“The red, red blood splatters the cities and plains,” cried the national anthem of Democratic Kampuchea. “The blood spills out into great indignation and a resolute urge to fight,” it “liberates us from slavery.” The image in the anthem was not simply symbolic. Upon taking power in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities and towns of Cambodia, initiating a three-year regime of terror that leveled the country economically, culturally, and physically. In this typhoon of tragedy, nearly two million people died, swept aside in a whirlwind of social upheaval.

It is generally accepted that declining birth rates in most Western countries after the late 1870s2 were preceded by declining marital fertility among the middle classes. Though some scholars have suggested that the general decline was due partly to the working classes' later emulation of the middleclass family size “ideal,” no hypothesis has been presented to explain satisfactorily the downward trend in middle-class fertility. The most widely accepted explanation is that the “great depression” of 1873–96 lowered the middle-class standard of living, which in turn led to a concomitant decline in the birth rate as middle-class couples tried to retain or improve levels of consumption and status. However, recent research indicates that the great depression may not have been anywhere near as severe as earlier scholars have implied. But even if the middle classes believed that they were experiencing a declining standard of living, surely many years of supposed deprivation would have been necessary to jolt their class psyche to the realization that the future was to remain forever gloomy. And when some authorities who promoted the great depression hypothesis also claim that the middle-class fertility decline commenced in the early 1870s, before the onset of the great depression, then the argument becomes even more suspect. If the work of other authorities, who have received less coverage in demographic literature, is considered, then it is not the great depression but the 1850s and 1860s—the period of mid-Victorian prosperity—that should be supported as heralding the decline in fertility.

One of the most frequently encountered representations of West Papuan people internationally today is a photographic or video image of a Korowai or Kombai treehouse (Figure 1). Circulation of these images first exploded in the mid-1990s. In 1994, an Arts & Entertainment Channel film about Korowai was broadcast in the United States under the title Treehouse People: Cannibal Justice, and in 1996 National Geographic published a photo essay titled “Irian Jaya's People of the Trees.” Korowai and Kombai treehouses have since been depicted in dozens of magazine and newspaper articles and twenty television productions, made by media professionals from the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Vietnam, and recently West Papua itself. Some representations have had mass global distribution through programming partnerships and satellite transmission agreements, and international editions of major magazines. Recently, several reality television programs have been produced about white travelers' stays in treehouses with Korowai or Kombai hosts. These include an episode of Tribe broadcast on BBC and Discovery in 2005, the six episodes of Living with the Kombai Tribe shown on Travel Channel and Discovery International in 2007, and an episode of Rendez-Vous En Terre Inconnue televised to much acclaim on France 2 in 2009. Treehouses were widely seen by Australian audiences in 2006 in the Sixty Minutes segment “The Last Cannibals,” and during a subsequent media firestorm that surrounded a rival show's unsuccessful effort to film their anchor accompanying a supposedly endangered Korowai orphan boy to a safer life in town. In 2009, a BBC film crew filmed Korowai house construction for the forthcoming blockbuster series Human Planet, and in 2010 National Geographic began researching a possible second story on Korowai treehouses. In late June and early July 2010, photos of Korowai treehouses were published by newspapers in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Paraguay, Spain, Romania, Hungary, Turkey, Finland, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and other countries, to illustrate stories reporting the Indonesian census bureau's announcement that it had counted Korowai thoroughly for the first time (e.g., Andrade 2010; most stories drew their content from Agence France-Presse). In August 2010, production began for a feature-length Indonesian film about physical and romantic travails of Javanese protagonists who sojourn with Korowai in their jungle home; no filming is being carried out in the Korowai area or with Korowai actors, but treehouses figure prominently in the film's early written and visual publicity.

Implicit in the hegemonic “civilizing” discourse of nineteenth-century British imperialism was the assumption that Great Britain was a model to be followed by backward societies. Included in the British characterisics to be emulated was the status of their women. In this article I turn this assumption on its head by arguing that the capital accumulation permitting the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain was furthered not only by primogeniture, as many scholars have correctly argued, but also by a marriage regime in which wives and widows had few rights to property, for husbands were usually sole owners of all marital property and had full testamentary freedom. This arrangement permitted property to concentrate in male hands. In contrast, the marriage system based on Portuguese and Brazilian law was one of full community property, which gave wives veto power in the sale or mortgaging of all real estate and assured widows rights of succession to one-half of the marital property. This system was combined with limited testamentary freedom and equally partible inheritance for both sons and daughters. I argue that, though it was more equitable than the British system, it worked against the accumulation of capital.

