This essay reflects a year of field work in what was then the Soviet Union, in a study regarded as the first ethnographic research conducted by a Western anthropologist in a Russian city. The Russians are particularly important for anthropological study, not only because of recent historic events indicating changes in their political and economic structures but because they are one of several groups of northern people organized into urban industrial societies characterized by varying amounts of mass violence. This violence has been employed in subjugating minority peoples within their normal borders and outside of their borders, in absorbing those cultures, and has taken on the various forms of genocide, purges, propaganda and fear.

Since the mid-1970s a number of rural areas on the periphery of Southern Europe have undergone rapid economic growth and structural transformation. They appeared to be following the earlier and much celebrated experience of the Third Italy comprising the North-East and Central provinces. The major form of industrial organisation which emerged in these regions was the small “flexible” firm, which was widely regarded as an alternative to the principles of Taylor-Fordism that lay at the heart of the industrialisation process of the more favored regions. However, almost from the outset the idea that flexible specialization presented a coherent and robust organisational paradigm has been controversial. Much of the debate was directed towards Spain and Portugal, but Greece, though an integral part of the Southern European space and despite its earlier accession to the European Community (hereafter, EC), has only attracted a limited degree of scholarly interest.

The notions of ‘the sacred’ and ‘the profane’, coined by Emile Durkheim and reinforced by Mircea Eliade, have become indispensable for the historian of religions. No matter how details may vary, every society, every human tradition singles out certain things, acts, words or places as totally distinct from others. In these special things, acts, words or places ‘real reality’ (Eliade) is present, made available or conveyed, and therefore they differ from all ordinary, profane reality.

The history of collective attitudes about death, a branch of the newhistory of mentalités, was until recently considered a speciality, or even acuriosity that was peculiarly French, or so at least, E. Le Roy Laduriewrote with reference to the work of Philippe Aries, Francois Lebrun and myself in his Territory of the Historian.

On November 26, 1949, less than two months after the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Ministry of Culture issued a directive to artists and writers about the importance and possible use in a new era of New Year prints (nianhua), a simple and inexpensive Chinese folk medium used to decorate homes in celebration of the New Year.

In this paper I argue that the ways in which a genealogical idiom brings together multiple scales of space and time is as important to its social, political, or religious efficacy as the particular people, places, and events it incorporates. To illustrate this point, I turn to the unusual patrilineal genealogy of Habib Abdurrahim, a nineteenth-century descendant of the Prophet Muhammad buried in the Indonesian region of Seunagan. Since the late 1950s, Habib Abdurrahim's descendants have cultivated a version of his patriline emphasizing five prominent figures. This constellation of figures, together with the relationships Muslims in Seunagan foster with each of the five, produce configurations of spatial-temporal scale through which local Muslims inscribe themselves as participants in several Islamic pasts: the establishment of Seunagan's customary practice, the Islamization of the Indonesian nation, and Islam's cosmic history. Narrative, social, and ritual practices surrounding Habib Abdurahim's patriline link Muslims in Seunagan to the multiple scales that inhere in the genealogy, encouraging them to see themselves as actors within entwined and unfolding histories of Islamization.

The impact of Christianity on the functioning of the later Roman empire has been examined by historians ever since Gibbon published his Decline and Fall. Had the Christians hastened the decline and fall of Rome? Outlining some themes of his projected work, Gibbon suggested before 1774 that indeed they had. In 1776, when publishing the first volume of his history, he touched on this same issue with considerable circumspection; but five years later, his earlier opinion appeared in print under the heading of “General Observations on the Decline of the Empire in the West” by way of concluding the third volume of the work. Here, Gibbon stated:

As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear, without surprise or scandal, that the introduction, or at least the abuse, of Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged: and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister; a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.

