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?

The study of festivals has only recently caught the attention of historians, who have traditionally shown themselves more concerned with the labours and afflictions of men than with their pleasures and diversions. If from this time onward, festivals become an object of historical enquiry, it will be perhaps because industrial society no longer has festivals—or at least that it has the festival only as pageant in which the passive community of onlookers has been substituted for the active community of celebrants—and because our interest in the festival increases to the extent that we lose it. However, we should also mention the historian's debt to the double stimuli of folklore and of ethnology. From folklorists and ethnologists historians have learned to concern themselves with the armature given to human experience by ritualization, even if anonymous, even if destitute of an explicit system of regulation or of a conscious cohesiveness.

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.

The histories of Germany and the United States became deeply entangled in the century of total war. After (re)unification on the battlefield in the midnineteenth century, both countries underwent rapid transformations through national programs of industrialization based on new products and technologies and emerged as great powers with global pretensions at the beginning of the twentieth century. An initial, and somewhat hesitant, confrontation in World War I was followed by a period of oscillation and confusion during the 1920s and 1930s, as leading elements in the two economies sought grounds for collaboration even as the political development of the two nations diverged, one moving toward fascism, the other toward a liberal democratic renewal. This produced the deeply ideological collision of the Second World War, which resulted in an equally dramatic turnabout, as the Germans endured what Americans then most feared, a grim (albeit partial) communist takeover, and the United States became the staunch ally of the German west in its faceoff with the east. Recently this close partnership has turned into a more perplexed and occasionally suspicious friendship, as the familiar terrain of the cold war is ploughed up. This is a history of extreme reversals is tied inextricably to war and preparations for war.

People are eating each other, came the message from southern Guangxi to Peking in the early summer of 1968, as the violent phase of the Cultural Revolution was drawing to a close. When militia reinforcements arrived in Wuxuan, parts of decomposing corpses still festooned the town center (Zheng 1993:2–3). No proper investigation was conducted, however, for this was a county in which order had already been imposed and the rebels had been crushed. Only in 1981–83, long after the Gang of Four had collapsed, was an investigation team sent into the county. It compiled a list of those eaten and a number of the ringleaders in cannibalism. Fifteen were jailed, and 130 Party members and cadres were disciplined. The Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region announced the expulsion from the Party of all who had eaten human flesh.1 But the regulations were withdrawn quickly for fear that the document would be slipped out to Hong Kong and reveal this episode of cannibalism to the world (Zheng 1993:52).

In 1899, Chilean workers discovered the mummified body of a woman in a copper mine in Chuquicamata, in the Atacama Desert. Chile's most prominent archaeologists were called to examine the body and they estimated it had been in the mine for more than four centuries. What most astonished both the public and the scholarly community was that the body had been preserved virtually intact, apparently by nothing but the environmental conditions surrounding it. José Toribio Medina, a central figure in Chilean archaeology at the time, discussed this finding in 1901:

In September of 1810, with a sudden flash of violent rebellion (preceded by months and years of salon conspiracies), the white native-born provincial elite of New Spain began the protracted and painful process of winning political independence from Spain. Although by about 1816 much of the country had been pacified by royal arms, pockets of rebellion continued to smolder and flare throughout the following years. The birth of modern Mexico itself finally occurred in 1821, owing as much to fortuitous political circumstances in Spain as to the military and political manipulations of Agustin Iturbide, the Creole adventurer who consummated the country's independence and briefly became its emperor. Programmatic pronouncements by the Creole and mestizo leadership of the independence movement abound in the form of pamphlets, constitutions, decrees, short-lived newspapers, captured correspondence, etcetera, and provide us with a reasonably clear view into the complex ideologi- cal process of political separatism from Spain. At least in the early years of the independence struggle, however, the insurrectionary armies were manned not primarily by Mexican-born whites or racially mixed groups, but by Indian peasants from rural villages all over the central parts of the country.

In this article I want to discuss a number of issues that have arisen out of my research into the structures of underdevelopment in Indonesia. First, some concepts that have been used in the analysis of Indonesian social structure will be examined. I shall show that these concepts, used in many cases as analytical tools are, in fact, aspects of peasant ideology. As such they should be objects of analysis rather than tools for analysis. The three concepts discussed in the first section of this paper are: the aliran, or vertical alliances described by Geertz and other members of the Modjokuto research team; ethnicity; and patron–clientage.

Authors in recent literature on developing polities have been searching for a middle class that could and, some even argue, should assume primary responsibility for all phases of development: social, economic, and political. This middle class has been identified as the New Middle Class (NMC). In contrast to the “old” middle class, the authors maintain, the NMC will create leaders; is more numerous; possesses organizational skills; is honest; develops forward-looking “new men”; in short, is shouldering, and should shoulder, social and political change.