To explain causality between ethnic consciousness and indigenous political activism in the Andes, scholars have proposed two perspectives. Some argue that ethnic consciousness was pre-existing; others claim that it was the product of political organizational processes. In this study, I demonstrate that the ethnic consciousness of Ecuadorian indigenous Andeans has been a dialogical work-in-progress that has hinged significantly on the emergence of self-conscious cultural performance. I analyze the trajectory from submission to assertiveness of Ecuadorian indigenous Andeans and compare it with the Peruvian and Bolivian cases, focusing on the ways in which performance and performativity have constructed indigeneity as a social reality. Performance implies a bounded act done by a subject who consciously performs, whereas performativity refers to the construction of the subject by the reiteration of norms. The research investigates three interrelated fields that are crucial in the constitution of indigeneity: the performativity of racial and ethnic hierarchies, the performance of indigenous culture during protest, and the performance of indigenous festivities. Considering that social hierarchies are iteratively constructed and that cultural performance is part and parcel of the political redress of cultural difference, I argue that through cultural performance Ecuadorian and Bolivian indigenous Andeans have been able to undermine the ways in which performativity has constituted them as subaltern subjects. This transformation has not happened in the Peru, where indigenous Andeans still feel that indigeneity is a stigmatized condition.

In the first weeks of the Spanish civil war, there occurred massive popular assaults against the Catholic Church in those cities which did not fall to the Nationalists rising, the Church having been widely (and correctly) perceived as hostile to the Republic and sympathetic to the generals who sought its overthrow. As rumors of priests firing on the populace from church towers circulated wildly, churches and convents were rapidly sacked and burnt. Supporters of the Republic killed religious personnel in large numbers—certainly well into the thousands—while desecrating and destroying church paraphernalia and cultic objects en masse.

The traditional Yoruba city has proved a refractory concept in the otherwise ordered universe of urban enquiry. Most students of Yoruba culture have felt obliged to treat the permanent and compact aggregations of population which were, and are, characteristic of south-western Nigeria as urban forms while yet recognizing that they differ in important respects both from the present-day industrial and commercial city of the West and from the several genres of city occurring elsewhere in the traditional world. Among the first to attempt to assign a precise status to these settlements was Professor William Bascom. Measuring them against the yardstick of Louis Wirth' minimal definition of a city as ‘a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals,’ he concluded that the urban status of the larger Yoruba settlements was in doubt only in respect of the last of these criteria, namely heterogeneity.

The ‘modernizer’ is a special species of the genus ‘innovator’ and one which only in the last century has appeared in large numbers on the human scene. There have, to be sure, been groups and individuals at many moments in world history who would qualify under the definition of the modernizer which I propose to use: ‘one who seeks the transformation of his own society or segments of it in imitation of models drawn from another country or countries’. Those Japanese court officials of the seventh century who tried to remould their country on the model of T'ang China are a case in point, and one could probably find many examples on the fringes of the great empires of the past. But it is only in the last century of Western colonialism and rapid technological change that this has become a world-wide phenomenon. It is also only in the last century that the doctrine of human progress has achieved such implicit world-wide acceptance that the imitated models have been seen not simply as ‘superior’ but also as ‘more advanced’—further ahead, that is, in some imputed scale of linear progressive development. The consciousness of backwardness, the concept of underdevelopment, are relatively new.

This article explores the nexus of sovereignty, violence, and transitional justice through an analysis of the public exhibitions of the faces of communist-era secret service officers in Poland. During the rule of right-wing government from 2005 to 2007, the state-run Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) organized exhibitions in public squares across Poland, which stirred much contention. Was it a pursuit of justice or a call for public lynching? Was it a means to ensure public transparency and identify the “faceless” evil of communism, or instead a political instrument of anti-communist nationalists? In some places, like the deindustrialized city of Katowice, the exhibition even met with devastating attacks. Focusing on this event in Katowice, I use media reports, interviews, and other ethnographic material to explore what the IPN-led state spectacles of justice, particularly the figure of the face and the defacement practices they employ, reveal about tensions and contradictions of “post-socialist” sovereignty; how the figure of the (secret) communist agent has come to facialize both the unfinished reckoning with communist-era state violence and the “normalized” violence of capitalist transformation. I argue that past violence, which is the typical object of transitional justice, needs to be approached in a dynamic and relational manner, with a focus on the conjunctures—how different forms of violence become transformed, reproduced, or entangled across time and space. My comparative perspective on transitional justice highlights the problems caused when its nationalist appropriation becomes entangled with capital's violence.

