The entry of a universal revelation into the mundane world of language threatens to be paradoxical: it must take a specific and local form. As such, it becomes implicated in nationalist, ethnic, linguistic, and other sources of community. This article centers on a small melodrama in late twentieth-century Indonesia, home to the largest number of Muslims of any country. After undergoing a mid-life spiritual awakening, H. B. Jassin, a modernist literary critic, editor, and ardent defender of freedom of expression, undertook two projects intended to convey the aesthetic power of the Qur'an to a non-Arabic speaking public. But if Qur'anic Arabic summons a transnational community of the faithful, standardized Indonesian was developed to address a nation of citizens. If scripture speaks in a divine, uncreated idiom, the national language is shaped by human efforts. Jassin's career had served a vision of literature and its public whose values and semiotic ideologies were dramatically at odds with Qur'anic traditions. Although this may appear at first glance to be a familiar story of progress and its opponents, this article asks whether Jassin's critics grasped something about signs and communities that his defenders did not. Examining the furor that resulted from his Qur'ans, it explores an array of conflicting assumptions about language, freedom, truth, and people's lives together in the late twentieth century.

Did Idi Amin join the army because of a lack of alternative economic opportunities for uneducated Kakwa in colonial Uganda? Or was he helped by the prior attractiveness of “tall African specimens” to those who were recruiting for the King's African Rifles?

Why have black people performed better by world standards in athletics than in most other sports and games? Does the explanation lie in the low economic status of blacks? Or is it partly a question of the physical attributes of some black “athletic specimens?”

Did the food culture of the Gurkhas and Punjabis help to make them “martial people” suitable for recruitment into the Indian army? Or were there primarily economic differences between them and the less martial communities of India like, say, the Gujerati?

It is one of the central paradoxes of any legal system that it should appear at once so central to the imposition of decisive pronouncements aimed at the very structure of social relationships yet remain dependent on forces beyond its direct control for the acceptance and implementation of these strictures. This peculiar status of laws and legal institutions gives rise both to exaggerated claims for its impact on social change and equally unrealistic assertions that all legal systems merely follow and support processes whose fundamental operations are carried out in the broader spheres of social and political life. Like other institutions, a legal system performs distinctive tasks in accord with its own internal history and logic. But in its very design and operation it is deeply influenced by the struggles for control and influence that occur among its own personnel, and between them and other sectors of society. Being neither self-executing nor independently defined, statutory propositions and judicial opinions have impacts which are as difficult to trace in detail as they are wide-ranging and interconnected at large. Even in societies with elaborated and sharply delineated legal institutions, the role of the legal system in shaping or reflecting social and political patterns partakes of this confusion of distinctiveness and derivativeness.

Historians generally dislike lost causes. They seek to explain what happened, rather than what might have been, and have consequently neglected the story of political emigrations. Granted, the study of dmigres is full of methodological pitfalls for the unwary: biased accounts of past issues, outright forgeries of documentary evidence, personal recriminations that serve to distort political reality, and a pervasive mood of bitterness, acrimony, nostalgia, and endless hope. Yet it is an important story, not only because of its intrinsic merit as a political phenomenon worth studying, but also because of the effect that exiles have had both in their place of refuge and in their homeland when they have been able to return. He who would ignore the émigrés might do well to recall that the experience of exile helped fashion the political careers of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, as well as of Charles II and Louis XVIII.

In the process of industrialization Western Europe went through a period of serious social tensions. For a while this phenomenon became of the utmost concern to all men engaged in socio-political thinking and action. In some countries one spoke - and sometimes still does - of “the social problem” or “the social question” in the singular to indicate its over-all importance.

