A Populist newspaper in North Carolina commented in 1890 that agrarian unrest was common just about everywhere, in “high tariff and low tariff” countries as well as in “monarchies, empires, and republics.” Historians of this discontent have neglected the international dimension of protest that was so striking at the time. The countries that produced the most vigorous agrarian movements, Germany and the United States, have been especially well protected from the scrutiny of comparison. One reason for this neglect is that scholars in both countries emphasize their nations' peculiarities and capacity to make their own histories. The most influential study of American Populism, for instance, is still John D. Hicks' The Populist Revolt (1931). Hicks ascribed the movement to the closure of the frontier, the “safety valve” once thought to be the special feature of American history. Most scholars today reject the “Turner thesis,” but continue to see populism as uniquely democratic. Just as American Populists have been celebrated as “good guys,” German agrarian leaders have been demonized. The marked anti-Semitic aspect of agrarian movements in the 1890s has led historians to link them more or less directly to national socialism, the arguably unique “outcome” of German history. Whatever the sources of this exceptionalism, the constrained view has distorted the understanding of a crucial historical conjuncture.

In this article I shall argue that a fundamental and often overlooked trait of ideas and opinions is their controversial or, if you prefer, dialectical character. This means that an idea or an opinion—the words here being used in a general sense—must be seen in connection with its opposite, especially if we are concerned to find its social roots and meaning. To express an idea, to state one's view about something, is a certain kind of action. The purpose of this action is not only to establish a fact but also to exclude other opinions about this fact and, directly or indirectly, to argue against competing opinions, ideologies, theories, and groups. The local or temporal dominance of any particular opinion prompts the question, Why was this position so emphatically maintained? Which were the competing opinions to be excluded?

This article examines extended debates after World War II over the repatriation of Italian civilians from Albania, part of the Italian fascist empire from 1939 until 1943. Italy's decolonization, when it is studied at all, usually figures as rapid and non-traumatic, and an inevitable byproduct of Italy's defeat in the war. The tendency to gloss over the complexities of decolonization proves particularly marked in the Albanian case, given the brevity of Italy's formal rule over that country and the overwhelming historiographical focus on the Italian military experience there. In recovering the complex history of Italian and Albanian relations within which negotiations over repatriation occurred, this article demonstrates the prolonged process of imperial repatriation and its consequences for the individuals involved. In some cases, Italian citizens, and their families, only “returned” home to Italy in the 1990s. The repatriation of these “remainders” of empire concerned not only the Italian and Albanian states but also local committees (notably the Circolo Garibaldi) and international organizations, including the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the International Committee of the Red Cross. In recuperating this history, the analysis rejects seeming truisms about the forgotten or repressed memory of Italian colonialism. Drawing upon critical theories of “gaps,” the article addresses the methodological challenges in writing such a history.

In 2011, lawyers for the Chevron Corporation filed a civil suit against an aqueous geochemist under federal racketeering and corruption laws. They claimed that the geochemist and her colleagues had ghostwritten significant portions of a report attributed to a court-appointed expert in Ecuador, although the accusation was subsequently withdrawn. The original case addressed the environmental impact of Chevron’s operations in lowland Ecuador, the subject of a $9 billion judgment against the oil company. This article treats legal transcripts and depositions as examples of life writing to examine the contribution of experts to environmental litigation. It adds to recent scholarship on the instability of scientific authorship by comparing different forms of ghostwriting. Whereas the pharmaceutical industry employs ghostwriters to conceal the potentially harmful consequences of its products, the scientists contributing to the case against Chevron sought to make the company’s environmental impacts visible. The company undermined confidence in the legal proceedings in Ecuador by criticizing the experts for the plaintiffs rather than their data, preventing people whose lives and livelihoods have been affected by oil contamination from collecting the judgment against Chevron. This corporate strategy may have a chilling effect on the willingness of environmental scientists and other expert witnesses to provide evidence against powerful corporations. There is a need for better accounting of scientific research undertaken in support of environmental litigation, especially given the high stakes of legal contests like this one, in which corporate fortunes, human lives, and the fate of the environment are contingent on their technical expertise.

Recent years have brought a proliferation of studies on the family on such topics as household composition, marriage patterns, childbearing practices, and life-cycle transitions. Scholars in ancient near eastern studies have contributed mainly to the legal and economic aspects of family history. Frequently the work done has centered on philological questions. The cuneiform data on the Mesopotamian family, accidental and all too often limited, is spread over a period of some three thousand years. Nevertheless it is time to broaden the focus despite the inherent problems. In this essay, I treat the question of the dynamics of Mesopotamian family life, more specifically intergenerational conflict, a topic barely touched upon by scholars in the field.

Before the 1915 Genocide of Ottoman Armenians, the region of Van, in contemporary southeastern Turkey, held hundreds of active Armenian churches and monasteries. After the destruction of the Armenian community, these ruined structures took on new afterlives as they became part of the evolving environments and communities around them. These ruined spaces play a role in the everyday lives of the people who live among them and shape their historical understandings and relationships with the local history and geography. I interrogate the afterlives of one abandoned monastery and examine how local Kurds imagine, narrate, and enact the politics of the past and the present through that space of material ruin. I demonstrate how the history of the Armenian Genocide and ongoing state violence against the Kurdish community are intricately linked, highlight the continuation of violence over the past century, and deconstruct notions of ahistorical victims and perpetrators. This article builds on a critical approach to ruins as it traces how histories of destruction and spaces of material ruin are revisited and reinterpreted by those whose lives continue to be shaped by processes of ruination. It demonstrates how ruins created through violent histories become spaces for articulating alternative senses of history and crafting possible futures.

