Historians have documented extensively the fascination of many American intellectuals with the Soviet Union and fascist Italy during the 1920s and 1930s (Diggins 1966; 1972; Feuer 1962; Filene 1967; Warren 1993). They have also drawn a compelling analogy between the sympathetic attitudes of American intellectuals toward Soviet Russia and the sympathy of a later generation of intellectuals towards Cuba, China and North Vietnam (Skotheim 1971: 96–106; Hollander 1981; Caute 1988). However, little effort has been made to examine whether the forgiving attitudes toward fascist Italy might also have had a historical analogue in the form of forgiving attitudes toward other, non-communist, dictatorships.

The archives of French India and French Guiana, two colonies that were failing by the mid-nineteenth century, elucidate the legacy of colonial linguistics by drawing attention to the ideological and technological natures of colonial printing and the far-reaching and longstanding consequences of the European objectification of Indian vernaculars. Torn between religious, commercial, and imperialist agendas, the French in India both promoted Catholicism and advanced the scientific study of Tamil, the majority language spoken in the colonial headquarters of Pondicherry. There, a little known press operated by the Paris Foreign Missions shipped seventy-one dictionaries, grammars, and theological works printed in Tamil and French to Catholic schools undergoing secularization in French Guiana, a colony with several thousand Tamil indentured laborers. I analyze the books’ lexical, orthographic, and typographical forms, metalinguistic commentaries, publicity tactics, citational practices, and circulation histories by drawing on seldom-discussed materials from the Archives nationales d'outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence, France. I propose a theoretical framework to investigate how technology intersects with the historical relationship between language and colonialism, and argue that printing rivalries contributed to Orientalist knowledge production by institutionalizing semiotic and language ideologies about the nature of “perfectible” and “erroneous” signs. My comparative approach highlights the interdiscursive features of different genres and historical periods of Tamil documentation, and underscores how texts that emerged out of disparate religious and scientific movements questioned the veracity of knowledge and fidelity of sources. Such metalinguistic labor exposed the evolving stances of French Indologists toward Dravidian and Indo-Aryan linguistics and promoted religious and secular interests in educational and immigration policies.

In December 1832, less than a year before the British Parliament passed the first imperial slave emancipation bill, an all-white jury in the British Caribbean colony of Barbados convicted a black, enslaved man named Robert James of having robbed and sexually violated Margaret Higginbotham, an impoverished white widow and mother. Since Robert James was a black man accused of raping a white woman the jury's decision could hardly have surprised anyone and his rapid dispatch by a hangman must have been universally expected.

This article examines a case study from war-torn Sierra Leone in 1994, in which a rumor galvanized violent public action and only dissipated when a seemingly unrelated issue was resolved. I argue that the circulation of rumors can foment the emergence of political narratives focused on topics that are otherwise taboo, and creates the space to act on them without overtly disturbing the status quo. I analyze the content of interview material with residents of the town of Makeni and eight months of articles printed in national newspapers to illustrate the subtle emergence of tribal accusations in the context of military mutiny. The rumor itself concerned an imminent attack by mutinous, criminal soldiers (called sobels) on the town they were meant to defend. This instigated a mass demonstration, shooting into a crowd, political mudslinging, and accusations that some politicians were trying to “tribalize the war.” Responding to the distress, the government removed the offending “tribalist” administrator from Makeni, and all talk of sobel fears dissipated, even as the reality of sobels was borne out in confirmed attacks and a high profile court-martialing. That tribal favoritism was the real issue was illustrated by residents' embrace of their new military administrator and the town's unprecedented move towards development in the midst of renewed security threats.

With Pushkin's narrative poem Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822), Circassians entered the Russian imperial imaginary as exemplary personifications of the savagery and freedom of the Caucasus as a whole (Layton 1994; 1997; Grant 2005; 2007). Accordingly, the Russian imagination of Circassian polity, now as egalitarian “free societies,” now as hierarchical aristocracies, now as “noble savages,” now as ignoble brutes, Muslim “fanatics,” or “Asiatic despots,” was a microcosm of the Russian colonial engagement with the Caucasus as a whole, often as not reflecting tensions in the self-perception of imperial autocracy and its elites more than indigenous political organization of Caucasian groups like Circassians in reality (Layton 1997; Jersild 2002; Grant 2005). Inasmuch as such imperial imaginings informed the fantasies of young men, causing them to enlist in search of the poetry of warfare, or informed fantasies of conquest among agents of the Russian state, these imaginings became real in their consequences for various Caucasian groups (Layton 1994; 1997). Nor was the exemplary alterity accorded Circassians limited to Russian audiences; it exerted a considerable fascination across Europe as well (King 2007: 241–45).