Officers in active military service engaged in administrative tasks in the civil service, in the management of economic enterprises, in farming estates, teaching, bank management and other “civilian” tasks are not an unusual phenomenon in countries where the military is the exclusive ruler, or a direct and active partner in the government. The number of officers in this category is increasing also in those countries where the military is only a latent and unofficial partner in the regulation of the different sectors of political, economic and social power. However, even in countries where it is excluded from power, the military as an organization (as opposed to individual officers) takes charge of services which in Western countries are regarded as the domain of the civilian administration, or of other civilian bodies. This issue has received only partial and incidental treatment in the literature devoted to the subject of modernization. The “infiltration” of various military branches into different sectors of society is generally explained, if the issue arises at all, in terms of the conflict preceding the coup, or through other political events. Although this method of explanation is perfectly legitimate, it does narrow the discussion to the political sphere. This results in the neglect of highly significant material for the analysis of what may be termed “improvised” processes of modernization and nation-building. “Improvisation”, in this context, means the utilization of unorthodox means and routes to accelerate the modernization process. Infiltration and usurpation of non-military roles by officers is a case in point, although one should acknowledge that modernization is not always desired by the “infiltrators”.

The mid-nineteenth-century renaissance of interest in historical and comparative social and cultural studies issued in a rich variety of work ranging through religion, law, myth, language, kinship, art, politics—indeed, the whole sweep of human institutions. We see it as an intellectual movement given unity by a common resolve to bring time and space dimensions to humanistic inquiry, to replace analysis of abstract categories with explication of specified conditions of human affairs as outcomes of processes operating through time. Revolutionary zeal that encouraged an immediate reconstruction of society based on deduction from reasoned, timeless principle was countered with a view that the setting of human group life is always a going concern, shaped variously by temporal forces, and understandable only in its concrete forms. From this perspective the Austinian search for legal forms and the dry calculations of Benthamite utilitarianism had painted a false picture that did not get at the real stuff of social life.

Schooling is now a routine part of childhood in Western Europe, but this has not, of course, always been the case. The historical process of incorporation into school systems was one which affected the children of some social groups earlier than others and which occurred earlier in some regions than in others. In Western Europe, the contrast between the Protestant North and the Catholic South has proven to be significant in schooling history as in so many other realms: in general the South was less literate and less schooled than the North apparently from the sixteenth century until the accomplishment of universal school attendance and literacy around the beginning of the twentieth century.

Questions of responsibility are central to the politics and metaphysics of history. This paper examines the creation of different histories from alternative formulations of personal and collective responsibility among urban Ndyuka Maroons in present-day Suriname. Tracing conflicting attempts to assign accountability for a senior man's sickness, I argue that a distinctly Ndyuka conception of history emerges from the dialectical relation between the material qualities of misfortunes and the practices Ndyuka use to affix responsibility. Ndyuka efforts to assuage history as embodied by ghosts and other spirits that seek revenge on corporate kin groups simultaneously use the symptoms of misfortune to make history and attempt to contain or deny the transmissibility of collective responsibility to future generations. Understanding this process demonstrates how distinct perceptions of historicity emerge from different conceptions of responsibility, and the extent to which intergenerational sociality is defined by conflicted attempts to redefine historical accountability as much as to acknowledge it.

The Book of Imaginary Beings, by the celebrated Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, appeared in 1969. This was the English translation of the revised and expanded second edition of an anthology of fantastical stories he had published two years before in association with Margarita Guerrero (El Libro de los seres imaginarios). According to the author, it was a “handbook of the strange creatures conceived through time and space by the human imagination,” a topic that was known to fascinate him. In fact, the success of Borges' work shows that such creatures appeared to hold as great a fascination for contemporary society as they had held over other societies many centuries before. Perhaps this brief evocation of Borges' interest in imaginary beings from other times and from all cultures—even if fantasies certainly do not hold an identical value in each historical period and the same significance in every culture—may help to demonstrate how mistaken it is to think that such ‘aberrations’ and ‘anomalies’ have entirely faded as ‘modernity’ has emerged. However, Borges did make it clear that the beings he was dealing with—whether the Indian elephant-headed god Ganesha or the monstrous Kujatha—were ‘imaginary,’ and he took care to distinguish them from other, let us say, ‘real’ entities. Such a clear demarcation has not always been feasible, and it is precisely the changing status of the ‘strange and marvelous’ that lies at the center of this essay.

