Recent interpretations of slavery in the United States suggest that we may be entering a new phase of scholarship on slavery as new approaches and categories are introduced by historians, and as anthropologists and sociologists again take up the study of an institution that was of such concern to their nineteenth century predecessors.

Taking inspiration from linguistic anthropological approaches to the work of the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), this article uses a Bakhtinian perspective on voice as contested presence to analyze the post-Mao revival of mountain deity possession practices among Tibetans in China's northwestern province of Qinghai. I respond to recent work that suggests that state-led development processes have intensified grassroots contests over the moral sources of authority and legitimacy in China, by contrasting the ambivalent voices of an urbanizing village's Tibetan Party secretary with those of the village's deity medium, during a mid-2000s village conflict. The conflict underscored a crisis of authority or moral “presence” among Tibetans under intensifying central state-led development pressures that for many carried forward the disenfranchisement of Tibetans that started in the 1950s.

In the nineteenth century the Germany university was the most admired institution of higher education in the western world.1 Much of this admiration arose from the widespread assumption that Germany's universities exemplified the ideal of pure learning, the disinterested pursuit of truth, knowledge for its own sake. German contemporaries saw the university in these terms, contemporary observers elsewhere agreed, and modern historians have accepted this statement of purpose.

It is frequently said that, while historians are theoretically naïve, sociologists are insensitive to the particularities of specific historical situations; and that this insensitivity can seriously affect the usefulness of theory. What follows is an attempt to marry the critical insights of sociologists on a central issue, the state, with the sensitivity of historians to the modalities and particularities of the exercise of political and social power in a particular context, seventeenthcentury England. The result, it is hoped, is an account that benefits from the strengths of both.

Ever the trickster, Tagaro appears and multiplies, disappears and reappears, across landscapes past and present in Vanuatu. His ancient adventures, deeds, and follies are deeply inscribed into the northern islands—on Maewo, Ambae, and Pentecost, especially—in rocks, caves, trees, and the shape of hills. In recent decades, Tagaro has journeyed more widely, by way of the conversations and texts of ni-Vanuatu religious scholars and early ethnologists, for the most part within the context of the Melanesian Mission of the Anglican Church. Like all good travelers, he always returns from his journeys transformed, carrying all of the burdens that are implicated in the engagement with otherness that journeying entails. For the Sia Raga of Pentecost Island (Taylor 2008), such fraught Oceanic crossings have split Tagaro into a seemingly contradictory figure. For some he is a benevolent God, for others a maniacal, murderous, axe-wielding foreigner. This radical ambivalence calls to mind Marshall Sahlins' description of those stranger-kings, so prevalent in the histories of neighboring Fiji and beyond, powerful figures who arrive from beyond society and who rule through acting beyond it morally, but in doing so are eventually encompassed by the people, “to the extent that their sovereignty is always problematical and their lives are often at risk” (1981b: 111). It also suggests the Deus absconditus of European Christian historiography: a largely unknown but always potentially dangerous “hidden God” that lies beyond human understanding of the covenant. In this paper I explore the troubled histories of Tagaro for what they tell us of changing local engagements with that ostensibly “Other” stranger, Christianity's God Almighty, and of the dynamics of sacred power within the continuing legacy of colonialism's culture. In doing so it demonstrates the ongoing vitality of indigenous Gods, ancestors, and culture heroes to the people of the Pacific region and beyond, and more especially their importance to understanding and negotiating social, political, and religious relations of power.