In a recent CSSH article, Jutta Sperling argued that in early modern Venice, political theory was a hermetically enclosed linguistic system, characterized by paradoxes and tautologies.J. Sperling, “The Paradox of Perfection: Reproducing the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1999), 3–32, at p. 16. I am uneasy when historians (or anthropologists for that matter) insist that the “real” significance of what people said and did was inaccessible to them at the time, a position that might be described as methodological atheism and which is generally associated with functionalism (although Sperling's analysis is more like “dysfunctionalism”). By contrast, like Clifford Geertz, I would argue for methodological agnosticism. I do however entirely agree with Sperling that the “second serrata . . . institutionalized tensions between mutually exclusive requirements” (5), and that the paradoxes of Venetian political discourse were “both constitutive and destructive of the political system” (32). Sperling's approach can also be contrasted with S. Chojnacki, “Identity and Ideology in Renaissance Venice: The Third Serrata,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 12977mdash;1797, (J. Martin and D. Romano, eds., Baltimore, 2000, 263–94), which sees patrician marriage legislation as part of a positive programme of self-definition. In what we might describe as a “deconstruction” of the so-called “myth of Venice,” Sperling argued that it collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions, which reveal it to be “non-sensical.”Sperling's article includes full bibliographic references to the literature on the “myth of Venice.” The insistence that Venice was a perfect state not only prevented nobles from dealing effectively with conspicuous consumption and electoral corruption but made it impossible for them to admit to the real source of their problems without destroying their claims to legitimacy. In particular, Sperling singles out the demographic and social consequences of a commitment to lineal purity among nobles, resulting in limited marriage, inflated dowries, the enforced placement of women in nunneries, and increasing economic divisions within a nobility whose official ideology remained one of Republican equality.

Between 1895 and 1945 Japan assembled one of the largest empires in modern world history. It vanished abruptly in the summer of 1945 at the end of the Second World War, and seemed to leave no trace in public consciousness. Historians, too, have portrayed postwar Japan as characterized by a virtual erasure of the imperial past. This article draws on recent scholarship to argue that things were more complicated than that. While references to the imperial past indeed dwindled after about 1960, immediate forgetting did not exhaust the reactions by individuals and interest groups. Some social milieus experienced the dissolution of the empire much more profoundly than official discourse would suggest. Since the mid-1990s, Japan's imperial past has reemerged as a major field of historical inquiry and a more general concern in public debate. In this article I situate the dialectic of remembering and forgetting within larger processes and transformations of the postwar order in East Asia, in particular the American occupation and the emergence of the Cold War.

Based on long-term ethnographic research, this article contributes to the growing scholarship on far-right social movements by presenting an in-depth account of the Italian far-right scene. In presenting personal accounts of three activists and situating them within the milieus in which they are active, it sheds light on a variety of factors that push youth to engage in far-right militancy. Many researchers of far-right extremism have asserted the need to provide more in-depth knowledge on far-right militants, yet there remain important gaps that this article strives to address. First, it demonstrates the value of the ethnographic approach in the study of far right, which offers unique insights into the motivations for involvement and the relations between ideas, beliefs, and practices. Second, it shows the importance of situating present-day activism in a historical context, not only by looking for long-term patterns but also by paying attention to the ways studied actors engage with historical comparisons. Third, in engaging critically with some commonsensical approaches to far-right activists, the paper suggests that ethnographic studies of far-right activism can give us fresh perspectives on broader social phenomena beyond the far right per se.

In the early evening of 14 September 1989, ferocious Hindu-Muslim rioting broke out in the city of Kota in the north Indian state of Rajasthan. The rioting started during the Hindu festival of Anant Chaturdashi, while celebrants were taking out religious processions through the city. Although most of the violence occurred during that first night, it would be another three days before the Indian army could restore an uneasy peace to the city and nearly three weeks more would pass before the military curfew that eventually confined city's inhabitants to their houses for all but a few hours a day was fully lifted. The mayhem claimed the lives of twenty-six individuals and left a further ninety-nine injured in hospital. Countless more ‘walking wounded’ were treated on an outpatient basis in local dispensaries or by friends or neighbors. In addition, vandalism, arson, and looting caused property losses exceeding ten million rupees. Although Muslims constituted only 9 percent of the city's population of roughly half-a-million, they suffered the vast majority of the casualties and bore a disproportionate amount of property loss. By convention we commonly refer to such rioting as ‘Hindu-Muslim violence,’ but the parity implied in this formula is deeply misleading. The vast majority of victims were Muslims.

