In every neighborhood of Dakar, Senegal, large houses in various stages of construction stand as witnesses to and evidence of transnational movements of labor and capital. These ambitious building projects, funded by Senegalese migrants living and working abroad, have utterly transformed the city landscape, and their pervasiveness leads many Dakarois to assume that everyone must be migrating. Intended as eventual family homes, investment properties, or a combination of the two, the innovative layouts and architectural flourishes of these not-yet houses echo lives lived elsewhere while drawing on local aesthetics and approaches to spatial design. Though some houses seem to near completion within just a year or two, most structures linger for several years or even a decade, slowly eroding as families and hired contractors wait for money transfers from abroad. Some constructions boast newly laid bricks or fresh paint, while others are obscured by overgrown vegetation and debris.

The use of internal colonial theories to examine racial developments within the United States of America had become almost fashionable by the late 1960s. A decade later, a study of the political economy of Wales described the internal colonial approach which it criticized as a “new variant of a time-worn model.’ Amongst historians, however, the internal colonial concept does not appear to be as familiar as it is to other social scientists. This article is addressed to historians who do not subscribe unreservedly to Alfred Cobban's belief that sociologists are their natural enemies, and amongst whom some might still be considering the implications of Fernand Braudel's contention that a “general history always requires an overall model, good or bad, against which events can be interpreted. ‘No theory, no history.’” The purpose here is to indicate some uses and characteristics of theories that the internal colonial concept has promoted, to comment briefly about some of the methodological issues which these theories present, and to suggest some benefits that the concept might have for certain types of social and historical enquiry.

Not all spirits have retreated to metaphor, even in the very public sphere of U.S. electoral politics. As we learned during the last presidential campaign, Governor Sarah Palin enlisted the help of Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee during his 2005 visit to Alaska to cast out the spirits that hindered her career. The New York Times elaborated, “Ms. Palin has long associations with religious leaders who practice a … brand of Pentecostalism known as ‘spiritual warfare.’ Its adherents believe that demonic forces can colonize specific geographic areas and individuals.… Critics say the goal of the spiritual warfare movement is to create a theocracy” (Goodstein 2008, my emphasis).

This essay deals with factors that contribute to the emergence of egalitarian ideologies, tracing the social processes they entail and analysing their consequences for social life.

Modern nations have often been explicitly imagined through familial metaphors. In particular, the construction of the national community as a brotherhood (a fraternity) has pointed both to the centrality of male bonding in the production of nationalist sentiment and to the exclusion of women from the social contract. Within that contract not only were women “subject to men's power; it also implied complementary bonds between men;… women had no place in the new political and social order except as markers of social relations between men.”

Hunt's observation recalls Sedgwick's analysis of how male bonding is mediated through the figure of woman. In nationalist discourse representing the homeland as a female body has often been used to construct a national identity based on male bonding among a nation of brothers.

While resistance and rebellion have remained core themes in anthropology at least since the 1960s, anthropologists have paid much less attention to the study of political revolutions as real historical events. Yet there are compelling real-world reasons why they should orient their analytical apparatus and ethnographic efforts towards revolutionary events. This article advances a series of reasons why anthropology can enrich and supplement existing political science and history traditions in the study of political revolutions. Anthropology can do so via key concepts developed by Victor Turner: “liminality,” “social drama,” “communitas,” “frame,” and “play.” Turner's ritual approach gains further relevance when linked to another series of concepts developed by Marcel Mauss, Gabriel Tarde, Georg Simmel, and Gregory Bateson, such as “imitation,” “trickster,” “schismogenesis,” and “crowd behavior.” To study revolutions implies not only a focus on political behavior “from below,” but also recognition of moments where “high and low” are relativized or subverted, and where the micro- and macro-levels fuse in critical conjunctions.

Four years after their “emancipation” in 1838, the former slaves of British Guiana protested against their conditions and their unfair treatment by the planters who sought to bind them to labor on the estates. When the planters introduced certain rules and regulations, which were intended to regulate the quality and quantity of work, and to reduce labor costs by lowering wages and abolishing customary allowances of free medical attention, housing, and provision grounds, the workers complained to the stipendiary magistrates and stopped work.