At a crucial meeting during their proceedings, on 9 November 1983, the sixteen members of Britain's influential Warnock Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology reached a key decision on how to base proposals for comprehensive legislation governing this largely uncharted territory. Famously, they chose the formation of the “primitive streak” in the early embryo as the basis for the fourteen-day rule that has now served as the global benchmark for experimental research in this area for nearly thirty years. Based on newly available archival material and interviews, this article offers a sociological account of the ways in which a specific translation of biological facts became the basis for an enduring social contract governing controversial bioinnovation in the UK. In particular, the combined roles of Committee Chair Mary Warnock and biologist Anne McLaren are examined in terms of how a decision, or “iterative settlement,” was reached as to “where to draw the line” using specific “developmental landmarks” to establish a basis for legal regulation. Drawing from this analysis, I offer a broader argument concerning the sociology of biological translation and biogovernance that is germane to ongoing debates such that over how to limit CRISPR-Cas 9 gene editing. I contend also that we have yet to fully grasp the historical and sociological lessons to be drawn from the early histories of establishing governance over new forms of technological assistance to human reproduction, and in particular the formation of the “Warnock Consensus.”

On 11 December 1912, Philadelphians encountered an extraordinary sight in their city's streets. Groups of prominent society women—“famous beauties and matrons … known all over the continent”—were selling eggs all over town. These eggs differed from those we buy today in that most had been in storage since April. Housewives nonetheless flocked to buy them, because they cost only 24 cents a dozen, much less than other April eggs. The sellers, themselves members of the Housekeepers' League, claimed they would not make money off the “hen fruit” that they had bought by the carload, but neither would they lose it. Rather, they aimed to break a commercial corner on eggs that, they claimed, fostered unfair and deceptive trade practices. In particular, they wanted to stop merchants from charging “strictly fresh” prices for what were in fact refrigerated eggs.

How to account for the courtly love complex of the troubadours and minnesingers has been an unsolved puzzle ever since the romanticists discovered it as a scholarly problem. For about three generations, in the 12th and 13th centuries, Provençal and German lyrical poetry was preoccupied with a strangely uneven love pattern. In the classic version of this poetry, the male lover presents himself as engrossed in a yearning desire for the love of an exceedingly beautiful and perfect woman whose strange emotional aloofness and high social status make her appear hopelessly distant. But the frustrated and sorrowful lover cannot overcome his fascination and renders faithful “love service” to this “high-minded” and exacting lady who reciprocates in a surprising manner: She does not grant him the amorous “reward” which he craves, but she gives him what immeasurably increases his “worth”: She rewards him with approval and reassurance. The great lady accepts him as being worthy of her attention, but only at the price of behavioral restraint and refinement of manners, that is, at the price of courtois behavior. As the contemporaries put it, courtoisie is the result of courtly love.

Agricultural or nonindustrial civilization is customarily defined by social scientists in terms of urbanism and a dual social organization. Such a definition is not recent and, like many other concepts in Western thought, can be traced back to the Greeks, to Strabo for example, if one wishes to do so. Another way of considering the definition is in terms of two complementary societal components, neither existing without the other. One component is an elite in an urban setting with an elaborate high culture or Great Tradition based on literacy, and the second is a large rural peasantry with a Little Tradition or illiterate folk manifestation of the Great Tradition. However, civilization with its elite and peasants is also found when cities are absent, as in Mayan Mesoamerica; nonexistent or not vital, as in early Dynastic Egypt; or atrophied into uninhabitable ruins, as in Ethiopia. Indeed, cities were neither numerous nor large throughout the time of Bronze Age civilizations. Cities and civilizations are thus not always related. As shown above, the latter may exist without the former, and in preliterate western Africa urbanism existed without civilization.

Colonial Java represents the paradigmatic case of an ethnically stratified economy. The Dutch controlled large-scale agricultural production and processing and the sale of these products in European markets. They also monopolised the import of European manufactured commodities, such as cloth. The Javanese provided labour for the cultivation and processing of export crops, maintaining themselves by subsistence farming and subsidiary occupations, such as petty trading and handicrafts. The Chinese linked the other two groups, providing supervisors and skilled workers in export agriculture, bulking peasant crops for interregional trade and export to other Asian countries, and wholesaling the imported and manufactured commodities that the Javanese required. Although ethnic monopoly of economic function was never quite this absolute, the basic hierarchical structure was only momentarily threatened in the mid-1930s, when the Japanese began importing their own commodities and selling them in their own stores to challenge the position of both the Dutch and the Chinese (Cator 1936:75–7; Liem 1947:66).