Social and ethnic groups in many different societies have often created socio-religious movements to express their malaise, dissatisfaction with present living conditions, and desire for regeneration. These movements, which still arise today, normally result from social, economic, cultural and psychological pressures produced by internal and/or external factors. They reflect the anxieties and hopes of the groups that participate in them for a sudden and total transformation of their physical, social and psychological environment.

Reading Ivo Andric's colorful short story, “The Vezir's Elephant,” suggests a weakness in state rule consistent with a Eurocentric image of Ottoman backwardness. In the story, just as Bosnian peasants familiarized themselves with the habits of one Turkish official, he would be removed, transferred to another province and replaced by a new official with new whims and wishes. Throughout the sixteenth and a large part of the seventeenth centuries, a more or less firmly established rotation system was part of the Ottoman state mode of social control. Patrons and clients, and patrons among themselves remained foreign and unfamiliar. The resulting level of uncertainty in the provinces disrupted patron-client ties.

In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “culture” achieved the status of a truly global concept. We find discourses of “culture” emerging to prominence in the German-speaking world during the second half of the eighteenth century (with the closely associated linguistic arenas of the Netherlands and Scandinavia rapidly following suit); in the English-speaking world starting in the first half of the nineteenth century; in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and South Asia starting in the second half of the nineteenth century; and just about everywhere else in the course of the twentieth century. “Culture” began to circulate far beyond the European sites of its modern genesis, sometimes through the direct transfer of lexical items from Western European languages (e.g., Russian kulءtura; the use of kalcar in various South Asian languages); and more often through the construction of new translative equivalencies with preexisting words or concepts most often signifying purification, refinement, or improvement (e.g., Japanese bun-ka; Chinese wen-hua; Bangla and Hindi sanskriti; Urdu tamaddun).

The organization of revolutionary guerrilla movements by the Latin American left came in two largely discrete waves. The first was occasioned by the success of the Cuban 26th of July movement against the late 1950s regime of Fulgencio Batista. Within less than a year it was triggering imitative efforts across Latin America via the cultural diffusion of its “foco model” both indirectly and directly, as indicated by the timing, internal movement evidence, direct training, and other sources concerning the 1960s guerrilla movements. A clear dampening of such efforts followed upon the multiple failures of the imitators, the late 1967 death of Che Guevara in Bolivia, the withdrawal of Soviet-line communists in Latin America from their previous support for insurgency, and finally Cuba's own rapprochement with the USSR. At this juncture, “surviving” movements from the earlier period were few—notably in Colombia, less true in Guatemala and Nicaragua—but a second, narrower cluster of far larger, more intensive and active movements developed by the later 1970s. Such strong survivors or newcomers can be best understood, not as imitations of Cuba 1959, but via their new strategies of long-term patient organizing and by the types of “closed regimes” they were confronting in the 1970s–1980s. They, too, then mostly faded away in the face of national-level experiences of massive military repression or ever-more-competitive electoral democracies.

Recent scholarship on Indian, African, and Caribbean political thinkers and leaders emphasizes the era leading up to and immediately after decolonization as one saturated with awareness of time and history. While much of this scholarship focuses on temporalities that open up the future, this article instead foregrounds imaginings of the present in the currency of news reports. By examining newspaper reports, we can attend in a different way to renderings of time and freedom. This article applies theoretical work on genre and addressivity to analyze how location, space, and time were simultaneously grounded and overcome by Nigerian newspaper columnists, and how this dynamic of bounded transcendence facilitated an array of social and political projects in the time-space of 1930s and 1940s colonial Nigeria. The pseudonymous writers examined in this article applied the trope of flying to exist in an alternate reality. Each “reporter” outstripped the normal logic of time and space through their ability to “jump” from place to place, and even to be in more than one place at once. By existing, as they claimed, “everywhere and nowhere” they literally and figuratively rose above the material reality of the everyday, thus ordaining an exclusive capacity for revelation.