In the analysis of ethnic separatism and secession, two approaches can be distinguished. One is to ask what forces are responsbile for the general upsurge in secessionist movements, from Burma te-Biafra and Bangladesh, from Corsica to Quebec, and from Eritrea to the Southern Philippines. Another approach is to ask what moves certain territorially discrete ethnic groups to attempt to leave the states of which they are a part (or at least to secure substantial territorial autonomy), whereas other groups, also regionally concentrated, make no such attempts. The first question calls for a general explanation of aggregate trends; it aims to compare the present with some period in the past. The second calls for an explanation that can discriminate among classes of cases; it entails comparison not across time, but across space.

What do you think you would find on the desk of a censor? He—almost certainly “he”—would not need much. A jar filled with blue pencils. A coffee cup. A phone for whispering praise to the higher-ups and for ignoring the entreaties of his victims. For reading material, an ideological reference manual or a dog-eared sheaf of instructions would suffice. Surely, one would not expect to find any actual books on the censor's shelves—why read when your life is committed to eviscerating literature?

If there is anything that exemplifies a certain common style in ethnographically-oriented approaches to culture and society today, and sets them apart from other kinds of social science, it is the habit, irritating to colleagues in some other disciplines, frustrating to students, deemed perverse by potential funders, and bewildering to the public, of responding to explanations with the remark, “We need to complicate the story.” The words “reductionist” and “essentializing” are brandished with scorn. One important perspective is expressed by this remark by Jean and John Comaroff, two influential anthropologists with solid roots in longterm fieldwork, the sobriety of British social anthropology, and the tough-minded realism of the Marxist tradition: ethnography “refuses to put its trust in techniques that give more scientific methods their illusory objectivity: their commitment to standardized, a priori units of analysis, for example, or their reliance on a depersonalizing gaze that separates subject from object” (1992:8). These words, offered almost in passing, take a host of important arguments as settled. One is that it is no longer in much dispute that cultural anthropology is not merely at an “immature” stage, en route to something more akin to natural science. Most significant, perhaps, is the assumption that the separation of subject from object can be understood only in negative terms, that to say that a field of knowledge “depersonalizes” is ipso facto to discredit it. Yet in their own ethnographic and historical work the Comaroffs take their empirical materials very seriously and do not wholly reject the separation of subject from object—how could they? What is at issue, rather, is what kinds of “objects” and “subjects,” and what categories of analysis and comparison, are epistemologically appropriate and ethically legitimate for the study of social actions and self-understandings.

In the wake of decolonisation, an increasing number of analyses turned the ethnographic gaze onto anthropology itself. Humbler postcolonial strategies emerged, designed to democratise anthropology's intercultural staging by means of an exchange of dialogue (Crapanzano 1977, 1980; Dwyer 1977, 1982). Though sensitive to the backdrop of neocolonialism, however, these strategies largely ignored anthropology's own cultural genealogy in favour of a more particularistic focus on the scene of ethnographic interaction.

An important part of the by now enormous literature on nationalism has focused on its conditions of possibility, on what we may call the processes of pre-formation that underlay the explosive rise of those “imagined communities” in the modern era. How indeed has modernity (however defined) impacted on the mechanisms by which identities—including national ones—are formed, felt and enacted? This question has frequently been addressed in recent decades, especially as studies of nationalism have broadened their ambit to take in the non-Western world. This expansion has certainly generated major works—most famously, of course, the first edition (1983) of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities which made the stimulating suggestion that print capitalism was a central pre-formative institution for incipient nations.

“Naturally, everyone would like to get their hands on kuru brains,” wrote D. Carleton Gajdusek in 1957. A young medical scientist, Gajdusek was writing from his bush laboratory in the eastern highlands of New Guinea, and he had in mind the competition among pathologists in Melbourne, Australia, and Bethesda, Maryland, for the valuable specimens. But he may also have considered his own recent transactions with the Fore people, afflicted with what he thought was the disease of kuru, and on whose hospitality he was then relying. Blood and brains, the germinal objects of his field research, were richly entangled in local community relations and global scientific networks; they could convey one meaning to the Fore, another to Gajdusek, and yet another to laboratory workers in Australia and the United States. These objects could be exchanged as gifts or commodities in different circumstances, or on the same occasion the different parties might confuse gift exchange with commodity transaction. At times, the scientist would try to obtain goods through barter, or even to appropriate them; and, then again, he might find that what he wanted was out of circulation altogether. In the field, Gajdusek had become enmeshed in a complex and fragile web of relationships with the Fore in order to acquire specimens that, through further exchanges with senior colleagues, might yet make his scientific reputation.