The French celebration of the centenary of Victor Hugo's death in 1985 included new editions of his works, biographies, an exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris, all that you would expect in honor of his life and art. But Hugo's death and funeral also drew the attention of some scholars, and forgood reason. Beginning on 18 May 1885, when what proved to be his final illness was announced, the newspapers were filled with reports and rumors about Hugo's condition. Following his death on 22 May journalists concentrated on what has been called the funeral of the century. Two million peoplecame to see Hugo's body lying in state at the Arc de Triomphe, and anenormous crowd viewed the procession to the Panthe on where he was buried.

This study examines the conception of nationhood developed by a political movement referred to as Ulusalcılık (nationalism), which emerged at the turn of the century. We focus on ways in which the Ulusalcı movement makes use of nation-building techniques to establish and propagate its own version of Turkish nationhood as one that is primordially secular and patriotic. This is expressed in its opposition to Islamism, Ottomanism, and what it sees as imperialist Western powers. We argue that the most significant technique Ulusalcı nationalists use to rebuild Turkish nationhood is a relocation of the nation's founding moment, from the official Kemalist one marked by the founding of the Republic in 1923 to the War of Independence fought against the European powers between 1919 and 1922. Our premise is that nationhood is ultimately the product of storytelling, and that the politics of nationhood involves the contentious production, dissemination, and negotiation of different stories and their corresponding founding moments. We analyze the story of Turkish nationhood told in the bestselling book Those Crazy Turks, which became the bible of the Ulusalcı movement. We argue that the Ulusalcı narration of Turkish nationhood interpellates a new national subject that is primordially secular, militaristically patriotic, and adamantly anti-Western. These are projected as essential qualities that must, at all cost, be upheld and defended against Islamist, Ottomanist, and Western powers that are conspiring to bring Turkey down.

The relationship of religion and politics is continuously fascinating and elusive, not least because it is rarely posed in a direct way. In stable democracies, incidents which are rather out of the ordinary, such as publishing the Satanic Verses in the United Kingdom or sporting the Islamic headscarf in a French state school, might push the issue temporarily to the centre of the political arena until the categories of normal politics, such as class, region, language or ethnicity, incorporate it or contrive to edge it beyond public visibility. In developing countries, one is accustomed to the more salient presence of religion in the public sphere: for example, the broad sweep of an Islamic revolution in Iran, popular jihad in the Middle East, the militant Sikhs in the Punjab, or the battle for the birthplace of Rama in North India. However, the intelligentsia in these countries who speak with the authority of modern science and the modern state see these events, important as they are, as the expression of primordial sentiments, and indicative of the underdeveloped nature of the people concerned, rather than as the political expression of unresolved issues, ill concealed by the fabric of normal politics and not articulated by political institutions.

Totem: the iconic representation of a specific ordering of plant and animal species. Clan: the representation of a group identity. Totemism: the relationship between totem and clan. From Emile Durkheim and his nineteenthcentury antecedents to Claude Lévi-Strauss, the discussion of totemism has addressed the way in which people classify themselves with reference to the animal and plant world. This discussion began with the observation among different exotic peoples of the widespread practice of arranging certain animal and plant species into a pattern that, while differing from culture to culture in content, seemed to indicate a consistent formal relationship between totem and clan. The iconic representation of so-called nature—the totem—seemed invariably the model for the representation of intra- or intergroup identity—for the clan.

Writing about the development of historical writing in the West, Hayden White argues that “narrative in general, from the folktale to the novel, from the annals to the fully realized ‘history’, has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority.” But precisely how does narrative treat the different forms of social authority? One answer is that historical narrative is a universal form representing time and experience that Western historians have made particularly persuasive and authoritative. The modern historian, according to this view, has brought narrative to its natural culmination by constructing such historical plots as the “Rise of the Nation-State” or the “Development of Modes of Production.” This perspective is put forward primarily by students of European historiography.