What explains the remarkable metamorphosis of elites from warrior nobilities into well-mannered aristocrats in early modern Europe? Existing accounts emphasize the coercive force of emerging states or the novel enticements of royal courts. Well suited to the paradigmatic case of early modern France, such arguments fail to explain cases, like England, in which elites developed pacified lifestyles in the absence of a dominant royal court and largely prior to the monopolization of physical force. This essay shows that explaining such cases requires greater attention to the historical variability of elites’ own interests and strategies. I argue that European elites (also) developed pacified lifestyles insofar as they came to reproduce themselves through strategies that operated without their personal use of physical violence (including, but not limited to, royal courts). Such strategies were contingent on varying configurations of inter-elite and elite–non-elite relations. I employ this perspective to explain the marginalization of violent skills and codes in the lifestyles of early modern English elites, focusing empirically on the practice of hunting, a defining ritual of elite lifestyles. The hunting evidence suggests that the landed gentry were the first English elite to develop a pacified lifestyle. Yet the gentry were neither subject to the coercion of a centralized state nor incorporated into a court society. Instead, I show that the gentry—and later, the nobility and monarchy—developed pacified lifestyles because they came to reproduce themselves through legal strategies, the successful performance of which required nonviolent skills and habits.

Since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, our understanding of Cold War history has changed considerably. The wave of new research spurred by the opening of archives and opportunities for novel East-West comparisons threw into sharper relief aspects of the Cold War contest that had received little attention previously. It has become increasingly clear that the Cold War was not only a military, political, and economic conflict, but also one profoundly implicated in, and shaped by, key transformations in twentieth-century culture. Capitalizing on the increased accessibility of primary sources from former socialist states, recent research has provided valuable insights into the politics of everyday culture on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and we have seen as well the publication of several transnational accounts of the cultural Cold War spanning the West and the East.

This article begins from the premise that the margins can shine light on the center, and uses the experience of Jews (thought of as marginal in the Islamic world) in Moroccan courts (similarly thought of as marginal in Islamic history) to tell a new story about orality and writing in Islamic law. Using archival evidence from nineteenth-century Morocco, I argue that, contrary to the prevailing historiography, written evidence was central to procedure in Moroccan shari‘a courts. Records of nineteenth-century lawsuits between Jews and Muslims show that not only were notarized documents regularly submitted in court, but they could outweigh oral testimony, traditionally thought of as the gold standard of evidence in Islam. The evidentiary practices of Moroccan shari‘a courts are supported by the jurisprudential literature of the Mālikī school of Sunni Islam, the only one prevalent in Morocco. These findings have particular relevance for the experience of non-Muslims in Islamic legal institutions. Scholars have generally assumed that Jews and Christians faced serious restrictions in their ability to present evidence in shari‘a courts, since they could not testify orally against Muslims. However, in Morocco Jews had equal access to notarized documents, and thus stood on a playing field that, theoretically at least, was level with their Muslim neighbors. More broadly, I explore ways in which old assumptions about the relationship of the written to the oral continue to pervade our understanding of Islamic law, and call for an approach that breaks down the dichotomy between writing and orality.

The historiography of French colonial educational policy and practice has advanced considerably over the past decade. Not long ago W. Bryant Mum-ford's allegation, “Africans learn to be French,” was taken literally, and most scholars presumed that France, either out of cultural arrogance or blind reflex, brought metropolitan schooling in undiluted form to her colonies. We know better now. Recent studies of education in French West Africa and Indochina have suggested that colonial schools were not only adapted to the colonial context, but taught the students a great deal about their own societies. This article focuses on the knowledge that the two basic school levels, the elementary and primary, distributed about indigenous society in two French colonial federations—French West Africa and Indochina—in the period 1918–38 and speculates as to why the content and distribution of that knowledge took the forms they did. The discussion is based on analysis of texts in use in the primary schools, government curriculum guides, and student school notebooks. It begins with a brief survey of the structure of the educational system and curriculum of the schools as a whole, then proceeds to an analysis of the presentation of indigenous society in the schools.