The exceptionalism thesis is well known. It purports that the United States—because of its anti–colonial tradition, democratic values, and liberal institutions—is not and has never been an empire. Scholarship critical of exceptionalist thought has demonstrated how this self-fashioning works. In denying empire, the United States exhibits an “imperial amnesia” about its past while “displacing” its imperial present. But recent events have served to complicate both traditional exceptionalism and the claims of its critics.

While cross-disciplinary analysis of ghosts and haunting has burgeoned in recent decades, much of this scholarship presumes the figure of the ghost as a less than literal apparition. We propose that writers such as Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon, who make use of the ghostly as a trope, are in fact describing a phenomenon we term secondary haunting, distinct from accounts of unquiet spirits who address the living directly with specific demands for redress: a visceral and often frightening experience we term primary haunting. Drawing on a contemporary account of the ghosts of a massacre in a Vietnamese village, we explore the complex interaction of primary and secondary haunting, the different kinds of memory work they engage in and the different moral communities they mobilize.

During World War II, Jacques Stern, a former French Minister of Colonies, wrote almost lyrically of the “patient labor of assimilation” by which France had been “consolidating the moral and material ties which bind together forty million continental Frenchmen and sixty million overseas Frenchmen, white and colored” in the French Empire. When the Brazzaville Conference met in 1944 under the auspices of the Free French government to consider the postwar future of that empire, its final resolution declared that the aims of the work of colonization which France is pursuing in her colonies exclude any idea of autonomy and any possibility of development outside the French empire bloc; the attainment of self-government in the colonies even in themost distant future must be excluded.

This essay describes the politics of voluntary isolation, an emerging category of indigeneity predicated on a form of human life that exists outside of history, the market, and wider networks of social connection. It traces a recent controversy around one such “isolated” population—Ayoreo-speaking people in the Paraguayan Gran Chaco—to suggest how these politics of isolation may represent a new regime of what Didier Fassin has called “biolegitimacy,” or the uneven political parsing and authorization of valid human life, within global formations of indigeneity. Here, I identify how international human rights law, multiculturalist state policies, humanitarian NGO programs, and genetic science all share an investment in the moral defense of isolated life. I explore how this investment may divide the kind of humanity authorized or claimed as “indigenous” into opposing legitimacies that are set against one another and vertically ranked. The essay argues that what is at stake in this process is not merely a new technique of the self or the enduring romance of the primitive, but the redistribution of the meaning and value assigned to those domains of human life imagined in opposition to social relation itself.

INTRODUCTION

In looking at yesterday's frontiers (or at today's industrialized world), social analysts tend to see violence as a straightforward and uncomplicated phenomenon: when openly used, it is a direct way of settling disputes; when it is not used but available, it is a necessary—and, at least in the short run, sufficient—condition of domination. As a background condition violence is readily forgotten. Such is the case even in the study of the various affronts to authority that are lumped under the rubric of‘collective behavior.’ One speaks of violent ‘episodes’ arising from the ‘breakdown’ of various routine social mechanisms. By the same token, all the interesting problems in political theory seem to lie in the area of how to control people in every other conceivable manner: through the establishment of a normative consensus, through ideologies, through the creation of common interests, or through bargains and deals. Sufficient consideration is not usually given to the varied and subtle effects of these ways in which the capacity for violence is structured in social life. But consequences follow for any society from the presence or absence of full-time military specialists, from the forms of their organization, from the regional distribution of control of organized violence, from the advantages and disadvantages associated with the use of force, and from the norms associated with such use.

Like many other states, Israel was forged through the struggle of a national liberation movement that likely drew inspiration from an ethnic past and that certainly worked to establish a political framework. Once the state existed, however, its leaders did not regard the ethnie as an objective category that would in large measure determine whether a nation would emerge. Instead, they viewed the ethnie as a subject susceptible, in varying degrees, to manipulation, invention, domination, and mobilization. As the prime minister of Piedmont said, “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians”; or as Israel's first prime minister, Ben-Gurion, put it in April 1951 during the election campaign: “I see in these elections the shaping of a nation for the state because there is a state but not a nation.”