In 1960, women in southern Ethiopia's rural Konso district faced a violent campaign by local men to eradicate leather clothing following a ban imposed by the local governor, Tesfaye Hailu. Tesfaye, a man of the northern Amhara ethnic group, banned leather clothes along with bead necklaces and arm bracelets as part of imperial Ethiopia's “modernization,” which was influenced by disparate sources, including the United States. Tesfaye saw women's attire as “backward” and “unhygienic” and as obstructing modernization; its elimination was a means to improve Konso culture and help the empire join the community of modern nations. The “culture” of “the Other” has often been cast as impeding “modernity” and requiring elimination or change, particularly the practices of women, from genital cutting in eastern Africa to veiling among Muslim women in the Middle East and Europe (Hodgson 2009; Masquelier 2005; Merry 2009a). So it was with the widespread, politicized transition to cotton clothing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century eastern Africa. The target was clothing worn by all women in Konso and made by women in the low-status category of “Xauta,” sometimes referred to as a “caste.” Leather skirts signaled important stages in women's lives, and became extensions of individual women's tastes, experiences, and identities. Women today recall the violence and punishments of the campaign, including being chased, beaten, imprisoned, and fined, and even having their skirts forcibly removed at home and in public. They offer contradictory explanations of who initiated the ban and the reasons for it, but they remember clearly the local men involved in eradication efforts.

In an increasingly integrated world social system, the communitarian society must guard its autonomy while it simultaneously adjusts to external institutions in order to survive. In this paper we are concerned with the ways in which two of the most successful or at least enduring examples of collective agriculture and communal living, the kibbutz communities of Israel and the colonies of Hutterian Brethren in North America, are adapting to the pressures of the external society in order to retain their cultural integrity.1 Although the ideologies of these groups are linked in the distant past, from the standpoint of cultural background one could hardly find two more disparate cases: the sixteenth-century Anabaptist Hutterites with their Christian brotherhood, and the kibbutzniks, with their secular socialism and Zionist zeal. These are real differences, but these communities also have two important things in common: a dedication to the principles of communal property and communal living, and making a living by operating large, diversified agricultural enterprises. These similarities create a common need on the part of both Hutterites and kibbutzniks to maintain a certain distance from the surrounding society and its prevailing individualistic organization; to calculate the advantages and disadvantages of an agrarian economy in an industrial age; and to experience virtually identical problems of management and social organization created by large-scale agrarian diversification.

Anthropological fashion moves in a rhythm unlike the deliberate seasonal cycle of the couture houses that design the foulards the French find so troubling these days. But if gray or green is the new black this season in Paris and New York, public has been the new structure in anthropology for several long seasons now, and is only just beginning to live up to some of its considerable potential as a design element in cultural analysis, and also to show its age. The advantage of the public sphere as a concept is that—like its predecessor, structure, which can stand against chaos, anti-structure, agency, process, and so on—“public” resides within a rich semantic network in which it can signify a number of oppositions and complements: privacy, secrecy, domesticity, isolation, individualism, sectarianism, market, state. Despite its normative reputation as a concept associated with rational deliberation over the public good, in the hands of John Bowen, Lara Deeb, Charles Hirschkind, and Esra Özyürek, the public sphere turns out rather surprisingly to rely on cultivated affect and on sets of embodied dispositions that it shapes in the process of people's participation in it. Like Bourdieu's Kabyle house writ large, the public sphere is an opus operatum, a space channeling the interactions that create it, a set of relationships maintained by the interests and capacities it generates.

