Religion … appears in all different sorts in Syria: Turks, Jews, Heretics, Schismatics, Naturalists, Idolaters; or to be more exact these are genera that have their species in great number, for in Aleppo alone we counted sixteen types of religions of which four were Turks different from each other; of Idolaters, there remains only one sort which worships the sun; of Naturalists, those who maintain the natural essence of God with some superstition concerning cows and who come from this side of the borders of Mogor; and the others without superstitions named Druze, living in Anti-Lebanon under a prince called the Emir. They pay a tribute to the Great Lord, and live in their own manner, naturally. From this one can see how necessary it is to have good missionaries, and virtuous ones, for all the scandals that go on in this Babylon, and learned men to refute so many errors. There are fourteen Sects or Nations differing from each other completely in Religion, in rite, in language, and in their manner of dressing: seven of these are Infidels, and seven Christians. The Infidels are Turks or Ottomans. Arabs, Kurds, Turcomans, Jezides, Druze and Jews. Among the Turks there are, moreover, several sects and cabals affecting Religious sentiments just as there are among the Jews.

During the long nineteenth century, emerging bureaucratic states sought to align boundaries of space, political authority, and social identity. According to the normative ideal, ramified systems of delegated control should be consolidated into a single government, state power evenly applied throughout the entire area, and patchworks of local identities replaced with uniform citizenship. However, as Bayly has observed, states remained composite, negotiating with subordinates who retained their own spheres of influence. Integration was contested, uneven, and by no means linear. These tensions were evident in cities, with their traditions of trade and migration, and in colonial societies, characterized by the symbiosis between communal leaders and imported officials. However, even here informal controls were supplemented by state-sponsored social discipline as military power, managerial capacity, and populations expanded. Social categorizations were more rigidly enforced. Settlements and regulations became more closely packed, shrinking unclaimed space, both physical and social.

In looking at the production of pottery and cheese in the southwest of France, we want to suggest that over the long term the region had a much more complicated history of production than its present, predominantly rural economy might suggest. The manufacturing processes were linked symbiotically with other local activities, and were often carried out by “peasants” working in agriculture for a good part of the year.

The thirty–fourth chapter of the Greater Bundahišn, which is the fullest eschatological account within this important Middle Persian text, ends on an extremely peculiar note. Its final verse states:

This also is said [in the Avesta]: “The earth becomes flat, without a crown and without a seat. There are no mountain peaks nor hollows, nor are ‘up’ and ‘down’ preserved.”

This article traces the shift in demographic thought from the Malthusian framework that predominated in English-language political economic writings of the nineteenth century to demographic transition theory, which prevailed by the mid-twentieth century. An analysis of demographic theory offers particular insights onto the intellectual history of development because the question of population served as the point of departure for various development theories. While the scholarly literature on U.S. development ideas and projects has grown increasingly rich and sophisticated in recent decades, it remains wedded to the notion that there was a stark rupture between American development theory and the conditions in and relationships to the underdeveloped world that it sought to describe. This belief threatens to trivialize the significance of violent economic, environmental, and political circumstances that made development a useful lens of interpretation. Focusing especially on ideas about India, this article examines how, in an era of economic crises, intellectual and political exchange between British colonial, Indian nationalist, and American thinkers concerning the problems of disease, famine, and immigration enabled a transformation in demographic thinking. The concept of development did not simply diffuse from the West to the Rest. Global conflict and dialogue—both between and within empires—enabled its emergence such that, by the early 1950s, peoples in various parts of the world had already taken the ideal of development for granted.

“Iglesia me llamo” (“church is my name”) was the only phrase uttered over and over by numerous criminals during judicial interrogations that took place at various times throughout the Iberian kingdoms that ultimately became Spain, and their American colonies. This expression meant that even after committing heinous crimes, those outlaws received shelter at local churches and thereby felt entitled not to disclose any information to justice officials about their conduct. Such criminals were confident that it would not be easy to remove them from the church for punishment. Indeed, groups of wrongdoers turned churchyards, churches, their cloisters, and their adjoining cemeteries into permanent residences. They were alleged to move freely in and out of church buildings under cover of night and to bring friends, lovers, and liquor in for enjoyment. Their presence terrorized neighbors and passersby, and inconvenienced priests and parishioners alike.