Rich vernacular traditions about the aftermaths of the social trauma of a major famine, sometime in sixteenth-century eastern Africa, narrate the founding of a new dynasty in Bunyoro, one of the region's oldest monarchies. Scholars often understand such traditions about the founding of new dynasties as chartering the new political order. Whether traditions credit that order with the aura of antiquity or strengthen it by excluding social elements discordant with the new orchestrations of power, they are exercises in legitimation. When scholars recognize that such traditions were set in the aftermath of widespread violence, a spirit of mourning emerges in them. Spirits of mourning, joined to those of legitimation, shape traditions about the founding of a new dynasty by deftly inflecting the problem of accountability. In Bunyoro, traditions about its founder depict him as a barbarian cultural neophyte, of fluctuating emotional stability, improvising a new political order. These unflattering, realistic representations of the founding dynast's affective comportment were designed to appeal to emotional repertoires in the different life experiences of audience members, enlisting their participation in the project of reviving sovereignty in the aftermaths of traumatic violence. Mourning and legitimation run through historical narratives initiating an aftermath to structural violence, and reveal that loss and worry shape narratives of transformed sovereign authority, and revive it in the aftermaths of structural violence. Mourning lends emotional depth and counterpoint to matters of bureaucracy, economy, gender, and so forth, in crafting satisfying accounts of transformation and accountability in political life. That emotional depth, in turn, helps explain the durability of traditions.

Legal approaches to judicial development in the new states of Asia and Africa seem to be inadequate for at least two reasons. One is that we cannot assume a prior knowledge of the political and social factors bearing on the process of change in these countries. The second is that by emphasizing legislative aspects of development, the spotlight is shifted away from the institutions themselves. One way of meeting these two objections is to bypass momentarily the normal function of judicial institutions and to look at them first of all as organizations like any other with group interests to defend and ambitions to pursue. From that starting point, it is possible to get a glimpse of the politics and sociology of legal and institutional change.

In spite of all the complex controversies concerning the interplay of religious ideas and economic forces at the end of the Middle Ages the investigation of the pre-existing medieval poor law has been rather neglected by modern scholars. Evidently enough attitudes toward the relief of poverty are as significant as attitudes toward the acquisition of wealth in gauging the climate of economic thought in any given age. Yet, apart from studies on hospital administration, little has been done in this field of medieval research since the pioneering works of Ratzinger, Emminghaus, Ehrle, Uhlhorn and Ashley in the nineteenth century. Since then the attitudes of social welfare experts to the problems of poor relief have radically changed and a great mass of source material unknown to the earlier writers, notably the work of the medieval canonists, has come to the attention of historians. Both these facts suggest a need for some reconsideration of medieval attitudes to the poor and to the relief of poverty.

During the period of Ottoman rule over the Arab East, from 1516 until the end of the First World War, the term Palestine (Filastin) denoted a geographic region, part of what the Arabs called al-Sham (historic Syria), rather than a specific Ottoman province or administrative district. By contrast, from 1920 to 1948, Palestine existed as a distinct and unified political (and to a considerable extent economic) entity with well-defined boundaries. Ruled by Britain under a so-called mandate granted by the League of Nations, Palestine in that period encompassed an Arab majority and a Jewish minority.

Starting with the author's own experience of ghostliness in the archive, the article explores the political meaning of the postwar Volkswagen in West Germany as embodiment of the country's “economic miracle.” The investigation follows the uncanny in texts and images about the Volkswagen between 1945 and 1960 and argues that the car carried with it a “public secret” as a “debris” from the Nazi empire that silently transcended the 1945 divide. This reading of the Volkswagen as well as the methodological path toward it highlight a phenomenon that postcolonial scholars have described as “haunting”: a confusion about the relationship between past and present that also bears on those who study the past. Taking this analysis as an encouragement to revisit the powerful myths and “miracles” of postwar consumer cultures in the West from a new angle, the article calls for historical genealogies of these myths that conceive of the postwar West as a—not yet—postcolonial space and that cross the 1945 threshold.

The term totalitarian has often been used by scholars to characterize the Soviet Union's system of government, and in many studies the emphasis has fallen on assessing the degree of effectiveness of the ruling apparatus in exercising its total control over society. Whatever the actual condition of public life in the Soviet Union (USSR), a desire to use the totalitarian system undeniably existed; and regardless of the degree to which people were able to retain an autonomous private sphere, their lives were shaped by this urge to total control. The best examples of this come not from the realm of high politics but of mundane personal practices such as the pursuit of hobbies. During the period from 1921 to 1939, the Soviet government redefined the hobby of stamp collecting, socially reconstructing it in terms of the regime's values. In the process, the Soviet regime demonstrated its totalitarian goal in ways that had ramifications in everyday life, as can be seen in the state's relations with the philatelists and in the realm of hobbies. The fact that the government strictly controlled and circumscribed something as seemingly innocuous and insignificant as stamp collecting reveals how strongly the state aspired to have total control of society. More important, this urge sprang not from the top of the Soviet apparatus but, rather, from mid-level officials.