This paper examines the nature of late Ottoman provincial intercommunal interactions and affiliations as they appear in the memoir of Hovhannes Cherishian (1886–1967), a shoemaker from late Ottoman Marash (present-day Kahramanmaraş, in southeastern Turkey). The paper is situated within the larger discourse of “untold histories” that historians have begun to address in revising the deeply ingrained post-Ottoman nationalist historiographies that dominate both academic and popular discourses. Conventional historiographies have represented former late Ottoman subject communities (e.g., Greek, Jewish, Armenian) as insulated and homogenous proto-nation-states. In the revisionist historiography, the late Ottoman Armenian voice, especially the provincial one, has been noticeably absent. Here I utilize Cherishian's memoir to examine the life and thoughts of one late Ottoman Armenian provincial subject. I focus especially on his treatment of intercommunal interactions in Anatolia and present-day Syria between 1897 and 1922. His accounts of these often extended intercommunal interactions, affiliations, and networks are characterized by intercommunal and interpersonal openness, sympathy, intimacy, and pleasure, even as he presents them side-by-side with descriptions of deportation and death at the hands of the late Ottoman state. I develop the idea of what I call “provincial cosmopolitanism” to conceptualize and represent the disposition, affinity, and process of identity formation that enabled Cherishian to create and operate these interpersonal relationships and networks that propelled his life, a historical condition to which we are not currently privy in most historiographical accounts of the late Ottoman period.

This article describes emergent Chinese regimes of knowledge about “minority nationality medicines.” We adopt Weberian terms of rational and charismatic authority to better understand ethnic healing as it is developing among minorities in southwestern China. In the course of uneven development among diverse ethnic groups over recent decades, modern information regimes and institutional models have started to transform the many forms of healing and heritage that can be found “on the ground” in minority areas. We delineate a shifting border between official (or rational) and wild (or charismatic) forms of medicine, and argue that every healing situation results from a dynamic and sometimes destructive relation between these forms of authority. We draw from research conducted among seven minority nationalities scattered in five provinces in China's south and southwest. After an overview of relevant scholarly work that circulates nationally, we discuss views and practices of three healers belonging to Zhuang, Tujia, and Yao groups, respectively. Ultimately we suggest that all healing, including that taking place in biomedical clinics, relies on some contact with “the wild,” and forges a relationship between rationality and charisma.

This article focuses on religious pedagogies as an essential part of the practice and the making of modern religion. It takes the case of the Syrian Orthodox communities in Kerala, South India to examine how shifts in pedagogical models and practice have reframed their understanding of knowledge and God. The paper highlights two moments of transformation—the nineteenth-century missionary reforms and twenty-first-century Sunday school reforms—that brought “old” and “new” pedagogies into conflict, redefining the modes of knowing and religious subjectivities they presuppose. For this I draw from historical and pedagogical materials, and ethnographic fieldwork in churches and Sunday schools. The paper diverges from widespread narratives on the missionary encounter by showing how colonial efforts to replace ritual pedagogies with modern schooling were channeled into a textbook culture that remained close to Orthodox ritualism. The “new” pedagogy turned learning into a ritualized practice that continued to emphasize correct performance over interiorized belief. Contrasting this with todays’ curriculum revisions, I argue that educational reforms remain a privileged mode of infusing new meanings into religious practice and shaping new orthodoxies, especially under the threat of heterodoxy. This reflects a broader dynamic within Orthodox Christianity that takes moments of crisis or change as opportunities to turn orthopraxy into orthodoxy and renew the faith. The paper engages with postcolonial debates on religion, education, and modernity, and points to more pervasive assumptions about what makes Orthodox Christianity and the modes of knowing and ethical formation in Eastern Christianity.

This article provides ethnographic, comparative, and theoretical perspectives on Muslim masculinities in South and Southeast Asia, home to more than half the world's 1.9 billion Muslims. Its empirical and thematic focus broadens the scholarly discussion of gender and sexuality among Muslims insofar as most of the literature deals with the Middle East and North Africa and is devoted to women and the discourses and practices of femininity and sexuality associated with them. More specifically, the article develops theoretical insights bearing on gender hegemonies and the pluralities and hierarchies of discourses on masculinities in the Muslim-majority nations of Pakistan and Malaysia, each of which illustrates broad trends in the region. It thus sheds important light on the empirical diversity of Muslim masculinities (amidst commonalities) and some of the ways they have been informed by locally and regionally variable macro-level processes keyed to colonialism, postcolonial nation-building, global/neoliberal capitalism, and post-Cold War geopolitical struggles including the Global War on Terror.