The distinction between state and civil society is deeply rooted in both sociology and political theory (Barkey and Parikh 1991:525; Bobbio 1999:115; Habermas 1989:19). Even thinkers who argue that civil society and the state ‘interact' often retain the basic conceptual opposition between the terms. Barkey and Parikh go so far as to characterize recent work on the state as “the state-society literature” (1991:524). Within sociology, however, there is less theoretical discussion of what connects state and society—political society—or the way that interests in civil society are constituted as claims on the state. But as the Sardinian Marxist Antonio Gramsci pointed out in his Prison Notebooks, and the German sociologist Max Weber is his essay on class, status and parties, political society is reducible neither to interests in civil society, nor to the state (Gramsci 1971:138–40; Weber 1946:194; see also Poulantzas 1976: 95; Przeworski 1985:67; Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin 1991:1153; Wright 1978: 103, 222).

This paper explores the movements of asylum patients in and out of psychiatric care in French Indochina as the product of everyday interactions between psychiatrists, colonial authorities, and the public, especially patients' families. Throughout the interwar years, families and communities actively participated in psychiatric decision-making in ways that disrupt our notions of the colonial asylum as a closed setting that patients rarely left, run by experts who enjoyed broad, unquestioned authority. Vietnamese families, by debating individuals' suitability for social life, engaged with professional psychiatrists to find common ground for thinking about and discussing mental illness. At the same time, they pursued their own strategies in ways that significantly limited the power of experts. Debates revolved around the mental health of patients, but also around the capacity of families to assume their care upon release, and whether the asylum itself was the most appropriate site for treatment and rehabilitation. By considering how lay people and experts came together to negotiate the confinement and release of asylum patients, this paper offers a novel perspective on the development of psychiatric knowledge and power in colonial settings. I argue that by situating the history of psychiatry within the local dynamics of colonial rule as opposed to expert discourse, the asylum emerges here less as a blunt instrument for the social control and medicalization of colonial society than as a valuable historical site for reframing narratives of colonial repression and resistance.

This paper is a reinterpretation of the origins of the Cold War from a novel point of view: Soviet foreign economic policy. It questions two fundamental concepts that have formed the basis for our understanding of that conflict: Soviet autarky, and bipolarity. Soviet autarky has been the basis for an understanding of a “war” that, although never fought on military terms, needed two sides to be so conceptualized. Just as enemies in war can have no areas of meaningful cooperation, so did academics require of these Cold War rivals an all-encompassing enmity. To do so they came to consider the Soviet Union a camp apart, unconnected and hostile to the capitalist order. Scholars required a Soviet Union politically committed to autarky. Using archives from Moscow, however, the article argues that the Soviet Union was not autarkic by political choice and, at length, not autarkic at all. It followed a similar trajectory in international economic engagement as that of the countries in the so-called free world, and what's more, sought to do so. In other words, when one looks at the political economy of Soviet economic relations, the conceptual framework of bipolarity that sustains much of the work on the Cold War becomes difficult to maintain. Instead, I argue, an immensely powerful liberal world order acted on the Soviet Union in ways that should be familiar to scholars of global capitalism.

This article explores the ambivalent forms of authority and legitimacy articulated by the Office of the High Representative of the international community in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. The High Representative exercised quasi-sovereign powers that placed his position at the center of two contradictions: a democratization paradox of “imposing democracy,” that is, promoting democracy through undemocratic means, and a state-building paradox of building an independent state by violating the principle of popular sovereignty. I analyze the Office's use of mass-mediated publicity to show how the High Representative sought to legitimize his actions in ways that both sustained the norms of democracy and statehood he advocated and suspended the contradictions behind how he promoted them. In doing so, he claimed that Bosnia was caught in a temporary state of exception to the normal nation-state order of things. This claim obliged him to show that he was working to end the state of exception. By focusing on one failed attempt by the OHR to orchestrate an enactment of “local ownership” that was aimed at demonstrating that Bosnia no longer required foreign supervision, this article identifies important limits to internationally instigated political transformation. It offers a view of international intervention that is more volatile, open-ended, and unpredictable than either the ordered representations of the technocratic vision or the confident assertions that critique international intervention as a form of (neo)imperial domination. It also demonstrates the analytic importance of publicity for the comparative study of international nation-building and democratization in the post-Cold War era.