Four books with one title—Empire—are the subject of this essay.Simply including the plural would have extended the list still further: see Susan E. Alcock, Terence N. D'Altroy, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Carla M. Sinopoli, eds., Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). I am grateful to Jane Burbank, Antonio Feros, and Molly Nolan for comments on a previous draft of this article. All were published within the past few years, and the interest they have generated reveals a widespread concern with the exercise of power on a vast scale, beyond the limits of national or continental boundaries. Yet the contemporary use of the word “empire” as a metaphor for unbounded power sits uneasily with scholarship on actual historical empires. Many historians have been trying to show that the long-term survival of empires depended on their rulers limiting their transformative ambitions even as they extended their power. The new interest in empires is nonetheless valuable because it suggests that scholars and intellectuals are emerging from their obsession with the nation-state, seen as the inevitable outcome of a movement from empire to nation, and as the political form characteristic of the “modern” era, which some scholars think is now giving way to new forms of global connections. Empire is being discovered in the past, in the present, and in the future.

Since 1972 I have been conducting a study of Jews in Tunisia and Morocco and Arabs in Israel. This study included interviews with stratified quota samples of Tunisian and Moroccan Jews from August 1972 to August 1973 and conversations with community leaders during these thirteen months, as well as my participation in the life of the Jewish communities. From May through August 1974 I carried out field work in Israel, surveying a stratified quota sample of Israeli Arabs and meeting regularly with Arabs from all walks of life. After my departure, research assistants completed the survey. Jews in Tunisia and Morocco and Arabs in Israel were selected for study because they are religious minorities in non-secular states. While they bear some resemblance to minorities the world over, there are additional factors defining their position in society which make their circumstances relatively unique. I have elsewhere described them as ‘non-assimilating’ minorities. The purpose of this paper is to examine two questions pertaining to the groups I am studying: (1) What factors account for the unnarrowed cultural distance between the three minorities and their respective host societies? (2) How do the three minorities understand their respective sociocultural identities? In responding to the second of these questions, some findings from the surveys will be presented.

This essay examines relations between eastern Africa and western India in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in respect to two related sets of problems: the changing regimes of commercial circulation, and more particularly the evolution of patterns of human movement, notably via the slave trade from Ethiopia and the Swahili coast to Gujarat and the Deccan. It argues that over the course of the sixteenth century, commercial relations between Deccan ports such as Goa and Chaul, and the Swahili coast, came to be strengthened through the intervention of the Portuguese and their military-commercial system. At the same time, large numbers of African slaves reached the Muslim states in India, especially in the period after 1530, where they played a significant role as military specialists, and eventually as elite political and cultural actors. The shifting geographical dimensions of the African presence in India are emphasized, beginning in western Gujarat and winding up in the Deccan Sultanates. This contrasts markedly with the African experience elsewhere, where the meaning and institutional context of slavery were quite different.

In a recent essay in this journal Dean C. Tipps subjected the tradition/ modernity concept to a thorough ideological and empirical critique and concluded that the time has come to get rid of it. Although his ideological and empirical analyses were convincing, the methodological remarks at the end of the essay were incomplete. If the contention that we should no longer attempt to revise the tradition/modernity concept is to stick, compelling methodological grounds must be given since ideological bias and empirical inadequacy can in principle be corrected. I want to show that in so far as the tradition/modernity concept is an ideal type, efforts to make it better ‘fit’ the spread of empirical data are in principle wrong. Moreover, efforts to transform the concept into an empirical ranking device or a classificatory system are open to equally serious objections. In order to do this I will first clarify the nature and function of ideal types, empirical types and classification systems.

William F. P. Burton's career straddled several worlds that seemed at odds with each other. As a first-generation Pentecostal he pioneered, with James Salter, the Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM) at Mwanza, Belgian Congo in 1915. The CEM became a paradigm for future Pentecostal Faith Mission work in Africa, thanks to Burton's propagandist writings that were published in at least thirty European and North American missionary periodicals. His extensive publications, some twenty-eight books, excluding tracts and articles in mission journals, reveal that the CEM was a missionary movement animated by a relentless proselytism, divine healing, exorcism, and the destruction of so-called “fetishes.” The CEM's Christocentric message required the new believer to make a public confession of sin and reject practices relating to ancestor religion, possession cults, divination, and witchcraft. It was a deeply iconoclastic form of Protestantism that maintained a strong distinction between an “advanced” Christian religion, mediated by the Bible, and an idolatrous primitive pagan religion. Burton's Pentecostalism had many of its own primitive urges, harkening back to an age where miraculous signs and wonders were the stuff of daily life, dreams and visions constituted normative authority, and the Bible was immune to higher criticism. But his vision also embraced social modernization and he preached the virtues of schooling and western styles of clothing, architecture, and agriculture. It was this combination of primitive and pragmatic tendencies that shaped the CEM's tense relations with the Belgian colonial state.