Students of drama, magazine fiction and novels know that virtually every nationality and minority group has been represented by a stereotype in print and on the stage. Social scientists generally discuss stereotypes as components of prejudiced beliefs accompanied by strong, unexamined reactions of dislike or approval. Historians and specialists in literature do not equate stereotyping with prejudice. Instead, they emphasize the origin of stereotypes as routinized, crude or at least oversimplified classifications of multifaceted characters and situations.

How far were China's prewar economic institutions the product of its particular history and traditions—that is, the product either of the nature of its premodern society or of its later status as a semicolony—and how far can they rather be seen as answers to problems common to the stage of economic development which the country had reached at that time?

The modern history of Asians in the New World is a long and complex one beginning with South Asian indentured laborers brought to the West Indies in the early decades of the nineteenth century and continuing into the present, when, in recent years, wholly apart from Southeast Asian refugees, Asians have amounted to about one in four of the legal migrants to the United States. Almost all of the literature about these immigrants and their descendants has been particularistic, focussing on one particular ethnic or national group residing within a limited geographical area, often as narrow as a particular city. This being the case, the articles in this journal by Stephen I. Thompson (1979) and Bernard Wong (1978) about the degree of relative assimilation of East Asians in Peru and the United States should be welcomed by all scholars interested in comparative ethnicity. Although the comments to follow are largely negative they should not be considered as dismissive of the value of the empirical research of either scholar; I have learned from each and hope to continue to do so.

The colonisation of the tropical lowlands of South America was until fairly recently often portrayed by historians as a straightforward catalogue of genocide, epidemics, and forced catechisation.See, for example, the work of John Hemming: Red Gold (London: Macmillan, 1978), Amazon Frontier (London: Macmillan, 1983), “Indians and the Frontier” in L. Bethell, ed., Colonial Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 145–89. In its emphasis on the undeniable fact of the violent subjection of much of Amerindia, this orthodoxy obscured the vital detail of the varieties of historical experience in the Amazon and Orinoco basins and the Guianas, projecting an illusion of uniformity and direction to historical processes which were in fact much more complicated and open-ended.N. Whitehead, “Ethnic Transformation and Historical Discontinuity in Native Amazonia and Guayana, 1500–1900,” L'Homme, 126–8, 13:4 (avril–décembre 1993), 285–305. A particularly good example of the complexity of “conquest” from the Indian perspective in the period immediately prior to the Cabanagem is N. Farage, As Muralhas dos Sertões: Os Povos Indígenas no Rio Branco e a Colonização (Rio: Paz e Terra, 1991). Historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have more recently emphasised the historically contingent nature of ethnic identity and traced out its empirical consequence, the interweaving of identity construction and ethnicity with colonialism, economic expansion and state formation from the sixteenth century onwards.General volumes covering all or most of the tropical lowlands are A. Roosevelt, ed., Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994); E.V. de Castro and M.C. da Cunha, eds., Amazônia: Etnologia e História Indígena (São Paulo: FAPESP, 1993); M.C. da Cunha, ed., História dos Índios no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras 1992) and G. Urban and J. Sherzer, eds., Nation States and Indians in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). For the Orinoco and Guianas, see chapters by Whitehead and Arvelo-Jímenez and Biord in Roosevelt, Amazonian Indians; Dreyfus, in Castro and da Cunha, Amazonia; and N. Whitehead, Lords of the Tiger Spirit: A History of the Caribs in Colonial Venezuela and Guayana, 1498–1820 (Dordrecht and Providence: Foris Publications, 1988). Price's trilogy on the Saramaka Maroons of Surinam, First Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), To Slay the Hydra (Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers, 1983), and Alabi's World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1990) is an example of a similar approach to an Afro-American ethnic formation. As a result, in certain parts of the tropical lowlands—notably the Guianas—it has been possible to produce a much more sophisticated reading of regional history, a “thick description” which can relate the fluidity and specificity of local circumstances to wider historical processes and can thus serve as the basis for a properly comparative mapping of the past.

Notwithstanding the wide currency of the concept of charisma in contemporary social science, considerable confusion exists in regard to its employment. While some authors insist that the concept should be used in the Weberian sense, others advocate its emancipation from the ecclesiastical context in order to render it suitable for use in the modern secular context. I will argue that “charisma” is ultimately a product of social structure and hence its nature and content will undergo a transformation as the society itself changes.

Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, the leading cities of the South Atlantic, experienced substantial growth in wealth holding during the first half of the nineteenth century. In this article, we argue that this growth is best interpreted in a broad, comparative framework, which examines these cities in relation to their internal demographic and institutional arrangements and to their external links to the Atlantic World. Our research emphasizes three major comparative findings. First, according to our samples, both Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires experienced substantial growth in wealth holding from the 1820s through the 1850s, well before their participation in the better-known global economic expansion of the late nineteenth century. Second, residents of both South Atlantic cities held wealth broadly similar in scale with their counterparts in comparable cities in North America. And third, wealth inequality was probably no greater in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires than in contemporary cities in the United States. Moreover, we believe that these increases in average wealth holding, as well as changes in the allocation of wealth across sectors, suggests economies that were growing rapidly while becoming more complex.

At the turn of the century, when lynching, Jim Crow laws, and disfranchisement were at their worst, black fraternal organizations offered Afro-Americans a place to preserve their self-respect. Scholars have studied these organizations little and understood them less. One early study dismissed them as merely parodying white organizations, but hardly resembling them, while the blacks, it claimed, exaggerated both regalia and ritual. When Noel Gist published his Study of Fraternalism in the United States, Carter Woodson charged that Gist failed to understand the importance of fraternal orders to blacks and that, indeed, Gist barely mentioned the black orders. After a detailed analysis, W. E. B. DuBois found that even black and white orders that shared a name might not resemble one another. He found similarities only in Pythians, Odd Fellows, and Masons. He thought the other black societies were “Negro inventions” and “curious and instructive” organizations. “Invention,” “curious,” “exaggeration,” “parody,” “importance to blacks”—these are the key phrases. All attempt to describe an amorphous quality of black fraternal orders that makes them unique. Yet while failing to define that quality, its would-be describers avoid the issue.

The museum has become disputed terrain in the closing years of the twentieth century. Not that there has been any unanimity of opinion about these institutions at any time in their history, but until relatively recently the disputes were often among insiders. These disputes were conducted within Western culture, within the professional world of specialists, and within a universe of agreed upon and accepted ideas about a viewing public and the objects they viewed. Karp and Lavine locate this debate and its dimensions succinctly: “whether to privilege context or object… aesthetics of objects or prepositional knowledge about them… [and] whether a curator's message… is more authentic than the provenance of the object itself” (1991:12)

One of the recent attempts to formulate a general theory of nationalism has been Deutsch's approach to the question. This aims to show that a correlation exists between changes in the process of social communications and the rise of national consciousness. A considerable number of studies based on this approach to nationalism will have to be carried out before its contribution to the identification of the elusive “essence” of nationalism can be evaluated with any amount of fairness. In the meantime one tentative procedure which might be used to assess its usefulness is to try to fit this model to the evolution of social communications in a number of countries which the author has not included among his illustrations.

Urban troubles were endemic in early modern Europe. Not only did cities undergo sieges, conquests, and epidemics, but the rapid spread of rural protoindustrial manufacturing threatened established markets and employment patterns. The acute problems of Antwerp, captured by Spanish troops in 1685, or of Como, whose textile industry collapsed in the early seventeenth century are not isolated examples of cities in trouble. Many more could be offered. Indeed, descriptions of cities in the seventeenth century, particularly those of the Spanish Empire, stress depopulation and decay. Contemporaries saw around them scenes of urban desolation. Sir Thomas Overbury, travelling in the Spanish Netherlands around 1610, wrote of the “ruinous” towns, while visitors to Ciudad Real in Spain around 1620 noted vacant, tumbledown houses, unemployment, and urban land gone to waste (Parker 1977:253; Phillips 1979:29). After several years in which Spanish Lombardy was devastated by wars, famine, and plague, the Milan City Council complained of “the destitution of all sorts of persons and the threat of impending ruin.” Moreover, throughout the state, values of houses and landed property had allegedly plummeted (Sella 1979:57,63).

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.

The contents of sacred texts are not simply reproduced in the doctrines of the religions which venerate them; there must be interpretation and selective emphasis. This is most obviously true when the corpus of sacred literature is large, as in Christianity and Buddhism. Historians of these religions may therefore ask why certain doctrines and certain scriptures have been emphasized at the expense of others.

This article analyzes the introduction of police dogs in early twentieth-century Paris, which formed part of the transnational extension of police powers and their specialization. Within a context of widespread fears of crime and new and contested understandings of animal psychology, police officers, journalists, and canophiles promoted the dogs as inexpensive yet effective agents who could help the police contain the threat posed by criminals. This article responds to a growing number of studies on nonhuman agency by examining how humans in a particular place and time conceptualized and harnessed animal abilities. I argue that while nonhuman agency is an illuminating and important analytical tool, there is a danger that it might become monolithic and static. With these concerns in mind, I show how examining historical actors' conceptualizations of animal abilities takes us closer to the historical stakes and complexities of mobilizing purposeful and capable animals, and provides a better understanding of the constraints within which animals act. Attitudes toward police dogs were entwined with broader discussions of human and animal intelligence. Concerns that dogs' abilities and intelligence were contingent and potentially reversible qualities resembled contemporary biomedical fears that base instincts, desires, and impulses could overwhelm human intelligence and morality, resulting in individual and collective degeneration. To many, it seemed that police dogs' intelligence had not tamed their aggressive instincts, and these worries partly explain the demise of the first wave of police dogs in Paris after World War I.