Traditional European values of noncapitalist wealth preferred “rent to profit, security to risk, tradition to innovation, and, in terms of personal goals, gentility to entrepreneurial skill and renown.” Both in the dynamic, expansive sector of the international economy and in marginal, “retrograde” economies, nonpecuniary values based upon kin, custom, religion, law, and politics openly contradicted the utilitarian assumptions of our contemporary economic theory, spurned reinvestment, and worked against development. How can we balance such premodern conceptions with economic forces that may have been imperfectly understood or not even perceived and, at the same time, give both early modern rationale and economic rationality a place in our descriptions of the old order in Europe? In other words, how can we account for the role of culture in economic decision making?

“Political capitalism” is a term frequently deployed in analyses of the economic systems that emerged in the former Soviet block after the implosion of communist autocracy. This crisp, evocative phrase effectively expresses the shared feeling that the transmogrifications of the formerly “planned economies” did not lead to the desired consolidation of a “normal” capitalism. Many would say that by the mid-2000s several East European countries had reached a state approximating “Western ordinariness.” But even they would agree that, at least during the first dozen years of postcommunist changes, the somewhat mysterious dynamics shaping postcommunist “economic domains” were marred by persisting “anomalies,” enduring “atavisms,” and recurring “distortions” which originated in the realm of “politics.” One cannot in good faith dispute that there was something “political” about the way the idiosyncratic postcommunist economies functioned throughout the 1990s.

Venice faced serious political and economic setbacks in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The future of the Eternal Republic seemed bleak when, in 1509, nearly bankrupt, her commercial empire in the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean slipping away, Venice's army was routed at Agnadello by the forces of the League of Cambrai. Even the elements seemed to have turned against Venice around this time, visiting the city with earthquake, storm, flood, famine, and the plague. Well might the prominent banker Girolamo Priuli have feared that “great God has permitted and ordered this severe ruin of the Venetian Empire”

The diffusion of British institutions, ideas, and values and the spread of the English language and of British peoples are among the major events in modern history. The study of the effects of this diffusion in the New World, Africa, and Asia in shaping political institutions in these regions has attracted many scholars, but the systematic and analytic study of the British themselves and of the societies and cultures they built overseas in their African and Asian colonies has thus far been neglected, except in the memoir and travel literature.

In recent years historians and sociologists alike have given increasing attention to the relationship between education and social structure in France. Louis Althusser has argued that the French educational system was designed to preserve elites. Michel Crozier concluded that the system prevented a too rapid mobility that would upset the status-quo and that ‘graduates [of grandes é'coles] have a de facto monopoly on the top brackets of the Civil Service, the universities, and medicine, and decisive advantages in entering most professions and many industrial organizations’.

Historians have long recognized that the large body of periodical literature surviving from the eighteenth century, along with the smaller amount preserved from the seventeenth century, is an important source of insight into the early development of modern society in the West. Newspapers and other periodicals—magazines, reviews, and a miscellany of other publications difficult to characterize precisely—provided eighteenth-century readers with fundamental information about their world and with news of the ways in which it was changing. It is not surprising that this voluminous printed record also yields evidence to those seeking to understand that world from the vantage point of a subsequent era.

In January 2011, people around the world turned their attention to Cairo's Tahrir Square. The news network al-Jazeera quickly became a window onto the square and surrounding streets, and news reporters became eyewitnesses to historical events. Aware of the media spectacle unfolding around them, Egyptian protesters over the following weeks held up signs in Arabic and English and, maybe unknowingly, staged highly photogenic scenes, for instance when Christians formed a human chain to guard Muslims during their prayers, and vice versa. During the first few days of the uprising, the regime shut down cell phone and Internet networks to prevent activists from communicating, but it could not stop their taking pictures and filming with cell phones and cameras. Every moment was carefully recorded, and today multiple initiatives are collecting films, photos, and audio recordings to preserve them in digital archives. In July 2011, activists set up an open-air cinema at Tahrir Square to screen and discuss footage of the protests. Subsequently video materials became crucial pieces of evidence in the courtroom where the former President Mubarak and ex-Interior Minister Adly were being tried. The Egyptian revolution was a highly visible and “mediatized” event. Its history can and has been told in images.