Anthropologists' view of law, as Bohannan (1963: 288) recently summarized, is generally concerned with two aspects: one studies the legal procedures of foreign cultures and discovers and compares inquisitorial and correctional devices, and the other focuses on basic axioms or ‘postulates’ underlying the stated norms or laws of a society. Bohannan amplifies the scope by noting that not only the ‘institutions of counteraction’ should be studied but also the events that precede and follow counteraction, for the anthropologist has learnt that legal institutions are, after all, a product of and constantly molded by indigenous culture. We are better aware of this interrelationship in simple cultures (for examples, see Bohannan, 1957; Gluckman, 1955,1965; Hoebel, 1954; Llewellyn and Hoebel, 1941; Pospisil, 1958; Schapera, 1938; and Beattie, 1957). The anthropologist has attempted to compare and analyze the legal institutions of one society with another, and tried to learn what the natives thought they ought to do, and what they thought constituted a ‘breach’ of norms.

Was bedeutet die Bewegung? What does this movement mean?

Bringt die Ost mir frohe Kunde? Goethe, cited from “West-östlicher Divan,” on title page of George B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan: A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures (New York: Knopf, 1968). Sansom, of course, was certain that the West did not need to learn anything from the East. Does the East bring me glad tidings?

An analogy comparing Shin Buddhism—the largest, most active, and most liberal of Japan's traditional Buddhist institutions—to Protestant Christianity has existed for a long time, beginning with the sixteenth century Jesuit encounter with Japan. See Galen Amstutz, Interpreting Amida: Orientalism and History in the Study of Pure Land Buddhism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). The analogy has always been distinctly limited in scope and in important respects has also always—in the context of all world history—remained primarily confined to the Shin-Christian encounter. Apparently, the kind of evolution of consciousness it indicates is historically rare. Notably, the notion of protestant has never developed into a systematic comparative term even in religious studies. See Amstutz, Interpreting Amida, 180–1.

The spectacular confrontation between the Chinese government and the Falungong spiritual movement has focused attention on the very visible conflict between state and religion in China's urban areas. Conflict and violence have also accompanied the explosion of popular religious activities in the rural areas of post-Mao China, where much of the conflict is subdued and largely invisible to the outside observer. Christians are denied the permits necessary to make “home worship” legal; popular religious temples are confiscated and occupied by authorities hungry for physical and cultural space; proselytizers seeking to spread the Word or the Way are run out of town on a rail. Other examples, however, are much more spectacular, and recall the mobilizing force enjoyed by certain religious groups in imperial times. Wu Yangming was arrested in 1995 for having founded the “Anointed King Sect” in eastern Anhui, which was to “unite the country” in its spirit (Maclean's 1996). The “Lightening from the East” sect preached the second coming of Christ as a woman, and prophesied the end of the world according to a mixture of folk Buddhist and Christian soteriological motifs (China Study Journal 1997). In the context of the group studied in this essay, the Way of the Temple of the Heavenly Immortals, a sect leader summoned village cadres to a Temple festival in 1985 and delivered—in trance—a message to village cadres:

In a provocatively entitled article, “Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community: An Open and Shut Case,” Professor G. William Skinner has raised a number of important issues regarding the closed corporate and open peasant community types first formulated by Eric Wolf (1955, 1957). Skinner questions Wolfs assumption (1957: 8) that closed corporate communities developed in areas where society became dualized “…into a dominant entrepreneurial sector and a dominated sector of native peasants,” whereas open peasant communities arose in the new, market-production oriented settlements budded off from Europe “ …in response to the rising demand for cash crops which accompanied the development of capitalism in Europe” (Wolf, 1955: 462).

In Brazil, ever since the thirties, when the sociologist, Gilberto Freyre, made pioneering use of journalism as a source for his studies of the past, considerable weight has been given to journalistic texts on the grounds that their news and editorial sections, as well as their advertising columns, portray society with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

In recent years sociological work in the field of stratification and social mobility has become, in at least one sense of the term, impressively cosmopolitan. National sample surveys which include data on inter-generational occupational mobility have been carried out in every major Western nation and in a good many non-Western societies as well, and those have inspired some ambitious comparative analyses of social mobility. This development, as S. M. Miller puts it, has had the virtue of making "the study of mobility one of the few fields of sociology which has overcome national parochialisms”. True as this is, however, it must be said that there are forms of parochialism other than national. Much contemporary research into social mobility suffers from one of these - a parochialism of time rather than of place, as it were, the parochialism of presentism. My purpose here is to suggest what is lost as a result of that parochialism, and to argue that a sense of the past, an ability to see his subject in historical depth, is not a luxury but a necessity for the student of social mobility.