Linguistic conflict between French and English-speaking Canadians has been an enduring feature of Canadian society since the British conquest of New France (Quebec) in 1759. This conflict has taken a variety of forms and revolved around a number of issues in the past two hundred years, ranging from the question of religious and linguistic civil rights to economic inequality and economic dominance. The latest and most significant manifestation of English-French conflict has been the emergence in the mid-1960s of a viable movement for political independence for the predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec.

The Quincentennial of Columbus's Discovery of the Americas has come and gone. Some people celebrated, others protested. The Discovery has been called either “The greatest event since the creation of the world, save the incarnation and death of Him who created it” (Francisco Lopez de Gomera writing in 1552), or the greatest disaster in world history. Columbus is either a saint (who was actually proposed for canonization), or he is a sinner responsible for genocide. Can one even say that Christopher Columbus discovered America when there were already millions of people living in these lands? Did he discover America when he thought he had found a new route to Asia? The debates are interminable and the issues have become so politicized that an informed and informative discussion has been all but impossible; one steps warily into the fray. Yet, despite the voluminous literature by and about Columbus, Americans outside the rarefied circle of Columbus scholars still know little about the man and his mission. In this paper I discuss some of the little known religious beliefs that underpinned the “Enterprise of the Indies,” for I think they have the potential to change fundamentally our assessment of Columbus and relocate some of the responsibility for the consequences of the encounter.

The question of populism in Uganda was investigated by Professor D. A. Low in this journal in 1964.1 He argued that the concept of populism was appropriate to describe the political agitation by the independent small landholders and poor peasants against the breakdown of the traditional hierarchical structure of Buganda under the impact of colonial rule. The populists were particularly concerned to reduce their economic disabilities through control of the marketing system for cotton, but at the same time were concerned to articulate ‘the kingdom's corporate solidarity’. To that extent Buganda populism was socially conservative, though it may have seemed radical to the colonial rulers.

The primary interest in this study is to make some contribution to the elaboration of a theoretical problem: What are the relations between certain forms of ideology and the social formations in which they are, or can be, realized? The consideration of ideology as a sociological category is of continual and growing concern (e.g., Moskvichov 1974; Bétaille 1978; Gellner 1978), despite the attempts of bourgeois social science to kill it off during the 1960s (cf. Lipset 1960; Bell 1960; Waxman 1968). But my present interest in it arises out of a particular historical question: Why did the Christian missions fail so signally in their efforts to evangelize and convert East African pastoralists, most conspicuously the various sections of the Maasai peoples of Tanzania and Kenya?

On the face of it, civil marriage represents both the most typical and most anodyne aspect of modern law. One might say that by instituting civil marriage, a bureaucratic, enumerative, and secularized state permits its subjects absolute individual choice of marital partners, and concurrently, by refusing to take into account the religious affiliation of any party, grants total freedom of religious faith. As such, it may be seen as a quintessentially modern phenomenon, connected through the adjective “civil” with other distinctively modern concepts such as civil society, all of which point to a notion of individual liberty, predicated upon a modern state guaranteeing the autonomy of large arenas of social life.

Contemporary debates on policing trace the rise of “law and order” populism and police militarization to colonial histories and imperial boomerang effects. In a time marked by the renewed imperative “to decolonize,” however, few studies examine what decolonizing policing did or could look like in practice. This article draws on oral history narratives of Jamaican police officers to recover their ideas about transforming the colonial Jamaica Constabulary Force in the 1970s. Born out of black power mobilizations and under a democratic socialist government (1972–1980), police decolonization was viewed as part of broader transformative effort to rid the country of colonial inheritances in economics, culture, and politics. Jamaican policemen, radicalized since the early twentieth century, then began revising their social mandate and ask who the police should serve and protect. Ultimately, due to internal contradictions and external pressures, the experiment failed, giving rise to police populism and increased violence against black men and women in the ghettos. The episode reveals how populism emerges out of a failure of emancipatory campaigns and how radical critique can turn into ideological justification. It also highlights the need to distinguish between diverse, contradictory, and overlapping demands to decolonize societies and institutions today.