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.

If the expansion and consolidation of state power simply undermined, homogenized, and ultimately destroyed the distinctive societies and ethnic groups in its grasp, as various acculturation or melting-pot theories would have it, the world would long ago have run out of its supply of diverse ways of life, a supply presumably created in the dawn of human time. To the contrary, state power must not only destroy but also generate cultural differentiation—and do so not only between different nation states, and between states and their political and economic colonies, but in the center of its grasp as well. The historical career of ethnic peoples can thus best be understood in the context of forces that both give a people birth and simultaneously seek to take their lives.

How do we conceive of law if litigation does not aim to settle conflict, if it is a means to perpetuate and obscure rather than resolve disputes? In this essay, I shall demonstrate the power of an unsettling norm: The Brazilian legal system aims neither to solve land conflicts justly nor to decide their legal merits through adjudication. My argument stresses intention and norm because land law in Brazil is so confusing, indecisive, and dysfunctional in its own terms that one suspects that the cause of these characteristics is not incompetence or corruption alone but rather the force of a set of intentions concerning its construction and application different from those aimed at resolution. Thus, I argue that Brazilian law regularly produces unresolvable procedural and substantive complexity in land conflicts; that this jural-bureaucratic irresolution dependably initiates extrajudicial solutions; and that these political impositions inevitably legalize usurpations of one sort or another. In short, land law in Brazil promotes conflict, not resolution, because it sets the terms through which encroachments are reliably legalized. It is thus an instrument of calculated disorder by means of which illegal practices produce law and extralegal solutions are smuggled into the judicial process. In this paradoxical context, law itself is a means of manipulation, complication, stratagem, and violence by which all parties—public and private, dominant and subaltern—further their interests. It therefore defines an arena of conflict in which distinctions between legal and illegal are temporary and their relations unstable.

Throughout the vast literature on British and general imperialism, the emphasis is largely upon the winning, then subsequent loss, of political control by the imperial power in colonial settings. Consequently, debate about the accession to that power has revolved largely about the great triad of considerations: economic necessity, strategic calculation, and civilising zeal. Similarly, discussion of emergent nationalist movements has hinged upon remarkably similar lines: Was the leadership of those movements motivated solely by ideologically inspired desires for independence, by the ambition to command the new sources of economic wealth developed under imperial rule, or by a simple thrust for political power to protect other interests? These are generalisations certainly, but, to take India as a case in point, much of the modern historiography has been concerned to demonstrate either how Britain “lost” or how the Indian National Congress “won” that power. But among such generalisations upon the British imperial experience, one interesting question has gone begging.

Although there has been a dramatic broadening of the definition of social protest in recent years to include collective behavior that was once dismissed as criminal, irrational, or insignificant, our attention has continued to be focused on movements involving direct, often violent, confrontations between the wielders of power and dissident groups. Avoidance protest, by which dissatisfied groups seek to attenuate their hardships and express their discontent through flight, sectarian withdrawal, or other activities that minimize challenges to or clashes with those whom they view as their oppressors, has at best remained a secondary concern of students of social protest. Although specific forms of avoidance protest, such as the flight of slaves in the plantation zones of the Americas or the migration or serfs to the towns of medieval Europe and peasants to the frontiers of Tsarist Russia, have merited a prominent place in the historical literature on some societies and time periods, avoidance protest has rarely been systematically analyzed as a phenomenon in itself. There have been few detailed studies of the diverse forms which avoidance protest may take and the ways in which these are shaped by the sociopolitical contexts in which they develop. This neglect is serious because in many societies and time periods (perhaps in most in the preindustrial era), modes of protest oriented to avoidance rather than confrontation have been the preferred and most frequently adopted means of resisting oppression and expressing dissatisfaction.

This paper considers one aspect of the relationship between social organization and certain sorts of economic activity, using a particular setting, the internal market system in peasant societies (Mintz, 1959), as a frame of reference. The argument proceeds from the well-known fact that, in many of these market systems, much or even most of the distributive activity is carried on by women, and these women often engage in commerce more or less independently of the economic undertakings of their husbands. In such cases, husband and wife participate in distinguishably different risk structures, an arrangement having particular relevance to the nature of family life and culturally determined sex-role differentiation. Furthermore, since husbands and wives in such cases may carry on not only independent but also different economic pursuits, it would not be surprising if some of the attitudes related to the kind of economic activity also differed along sexual lines. Productive and distributive undertakings require different skills; probably they evoke different temperamental responses as well. One might claim that the tests of success for the middleman are different in character from the tests of success for the agricultural producer; those successful in one pursuit are not necessarily those most likely to succeed in the other. Of course this contention does not preclude some optimum combination of skills; many producers alsoengage successfully in intermediary and distributive activities, and some of the so-called underdeveloped world's most skilled traders began as agricultural producers (Bauer, 1957: 71; Bauer and Yamey, 1957: 104–5).