The gorgons had thus the same effect as paradoxes. For paralysis means: immobility; and immobility: to be unable to observe (Niklas Luhmann).Niklas Luhmann, “Sthenographie und Euryalistik,” Paradoxien, Dissonanzen, Zusammenbrüche, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht und K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds. (Frankfurt a. M., 1991), 58. Recently, the “paradoxical” character of sixteenth-century Venetian politics and culture has become the focus of attention among scholars of early modern Venice. In her book on City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice, Martha Feldman states that “Venice was above all a paradoxical city,” given the “divided consciousness” of Venetians whose urban culture oscillated “in a peculiarly ambivalent counterpoise” to contemporary court culture.Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (University of California Press, 1995), 10. Margaret Rosenthal has examined how Veronica Franco, poetess and prostitute in sixteenth-century Venice, portrayed herself as an “honest courtesan,” ingeniously appropriating the oxymoronic Venus-Virgin paradigm in Venetian iconography.Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (University of Chicago Press, 1992). According to Edward Muir, the doge's “two contrasting personae, one so humbled and the other so splendid,” were the complementary features of a “paradoxical prince.”Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton University Press, 1981), 261. I would like to contribute to this debate by analyzing how the social practice of marriage among the patriciate and the language of perfection in sixteenth-century political discourse followed the logic of paradoxical constellations. Rather than arguing for a causal connection between social practice on the one hand and political theory on the other, I propose to apply one analytical framework to investigate the paradoxical qualities of different social, political, economic, and cultural phenomena which were at the center of politics and society in Late Renaissance Venice.

The years of colonial rule in Malawi (formerly Nyasaland) were characterised by the imposition of a political and social system whereby a superior European authority attempted to exercise its will over a territory already populated by Africans. This enforced colonial relationship determined the pattern of political change within the Protectorate, so that any variation in the fundamentals of the relationship was bound to have important repercussions on the total colonial situation. From the earliest years of British rule in Malawi, Africans sought to modify or alter the colonial relationship and it is this sort of African sentiment and activity in reaction to alien control and domination that has come to be regarded as manifestations of nationalism not only in colonial Malawi but also in the other ex-colonial territories of Africa. Thomas Hodgkin, for example, has lumped under the general rubric of ‘nationalism’ “any organisation or group that explicitly asserts the rights, claims and aspirations of a given African society (from the level of the language-group to that of ‘Pan-Africa’) in opposition to European authority, whatever its institutional form and objectives”. Others, however, although appreciating the deep roots of nationalism have tended to confine the use of the term to the post-1945 period with its emergence of nation-wide movements seeking self-government and independence. They have argued that to include every social movement of protest against alien rule as a part of nationalism obscures the political meaning of the concept, blurs the important distinctions that can be made among African responses to the colonial situation, and makes comparative analysis difficult.

Recently attention has been devoted to the use of apparent eclipse references in African oral traditions for dating at least a few remembered events with some certainty and precision. Unquestionably the few such references in these sources could be invaluable in charting islands of absoluteness in a sea of relativity. In fact their very importance demands that their study should, from the very beginning, be undertaken as carefully as possible, following the example set in refining the paths of African eclipses. One way in which a higher level of critical analysis can be attained is by bringing the rich comparative data to bear on the problems associated with the interpretation of historical eclipse references. This paper attempts to initiate this process by discussing some results of research into eclipse references preserved in oral historical sources and by scontemporaneous chroniclers and observers.

The forms and processes of local-level social organisation seen today in fishing communities in northern Europe can be fully appreciated only after their history is recognized and explored. Until the middle of this century, the predominant form of organisation was the joint maritime household, which involved men and women in separate sets of collaborative activities. With changing technology, rising standards of living, and the intervention of the institutions of modernity, women everywhere in northern Europe have been able to disengage themselves from their former obligations, doing so largely in order to realise their aspirations for domestic independence. The men, however, continue to own their boats in partnerships and to pool their labour, drawing upon relationships of kinship, affinity, and neighbourhood as economic and social recnnrces