Culture, one of the keywords of our time, became common, as Raymond Williams has suggested, in Western discourse in the early nineteenth century. Subsequently, pushed by both anthropological and literary-aesthetic studies and extended to global dimensions, the concept of culture, which supposedly expresses primordial naturalness and the irrational, is often played off against its counterpart from the beginning, the calculated mechanicalness of civilization, or the rational. More recently, in the burgeoning field of cultural studies, the boundaries between the two terms have become increasingly blurred. Now civilization, too, is seen as the domain of the irrational, masking itself in socalled rational representation.

In worlds of difference, how might certain unities be forged for liberation? This paper pursues this question from the vantage-point of the dialectical tension between Marxism and religion. While some scholars have noted parallels between the two, philosophers of critical realism have aimed to establish a deeper equivalence between Marxism and religion. This paper, however, considers how an equivalence may be forged by subaltern actors in the context of political struggles—how a religious Marxism might look as a theoretical and political practice. I do this by historically reconstructing the life of Sufi Sibghatullah Mazari, a locally influential communist from Pakistan who equated Sufism with Mao-inflected Marxism. Born into a poor farming family from South Punjab, he would go on to lead peasant movements against “feudal” landlords (jagirdars) during the 1970s and be recruited into the Mazdoor Kisan Party, the country’s historically largest communist party, which drew inspiration from Mao Tse-tung. Sibghatullah’s introduction to Maoist thought and practice, especially its emphasis on a vernacular-driven communist universalism, led him to comparatively reflect on circulating insurgent Sufisms and their own universalist possibilities. Maoism and Sufism’s shared universalist elements then allowed him to equate the two: an equivalence he centered on the concept of Truth (Haqiqat). Sibghatullah also expressed this “mystical Marxism” in his political practice, as he mentored revolutionary Sufi disciples, recruited Sufi-inflected mullahs into the communist party, built alternative insurgent mosques, and even challenged the tribal and patriarchal “honor” codes, practices that, in undermining landlordism’s hegemony over Islam, threatened its reproduction.

During the early Meiji period of the 1870s and 80s, Japanese leaders were in the process of constructing a new state. The old regime of the Tokugawa shogunate had been overthrown in 1867, and its “feudal” ways were to be replaced with institutions that valued another, “Western” set of priorities—including applied science and industrial capitalism, constitutional law and deliberative assemblies. This program of institutional change, called “civilization” or “enlightenment” by its proponents, enlisted a range of foreign consultants, from engineers and military officers to teachers and legal experts. Equally important were Western books, the translation of which had begun under the old regime. Among the works that made a powerful impression on Japanese readers at the start of the Meiji period were William and Robert Chambers' Political Economy, Samuel Smiles' Self-Help, and John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. The “liberal” tradition defined by these authors provided an introduction for the works of Herbert Spencer. Although his reputation today most often places him among conservative or libertarian political philosophers, it was Spencer's liberal defense of natural rights that initially interested Japanese readers in the 1870s. For Spencer's appearance coincided with a growing advocacy of “people's rights” in Japan, as private citizens pressured the authoritarian oligarchy ruling Japan to grant them the rights to freedom of speech, press, and assembly, and to participation in governmental process through the institution of a national assembly.