The major metropolis in almost every newly industrializing nation is not a single unified city but, in fact, two quite different cities, physically juxtaposed but architecturally and socially distinct. Many observers have noted this in non-western countries throughout the world. These dual cities have usually been a legacy from the colonial past and, while increasing national autonomy and “nativization” are tending slowly to blend the two patterns, many generations may be required before the bifurcations drawn in the nineteenth century have been erased.

There is a great deal of confusion about the history of women's work outside the home and about the origin and meaning of women's traditional place within the home. Most interpretations of either of these questions depend on assumptions about the other. Usually, women at home in any time period are assumed to be non-productive, the antithesis of women at work. In addition, most general works on women and the family assume that the history of women's employment, like the history of women's legal and political rights, can be understood as a gradual evolution from a traditional place at home to a modern position in the world of work. Some historians cite changes in employment opportunities created by industrialization as the precursors of legal emancipation. Others stress political rights as the source of improved economic status. In both cases, legal-political and economic ‘emancipation’ usually are linked to changes in cultural values. Thus William Goode, whose World Revolution and Family Patterns makes temporal and geographic comparisons of family patterns, remarks on what he calls ‘the statistically unusual status of western women today, that is their high participation in work outside of the home’.

In 1987, there was an uprising of sorts in the remote interior headwaters of Sarawak, East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo. In March of that year, Penan hunter-gatherers in the Baram and Limbang Districts of Sarawak suddenly erected more than a dozen blockades against logging companies. Since that time, scores of Penan have been arrested for resisting the activities of these companies by erecting more blockades and engaging in other acts of civil disobedience. In doing so, they have achieved a great deal of international reknown among environmentalists, indigenous rights activists, and the Euramerican public at large. Their story has received broad international media coverage, and scores of celebrities, from politician Al Gore and musician Jerry Garcia to Prince Charles, have spoken out on their behalf. The Malaysian government has responded to these efforts with a vigorous media campaign of its own and, in the process, has come to play an increasingly visible role as a critic of what is portrayed as neocolonialist attempts at control over environmental affairs in the South.

Recently I have been examining the international campaign that emerged around the Penan issue in the late 1980s. In a series of interviews with European and American environmentalists, Penan resistance to logging was repeatedly cited as an important influence in the growth of movements promoting rainforest preservation and indigenous rights. Virtually everyone describes the Penan as exemplars of how an indigenous people can assert control over their own destiny and, in the process, halt the loss of global biodiversity. In short, the Penan have become an icon of resistance for environmentalists worldwide.

Few countries have been as frequently described in terms of national character as Turkey. Even the earliest observers of the Ottoman Empire appear anxious to set their findings into some generalized formula of the Turkish ethos. The term used to refer to these attempts at national stereo-typing in the lingua franca of the Levant was Alia Turca behavior, an expression which has survived into modern Turkish.

Although often associated with colonial times, tropical plantations growing industrial crops such as rubber, sugar, and oil palm are once again expanding. They employ hundreds of thousands of workers, who still use remarkably basic tools. Flagging colonial continuities, labor activists campaign against the reemergence of unfree labor and “modern forms of slavery.” Paradoxically, labor activists also highlight the opposite problem: the casualization of plantation work, as workers are hired daily and fired at will. Recognizing that both “free” and unfree labor regimes have a long history in Indonesia, and plantations have pivoted between these modes more than once, my study compares plantation labor regimes in the colonial, New Order, and “reform” periods (post-1998) to answer three questions. First, given that employers always want to access disciplined labor at the lowest possible price, what were the conditions that led employers to rely on unfree labor in some cases, and “free” labor in others? Second, to what extent was unfreedom imposed as a response to excessive freedom among workers and peasants? Third, how were the costs of social reproduction distributed between workers and employers, and what pressures from workers or regulators (state, colonial, transnational) affected this distribution? In addition to published sources, I draw on my ethnographic research in West Kalimantan (2010–2015) to explore contemporary experiences of un/freedom among workers on state and private oil palm plantations.

Purdah, meaning curtain, is the word most commonly used for the system of secluding women and enforcing high standards of female modesty in much of South Asia. Purdah is an important part of the life experience of many South Asians, both Muslim and Hindu, and is a central feature of the social systems of the area. The crucial characteristic of the purdah system is its limitation on interaction between women and males outside certain well-defined categories, which differ among Muslims and Hindus. Muslim purdah restrictions do not apply within the immediate kin unit,but only outside it, while Hindu purdah is based on a set of avoidance rules between a woman and her male affines. Muslim seclusion begins at puberty, Hindu seclusion strictly speaking begins with marriage.