The scene that unfolded in the plaza of Cajamarca on Saturday, 16 November 1532, is one of the most loaded in the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. That day the Inca Atahualpa, head of an empire of several million extending from present day Ecuador to Chile, surrounded by his powerful army, was captured by 168 men. The attack took place after the exchange of a book and words in the middle of the plaza, between the Inca and fray Vicente de Valverde, head clergyman of the conquest party lead by Francisco Pizarro. The scene has been the object of much debate, both in the sixteenth century, when it rapidly became part of Europeans' colonial imagination, and in the present. This essay's goal is to offer an alternative interpretation of Cajamarca, which addresses a simple, under-explored question: Why did the meeting occur in the way it did? Why was Atahualpa there, exposing himself to some dangerous looters, why did the Spanish not attack directly if the ambush was ready? To anticipate my conclusion, I argue that Cajamarca happened as it did because it was the necessary final act of a long chain of improvised moves, which responded to culturally specific political dilemmas. Its dynamic reflected a radical uncertainty common to contact processes, but left aside by most scholarship. Recovering this, I suggest, speaks not only to the case in point, but to the mechanics of power and coloniality across space and time.

Recent scholarship on Zionism has shown Orientalism to be a pregnant concept through which to study the formation of Jewish society and culture in Palestine and later Israel. As this body of scholarship suggests, Zionist self-perception as an outpost of Western civilization in the Orient has played a fundamental role in shaping both Zionism's relations to the Palestinians and to its “internal Others”—mizrahi, literally, Oriental Jews. Indeed, it was Zioinist Orientalism which created the mizrahi category in the first place, turning heterogeneous Asian, North African, and Palestine's Sephardic Jewish communities into a single, supposedly coherent group in need of modernization and civilization, against which the ‘westernness’ of European ashkenazi Jews was repeatedly asserted. What these studies often overlook is that the Zionist ‘civilizing mission’ was initially directed at (east) European Jews. Thus, for many of the “culture builders” who during the mandate years operated in the yishuv—the Jewish community of Palestine—Jewish westernness was deemed a project, something yet to be achieved.

Even a casual survey of recent history reveals that a society's devotion to democratic or egalitarian principles hardly rules out blatant racial oppression. Indeed, the two positions have often been deemed compatible. The democratic ideology professed by Europeans (or those of European descent settled elsewhere) has been drawn from the egalitarian thought of the Enlightenment. As Louis Hartz has indicated, Enlightenment thought on this matter can be interpreted either inclusively or exclusively—equality can be granted to all men, or only to certain categories of men. The seeming paradox of egalitarian rhetoric combined with obvious inequities is often resolved through defining members of some groups as outsiders—not a part of the ‘Herrenvolk’ or the ‘people’—or even as subhuman.

Caste has always generated political and scholarly controversy, but the forms that this takes today newly combine anti-caste activism with counter-claims that caste is irrelevant or non-existent, or claims to castelessness. Claims to castelessness are, in turn, viewed by some as a new disguise for caste power and privilege, while castlessness is also an aspiration for people subject to caste-based discrimination. This article looks at elite claims to “enclose” caste within religion, specifically Hinduism, and the Indian nation so as to restrict the field of social policy that caste applies to, to exempt caste-based discrimination from the law, and to limit the social politics of caste. It does so through a comparative analysis of two cases. The first is the exclusion of Christian and Muslim Dalits—members of castes subordinated as “untouchable”—from provisions and protections as Scheduled Castes in India. The other case is that of responses to the introduction of caste into anti-discrimination law in the UK. While Hindu organizations in the UK reject “caste” as a colonial and racist term and deploy postcolonial scholarship to deny caste discrimination, Dalit organizations, representing its potential victims, turn to scholarly discourse on caste, race, or human rights to support their cause. These are epistemological disputes about categories of description and how “the social” is made available for public debate, and especially for law. Such disputes engage with anthropology, whose analytical terms animate and change the social world that is their subject.