In the years before 1939, the functionaries of Afrique Occidentale Française, or AOF, as France's West African possessions were known, consistently failed to introduce effective legislative controls upon Eastern Mediterranean migration under their purview. This was not for lack of trying; from 1905 onwards, administrators both in the territorial government of Guinea and in the Government-General of the Federation in Dakar repeatedly attempted to close their gates to these interlopers of empire, most of them from present-day Lebanon, who first began to venture into West Africa in the last years of the nineteenth century. By the late 1930s, some six thousand citizens of the Mandatory states of Lebanon and Syria resided across AOF. Most worked as produce brokers, shopkeepers, and traders, buying up groundnuts, palm oil, or kola nuts from African producers, and supplying them in turn with consumer goods such as textiles and clothes, processed foodstuffs, alcohol, and matches. Despite their attempts to channel and stem this flow of men and women, AOF administrators proved unable to impose effective legislative checks upon their movements.

Scholars have long been attentive to the relationship between legal regimes and agrarian dispossession in the resource frontiers of the postcolonial world. The analytical problem of identifying how private firms use legal regimes to take control of land—whether for mining, plantations, or Special Economic Zones—now animates a new body of research seeking the historical antecedents for contemporary land grabs. In the case of colonial South Asia, existing scholarship has often tended to suggest that the law precedes processes of capital accumulation, and that colonial capital operated within the confines of definable, even if legally plural, institutional regimes, such as property rights and commercial law. This perspective suggests, if only implicitly, that capitalist firms prefer to work within formal frameworks of legality. In this article, I outline a different understanding of the place of law in colonial South Asia, which follows the formation of property law for coal at the end of the nineteenth century. I argue that the discursive framing of coal's status as property emerged out of, rather than preceded, social and ecological displacements caused by a coal commodity boom after 1894. Reconstructing conflicts over coal-bearing agrarian land through civil court records and mining company property deeds, I demonstrate how the absence of coal property within the colonial legal archive was reassembled through a recursive conception of legality. This genealogy of law recovers the historical context for contemporary struggles over mining claims in India's coal region today.

In historical writing on the British West Indies, discussion of the transition from slavery to other forms of labour control after emancipation has been largely confined to the plantation colonies. It is usually argued that planters were most successful in controlling former slaves in colonies where they were able to limit the freedman's access to land and thus create a dependent wage-earning proletariat. Such an analysis cannot, however, be readily applied to the Bahamas, where the plantation system based on cotton production had collapsed before emancipation and where the sea provided an important source of subsistence and employment. This article examines the control mechanisms which enabled a white mercantile minority to consolidate its position as a ruling elite in the postemancipation period. Rather than a monopoly of land, the important elements in this elite's economic and social control were a monopoly of the credit available to the majority of the population and the operation of a system of payment in truck. The credit and truck systems frequently left the lower classes in debt and, as a governor of the colony in the late nineteenth century remarked, in a position of “practical slavery. ”

Two irrevocable commitments of Spanish colonial policy were that the natives as “new Christians” merited some guarantees as to their property rights and the liberty of their persons and that colonizing based upon the services of Indian labor had to be made profitable for the Spanish colonists. The Spanish crown seldom vacillated in its sometimes quixotically pursued determination to reconcile these two cardinal commitments. Harmonized they sometimes were, but there are striking cases where the two goals seemed mutually exclusive. The aim of this essay is to examine some patterns of change and continuity which emerged during those periods of crisis when the general well-being of the colony apparently clashed with the specific welfare of the Indians.

Although much of the history of women's suffrage has focused on the American and British struggles of the early twentieth century, a newer generation of interdisciplinary scholars is exploring its global trajectory. Fundamental to these cross-cultural comparisons is the establishment of an international timeline of women's suffrage; its order at once shapes and is shaped by its historiography. According to the currently dominant chronology, “Female suffrage began with the 1893 legislation in New Zealand” (Ramirez, Soysal, and Shanahan 1997: 738; see also Grimshaw 1987 [1972]: xiv). In this timeline, “Australia was next to act, in 1902” (ibid.). Despite the geographical location of New Zealand and Australia in greater Southeast Asia, the narrative that accompanies this timeline portrays “first world” women as leading the struggle for suffrage and “third world” women as following their example.1 As Ramirez, Soysal, and Shanahan write, “A smaller early wave of suffrage extensions between 1900 and 1930 occurred mostly in European states. A second, more dramatic wave occurred after 1930” (ibid.). Similarly, Patricia Grimshaw writes, “It was principally in the English-speaking world, in the United States, in Britain and its colonial dependencies, and in the Scandinavian countries that sustained activity for women's political enfranchisement occurred. Other countries eventually followed suit” (1987: xiv).