The eighteenth-century medical view of the peasantry offers clues to a series of problems. This essay will treat one of them, namely the processes by which the French medical community in the declining years of the ancien régime and the early years of the Revolutionary period came to justify proposals for intervention in a rural society generally hostile to its claims and suspicious of its motives. The theme of the present study is an exploration of how the ideology of rationality and control, which was being developed in the learned world of the eighteenth century, was reinforced by a group within it that was gaining prestige and searching for means to enhance its professional status and power.Since the demands of such an inquiry are rather large, many of the related questions which it raises, such as the nature of medical knowledge, the contemporary disputes in medical philosophy, and the movement of change from one form of medicine to another, will be touched on only insofar as they have direct relevance to the major need to clarify the medical contribution to the development of the new ideology. In my present conceptualization of the problem, I am concerned to show that there was a close interaction between medical knowledge and the social values of the members of the medical trade, even if there existed no conscious direction of the elements connecting the two, and in spite of the difficulties there are in establishing the precise links mediating intellectual products and their social configurations.

The presence at Uganda's 1980 general elections of a Commonwealth Observer Group might be seen as a seminal moment. This was the first formal international observation of polls in a sovereign African state and the precursor of multiple similar missions that later became routine. Yet the 1980 mission sits uneasily in the history of election observation. The observers endorsed the results despite evidence of malpractice, and Uganda plunged into civil war within months. Internationally, the mission is now either forgotten or treated as an embarrassment. Within Uganda, it has been denounced as part of an outsider conspiracy to foist an unwanted president on an unwilling people. This article argues that the 1980 mission was neither entirely seminal nor an aberration, and that both the elections and observation were driven partly by actors within Uganda rather than simply imposed by outsiders. The availability of UK government records allows us to see the events of 1980 as a particularly clear example of a recurring “observers’ dilemma.” Ideally, elections combine democracy and state-building. They offer people a choice as to who will lead or represent them, and at the same time they assert through performance a crucial distinction between a capable, ordering state and a law-abiding citizenry. Yet these two aspects of elections may be in tension; a poll that offers little or no real choice may still perform “stateness” through substantial, orderly public participation. When that happens in what would now be called a “fragile state,” should international observers denounce the results?

At the turn of the twentieth century, a new reform movement rose to challenge the nation's economic oligarchy. It drew its support from an expanding urban middle class and from influential intellectuals and publicists. The party that gave political voice to these interests was led by a popular leader no ted for his vague but alluring rhetoric. He made skillful use of the press and of his party machinery. He and his followers sought to control large economic interests (an important railroad regulation law was passed in 1907) and to democratize the machinery of government (a major electoral reform law was passed in 1912).

According to Xanthus of Lydia, who wrote in the fifth century B.C., the Magi considered it right to have intercourse with their mothers, daughters, and sisters and also to hold women in common. The first half of this claim is perfectly correct: Xanthus is here referring to the Zoroastrian institution of close-kin marriage (khwēdōdāh), the existence of which is not (or no longer) in doubt. But his belief that the Magi held women in common undoubtedly rests on a misunderstanding, possibly of easy divorce laws and more probably of the institution of wife lending. In the fifth century A.D., however, we once more hear of Persians who deemed it right to have women in common; and this time the claim is less easy to brush aside. The Persians in question were heretics, not orthodox Zoroastrians or their priests; their heresy was to the effect that both land and women should be held in common, not just women (though the first attempt to implement it did apparently concern itself with women alone); and the heretics are described, not just by Greeks, let alone a single observer, but also by Syriac authors and the Persians themselves as preserved in Zoroastrian sources and the Islamic tradition.

If only everybody meant the same thing by ‘bureaucracy’—or ‘feudalism’, ‘Old Regime’, ‘capitalism’, and so on, ad nauseam. If we all agreed on what these terms meant a good deal of paper might be saved. Since this is not even remotely the case, I had better begin by saying something about how the term ‘bureaucracy’ is to be used in the pages that follow. A government shall be said to be bureaucratized to the extent that it has come to resemble the organizational portrait drawn by Max Weber in Economy and Society. Weber's so-called definition is a list (or lists) of characteristics whose relative importance and relation to one another have stirred much debate.

It is a commonplace in the study of nationalism that the construction of national identity inevitably relies on the creation and use of narratives—part history, part myth—that imbue nations and nationalist projects with coherence and purpose. This article seeks to render this idea more complex and analytically useful by asking how such narrative discourses become connected to personal identities. Why and how do people invest themselves in nations and nationalisms? An important part of the answer lies in the ways that constructions of narrative and agency at the collective level articulate with experiences of narrative and agency at a personal level. It is our constant existential concern with power that binds together collectivities and individuals, national narratives, and life histories. We must attend to this connection in order to better understand the powerful resonances nationalist discourses often have.