Over the last decades, Europe debates on Islam have been framed increasingly through the lens of cultural difference. In this discursive climate, culture constitutes a crucial terrain of investment for European Muslims in their struggle for inclusion and recognition. Based on two different ethnographic research projects among European Muslims, this essay examines two distinct types of culture discourses. One employs an Islam-versus-culture trope that serves to disconnect Islam from certain patriarchal practices perceived to exist within Muslim communities. The other discourse defends the intrinsic and symbiotic link between Islam and culture, especially in order to elevate the place of artistic practices within Muslim communities. To make sense of these seeming contradictions, I explore the multivalent meanings contained in my interlocutors’ uses of the culture concept by tracing the respective genealogies of these meanings. This includes an investigation of culture's conceptual histories, formulated successively by Enlightenment thinkers, Romanticists, and early anthropologists, as well as by Islamic reformers and their more recent successors. My investigation into these conceptual histories exposes broader concerns about individual freedom and agency on the part of cultural theorists, which have furthermore enabled various claims about modernity and backwardness. While European Muslims creatively integrate various articulations of the culture concept into their world-making projects, I argue that the ontological assumptions underpinning the culture concept continue to haunt and render precarious efforts to demonstrate Muslim belonging to Europe via culture.

At the end of his suggestive political analysis of Nairobi, Herbert Werlin asserts that a major goal for Kenya politics “is to build up the basis for cooperation” (p. 197). Cooperation existed in Kenya under British colonialism; it exists in Britain today. Lack of cooperation at present makes it more difficult for Kenya and Nairobi to solve acute social and economic problems. For Werlin, cooperation requires an educated, public-spirited citizenry, a politically conscious, reform minded business class, and a corps of dedicated professional administrators (p. 197). Cooperation requires a modern social order which in American cities has functioned to encourage “good government”. But this very modern concept of cooperation tells us more about where Kenya and Nairobi ought to go than how they should get there.

The role of regional associations in urbanization has been the subject of recent debate. From the study of clubs in Lima, Peru, Mangin( 1959) and Doughty (1969) conclude that their role is threefold: to act as a mechanism to integrate the rural migrant into the urban and potentially hostile environment, to act as an agent to promote home-town development, and to contribute to the social and political integration of the nation. The evidence discussed by Little (1973) from a number of African countries supports the first of these contentions. However, in an article in volume 17 of CSSH, Jongkind (1974), also using data from Lima, has strongly challenged these three supposed roles, finding that they cannot “survive the test of empirical criticism.” He argues that the regional associations are composed of elitist, well adjusted and successful migrants and that they are definitely urban institutions, not rural enclaves in the city as Mangin and Doughty have implied.

In recent years a number of investigators have been concerned with the antiquity of irrigation agriculture in central Mexico and its possible relationship to processes of social and political differentiation in the ancient urban civilizations of that region. Because of its strategic role in the prehistory of Middle America, attention has centered on the Basin of Mexico in the Mexican central plateau. The semi-arid Valley of Teotihuacan, in the northwestern part of the Basin, has been of special concern because it was the locus of the enormous city of Teotihuacan, one of the most powerful and influential centers in Middle America during a large part of the first millenium of the Christian era. Studies to date have dealt largely with historical and archaeological evidence bearing on this problem.

“Phrenology is of German origin: Vienna was its birthplace, Gall and Spurzheim its progenitors. But it was in France that it acquired its European eclat”, stated George Lewes in 1857. But he went on to declare that it was in America and Britain that the pseudo-science had its widest popularity amongst the “general thinking public”. The writing of the history of phrenology has also broken along national lines. Its impact on America and Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century has attracted the attention of a generation of young social historians, whereas its progress in France has drawn the interest only of historians of medicine.