Haitian Vodou has long been viewed through a distorted lens by outsiders. In the nineteenth century, as the Republic of Haiti suffered from a unique degree of economic and political isolation implemented and enforced by the powerful slaveholding empires and nations that surrounded it, Vodou was commonly represented as the ultimate antithesis of “civilization,” as a case of African superstition reborn in the Americas. During the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, images of Haitian Vodou as a terrain of demonic possession, absurd superstition, and zombis proliferated in the United States. At the same time, the twentieth century has also seen the publication of several careful ethnographic works about Vodou. During the 1930s, Melville Herskovits published his Life in a Haitian Valley, which argued that the Haitian religion had West African roots. During the same period Zora Neale Hurston wrote her less well-known Tell My Horse. Both of these works attentively described aspects of Vodou, as did Alfred Metraux's classic 1959 text Voodoo in Haiti. The next year Harold Courlander's Drum and Hoe provided detailed examinations of Haitian ritual music. The filmmaker and dancer Maya Deren published her at times experimental Divine Horsemen, which drew on Joseph Campbell's theories in seeking to describe the theological system of the religion. Another dancer, Kathryn Dunham, also described Vodou in her Island Possessed, published in 1969. The obstinate, broader stereotypes against which these works were articulated influenced the ways in which all these authors wrote about and interpreted the religion. These texts, notably those by Metraux and Deren, fought a battle for Vodou, confronting the idea that was it was little more than a “cult” or the expression of “superstition,” with carefully crafted descriptions of the belief systems and ritual of what they showed to be a complex and deeply rooted religion. This work on Vodou developed alongside other works on “Afro-Atlantic” religions, such as Cuban Santéria, and Brazilian Candomblé, as well as on the African influences on Afro-American Christianity.Melville Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1971); Zora Neal Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990); Alfred Metraux, Voodoo in Haiti (New York: Schocken Books, 1959); Harold Courlander, The Drum and the Hoe: Life and Lore of the Haitian People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (New York: McPherson and Company, 1953); Katherine Dunham, Island Possessed (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969). Among the classic broader studies of African religion in the New World are Roger Bastide, African Civilizations in the New World (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), and, more recently, Robert Farris Thompson's Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983).

This article examines the recent emergence of homophobia among Muslims in Singapore. While Islamic scriptures were used to justify homophobia, interpretations of these holy texts regarding non-normative sexualities have always been diverse. The anti-homosexuality exegesis of Islamic scriptures gained traction in a particular constellation of contemporary politics. When the state broached a discussion over whether a colonial-era law criminalizing homosexuality should be repealed, evangelical Christians were the first to vigorously support the retention of the law. Evangelical Christian homophobic discourses were soon reproduced by Muslims, whose own conservatism has been rising in recent years. Longstanding state biases against Muslims (who are mostly lower-working-class Malays), however, restricted the expression of their religious conservatism, which makes it useful for them to perform good citizenship by standing alongside evangelical Christians (mostly middle-class Chinese). This article demonstrates that Muslim homophobia has complex roots and explanations that cannot be reduced solely to Islam.

The consolidation of China did not come immediately with China's unification. It was not fully accomplished until the middle of the Former (Western) Han. The monolithic2 nature of the political powers and a group of local elite3 were then forming. And the bureaucracy, becoming much elaborated during this era, served to link the two. The elite group functioned, on the one hand as the reservoir of candidates to officialdom, and on the other hand, as the leading element with education, prestige, and often wealth, in the community. Based on these concepts, this paper ventures to present the formation of the local elite group through the changing social base of political power during Western Han.