French literature has specialized, almost since its beginning, in accounts of eroticism and courtship. During the twelfth century, Northern romance and Southern lyric described an idealized heterosexuality and its role in honing the aristocratic individual. In the thirteenth century, a new genre appeared that dealt with sexual encounter in more materialistic terms. The new form, the fabliau, added to literary language a vocabulary of vulgarisms from the spoken vernacular. At the same time, it gave European literature a new theme: sexuality that betokens not personal fulfillment, but rivalrous interpersonal struggle.

Neither the unremitting imposition of alien ways nor the faithful preservation of local ones, colonialism proceeds by the melding of imperial practices with indigenous social forms, creating new arrangements that look like old ones. Moreover, colonialism is an intersubjective, interpractical relationship; as a growing number of historical and anthropological studies have shown, the natives are unlikely to be passive receivers of imposed forms. However difficult their circumstances, the colonized busily construe and misconstrue the colonizers and their social practices, manipulating both to their own advantage. What follows is a “working misunderstanding.”

How conservative a force is Islam in Africa?

The experience of Northern Nigeria would seem to suggest that Islam is indeed basically conservative. Yet, if that is so, there are other factors on the African scene which need to be explained away. When a few years ago Africa was divided into the Casablanca and the Monrovia groups, the radicals were the Casablanca states. Yet of the six countries which constituted the Casablanca group, five were Muslim countries: Guinea, Mali, the United Arab Republic, Morocco and Algeria (then represented by a Government-in-exile). Nkrumah of Ghana was the odd man out at Casablanca.

This paper is a part of a much larger study in comparative historical sociology addressing the question of the emergence and initial development of the related phenomena that may be subsumed under the umbrella term “nationalism”: national identity, national consciousness, and political collectivities based on such an identity and consciousness—nations. This larger project focuses on the five societies that were among the very first to define themselves as nations—England, the United States of America, France, Germany, and Russia—and examines the social bases of national identity, its embodiment in and perpetuation through institutional arrangements and patterns of culture, and its transformation in the process of diffusion from one culture to another.

When I first started fieldwork in Wannian, a village in southwestern Taiwan, I stayed in the village leader's house. At this early stage of the fieldwork, my relationship with the villagers was no more than polite and formal. One afternoon, I heard villagers talking in low and urgent voices about their temple's god statue. When I approached, they fell silent. No matter how I tried to question them about what had happened, they would tell me nothing. In the following days the village atmosphere became ponderous and oppressive, and I felt my presence there becoming increasingly awkward. Thinking that leaving for a while might provide a relief for both the villagers and me, I moved to a neighboring village. Since it was only one kilometer away, the wind brought the sound of the Wannian village loudspeaker. Though they had lowered the volume, I could vaguely hear announcements of preparations for upcoming ceremonies of worship. After a month, I moved back to Wannian, but only several years later did I understand what had happened.

“Social disciplining” is the name that has been given to attempts by the authorities throughout early modern Europe to regulate people's private lives.1 In explicit contrast to “social control,” the informal mechanisms by which people have always sought to put pressure on one another in traditional societies, “social disciplining” was a set of formal, legislative strategies through which the emerging early modern state sought to “civilize” and “rationalize” its subjects' behavior in order to facilitate well-ordered government and a capitalist modernization of the economy.2 Whether viewed favorably as an essential stage in a beneficent “civilizing process” or more critically as an arbitrary coercion of popular culture in the interests of elites, social disciplining is increasingly regarded as central to most aspects of political, economic, religious, social, and cultural change in Europe between the medieval and the modern periods.3

Recently Singer (1966: 497–505), while reviewing a book on economic development and Hinduism, underlined the necessity of recognizing the ‘deficiencies’ of the hypothetico-deductive method in studying social change in India. He alluded to Weber's thesis (ideal-typical relations of the Hindu ‘ethic’ to economic development) and its possible ‘distortions’ under this approach, especially if applied ‘as a basis for quick diagnoses of the ideological and structural factors impeding or facilitating economic development…’ (p. 498), or when applied to a general analysis of the social and cultural ‘transformations’ involved in modernization. He noted two major limitations: first, that under hypothetico-deductive use of ideal types one tries to deduce ‘realistic consequences from basic beliefs, values, motives postulated in isolation from concrete social and cultural contexts’ (p. 501), and second (which is perhaps a related consequence), that when deducing general tendencies, one fails ‘to specify conditions and magnitudes under which the conclusions are valid’ (p. 502). While Singer recognizes that this approach ‘will eventually complement’anthropologists’ narrative, descriptive, and inductive approaches, he stresses that the present need is to accumulate relevant empirical studies of the latter kind, against which we can check the conclusions of hypothetico-deductive theory.