A remarkable feature of African studies has been the sharp discontinuities in the characterization of transitions in African history and society from one era to another. Thus, for an important example, colonialism has rarely been related to the previous era of the slave trade in the analysis of any dominant socioeconomic themes in Africa. Such discontinuity is significant in one important strand of modern African studies: The transition from the lore and scholarship of colonial social anthropology to postcolonial forms of African studies has been stalled into a brittle break because its central focus on the “tribe” has been under attack. Social anthropology gained strength through its analysis of the tribe and its associated concepts of kin groups and kinship behaviors in colonial Africa. However, following criticisms of the mission and manners of social anthropology by postindependence African scholars and politicians, and a brave reexamination of the conceptual problems of their discipline, social anthropologists more or less agreed to abandon the use of the tribe and of its more obvious derivative tribalism with respect to Africa.

A polarization has emerged in the field of colonial studies. On the one hand, many writers describe colonialism as a direct, inexorable product of Orientalist or precolonial racial discourse and pay little attention to “social” phenomena such as capitalism, the state, and social class. Other analysts assume that cultural discourse is the product of supposedly more foundational economic or material factors. Historians in the second group explain colonial policies in terms of imperialist economic and political interests, strategies of resistance and collaboration among the colonized, precolonial social structures in the periphery, or other “quasi-objective” phenomena. Both schools tend to ignore the role of properly psychic processes in the constitution of colonial regimes, although this has been the focus of Homi Bhabha's psychoanalytic interventions in (post)colonial theory (1994). The lack of integration of materialist, culturalist, and psychoanalytic approaches in the colonial literature echoes broader oppositions that structure the human sciences today.The essays in Steinmetz (1999) exemplify some attempts to overcome the artificial separation between culturalism and materialism in studies of the state. Landmark theoretical interventions that reintegrate the social and cultural levels include Bourdieu (1977), Bhaskar (1979), and Laclau and Mouffe (1985). The need for a reintegration of the psychic into social theory has been argued forcefully by Zizek (1989, 1991) and Elliott (2000).

When I did my first field research in Peru in 1974, I was struck by the forceful, energetic, and at times bawdy market women known as cholas. They stood out because they appeared fearless, astute, different, and unpredictable. I could ot find a counterpart among Peruvian males. The cholas feigned neither humility toward rich white foreigners nor unbridled admiration for their ways. They inhabited a world distinct from that of either the Quechua peasantry or the westernized mestizo but easily interacted with both campesinos and mestizos. They freely insulted whom they pleased; they engaged in wheeling and dealing and stood their ground but could also be surprisingly generous, almost religiously so.

The course of events leading up to 1947, when independence and partition came to the Indian subcontinent, has colored retrospectiveassessments of Hindu-Muslim relations in many perceptible ways.Polarities in religion and culture receive inordinate attention as theharbingers of the great divide yet to come, as do political developments asturning points in the eventual separate destinies of many Hindus and Muslims in South Asia.

When anthropologists come to examine the role of Christian missionaries in the transformation of non-Western societies, as they have done increasingly over the past decade, they soon become deeply embroiled in debates about narrative. Most obvious and immediate are the written and published narratives in which missionaries report their activities, providing the single most important source of data. But the more fundamental issues lie beyond: They have to do with the role of narrative in the social transformation itself, and eventually with the place of narrative in the ethnographic account that anthropology sets itself to produce. In this essay, which arises from a larger project on the encounter of religions in nineteenth-century Yorubaland, the focus of the argument will move through several levels of narrative, but it will start and finish with an argument that demonstrates why narrative is so important for the achievement of a properly historical anthropology.

Recent challenges to the unity of the nation-state in advanced industrial societies have surprised most of us. Scotland, Quebec, Flanders, Occitania, bCatalonia and other regions have made life more interesting politically and more confusing intellectually. While the emergence of ethnic consciousness, or concern with ethnic identity, appears nearly universal across Europe and North America (or indeed around the globe)nationalist movements—demands for autonomy or outright separation—are not equally strong: the nationalism of the Scots, the Basques, Catalans, Croats, Flemish, and Quebecois is far more powerful than that of the Alsatians, Bretons, South Italians, and the Occitents.

Our current historical conjuncture is marked by a global proliferation of nationalisms that have fundamentally, and often violently, transformed the inherited geopolitical configuration of the post-war era. The apparent resurgence of nationalism has been matched by a growing convergence across disciplinary divides on the problematic of nationalism. A few salient prior works notwithstanding, it is mainly in the last two decades that nationalism has emerged as a central preoccupation of contemporary historical and social-scientific analyses. Remarkably, the stubborn persistence of nationalism in the current context of neo-liberal global restructuring and the dizzying expansion of nationalism research have not enhanced analytical consensus on core theoretical and methodological issues. Indeed, the rush for an analytical “fix” on nationalism has tended to fortify rather than resolve inherited methodological divides, especially that between objectivist and subjectivist approaches to nationalism.

Investigations in social history confront a fundamental methodological difficulty: How is it possible to comprehend and to present the dual constitution of historical processes, the simultaneity of given and produced relationships, the complex interdependence of encompassing structures and the agency of “subjects,” the relationships obtaining among the circumstances of life, production, and authority, and the experiences and modes of behaviour of those affected by these circumstances?