Williams makes the point as follows in her discussion of ethnicity in the context of territorial and cultural nationalism. Like tribe, race, or barbarian, she notes, the label ethnicity identifies those who are at the borders of empire or nation. “Within putatively homogenous nation-states, this border is an ideologically produced boundary between ‘mainstream' and peripheral categorical units of this kind of ‘imagined' social order.” Williams, ‘A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation across Ethnic Terrain,' Annual Review of Anthropology, 18 (1989), 439. the fuzzy edges and grey areas around which the question of boundaries—geographical, social, and cultural—will be negotiated or fought over.

It is increasingly fashionable for anthropologists to castigate themselves (or at least to castigate other anthropologists) for failing to take into account the larger or global processes that affect the small communities they study. We accuse ourselves, for example, of treating peasant communities as if they were primitive isolates and of failing to consider the external forces that created those communities and that cause them to operate the way they do. While this accusation may be warranted for the earliest work on peasant communities, I suggest that for quite some time now the anthropological perspective regarding these communities has shifted. In fact, I will argue here that many anthropologists have been all too ready to accept global views of peasant communities and social relations without proper consideration of the interplay between local and global processes.

This study presents an analysis of Malay peasant resistance to the Islamic zakat today and of French peasant resistance earlier to the Christian tithe, but it is offered with a larger argument in mind. Its purpose is to show that a vast range of what counts—or should count—as peasant resistance involves no overt protest and requires little or no organization.

The Latin-American Wars of Independence realized the long-standing hope of the criollo gentry to rid themselves of Spanish limitations on their economic and political activities. From the beginning of the New World colonies, the Spanish rulers had labored diligently to check the aspirations of the colonial gentry by limiting their access to both land and status. Grants of encomienda had yielded up to the colonists use rights to Indian labor and produce, but not the ownership of land. At the same time, the Crown had curtailed the ability of criollos to obtain titles of nobility. These limitations had been supported by the prowess of Spanish arms, effective perhaps even more in keeping potential competitors at bay in Europe than in exercising viable military control in the New World. The failure of this ultimate means of control during the Napoleonic wars finally called into question also continued Spanish dominance over the American colonies.