The Liberal Tradition in America, by Louis Hartz, appeared in 1955. Since then it has taken a place among those few recent essays interpreting the course of American political thought that deserve our serious consideration. One thinks of works by Hofstadter, Boorstin, and Rossiter as comparable examples of the genre. In examining Professor Hartz's book, or any of its counterparts, I cannot believe that it would be useful or proper to assume the solemn office of a high tribunal, weighing the merits of a candidate for immortality. Classics declare themselves in their own good time. To treat an interesting contemporary discussion as an established masterpiece would be to sink the book under a punitive burden.

German coffee planters in nineteenth-century Alta Verapaz, Guatemala were also ethnographers, archaeologists, and geographers who published their works in Germany, the United States, and Guatemala. Their published works, as well as coffee plantation records, government correspondence, judicial records and other archival materials reveal how German coffee planters-cum-ethnographers drew upon ethnographic knowledge and representations to forge a reliable labor force. Like ethnographers in Britain's colonies, German settlers in Alta Verapaz understood the potential symmetry between ethnography and the governance of indigenous peoples. Their ethnographic knowledges also push us to reconsider distinctions drawn between German cosmopolitan ethnographic traditions and British functionalist ones and demonstrate how ethnographic knowledge and cultural difference could be deployed to forge new kinds of racial capitalism. In Guatemala, the intimate relationship between the rise of capitalism and ethnography shaped the anti-communism of mid-twentieth-century anthropology in the region.

In Friction, Anna Tsing uses logging practices and timber consumption, environmental activisms and ideas about nature, local loss of livelihood and local despair over the loss of forest-as-life (as opposed to forest-as-resources), and Indonesian nation-making through business practices and international investment as her entry points for a richly argued and ethnographically nuanced analysis of the social processes by which the spatial, discursive, and metaphoric sites that have come to be known as the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ are made by each other. Her ethnographic contribution is her ability to demonstrate multiple experiences of events—from Meratus Dayak elders to Indonesian environmentalists, from Indonesian businessmen to consumers in an IKEA, from the Korean Development Company to Freeport McMoRan—which each person and institution understands and narrates differently. Indeed, Tsing shows that these people and institutions understand events and misunderstand each other in profound ways, but that the misunderstandings are productive, creating the social fact that is the Indonesian forest.

Yaupon (the unfortunately named Ilex vomitoria) is a holly commonly used as yard décor in the southeast United States, but many North Americans will be surprised to learn that it is the source of a stimulant tea that has been in continuous use for nearly a millennium. Yaupon is more than a drink; it is a window into questions of identity, community belonging, and how the New World was inserted into the global economy. From Cabeza de Vaca's sixteenth-century brush with the beverage, yaupon has iterated between ceremony, medicine, and caffeinated tea as inhabitants of North America—Indigenous, enslaved, and settler colonial inhabitants of North America—have harnessed the leaf's properties to different, culturally situated aims. This article traces narratives, recipes, and medical descriptions of yaupon from contact to the present, and compares these against material and archeological records to explore differences between settler and extractive colonial encounters with Indigenous psychoactive substances (and thus indigeneity). The story of yaupon reveals contests between regimes of knowledge, the political economy of colonialisms, and the fraught intersections of identity and cuisine. Despite abundant ethnographic, documentary, and scientific evidence to the contrary, the scientific and medical literature long mislabeled yaupon as emetic. This raises questions about how knowledge is transferred and how scientific authority is constructed. I argue that indigeneity, race, and class have steered how yaupon has been understood, and help to explain why a popular caffeinated product waned at a time when the use of stimulants was increasing, and “proletarian hunger-killers” were on the rise.

Anthropological studies of Indian villages conducted in the 1950s and 1960s form a valuable archive of rural life soon after India's independence. We compare sections of that archive with recent fieldwork in the same villages in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha. If we trust the ethnography of the 1950s, domestic and caste spheres were the locations of village incivility. It is noteworthy that there is no reference in the early work to the Partition of the subcontinent that had occurred just a few years before. Neither is there mention of discrimination or violence carried out in the name of religion in these locations. New fieldwork reveals a different story about the rise of wholesale religious incivility in the public sphere. Caste has not vanished, but inter-caste relations have taken on new forms. We suggest that the intersection of affirmative action policies, political parties, and the systematic penetration of Hindu nationalist organizations has been crucial in the remaking of rural India.

In part because a single colonial project eventually formally incorporated Burma as an appendage to British colonial rule of India, Burma scholars persistently draw on historiography and anthropology of India to assert that ethnic categories in Burma were “reified” and hierarchized by colonial governmentality and ensuing postcolonial statecraft. This article disputes such assumed equivalences, re-theorizing “reification” through the concept of governmentality to distinguish modes of regulation and the kinds of social responses incited, suggesting that India and Burma stand as respective exemplars of distinct governmental forms. Specifically, scholarship represents Indian population groups (of caste, tribe, ethnicity, etc. permutations) as being reified by dense and reinforcing applications of knowledge/power. Even when these various and interlinking regulatory apparatuses “fail” to accurately describe social reality, they interpellate a response from subject populations, a process that operates to dialectically reinforce the categories. Conversely, similar governmental apparatuses desultorily implemented in Burma have operated differently. While they have succeeded in making South Asian and Muslim subjects into Burma’s self-perceived constitutive outside, governmentality has “doubly failed” on its taingyintha (indigenous) subjects. Poor knowledge of these Burmese peoples has foreclosed intensive projects of knowledge production, leading to “misinterpellation,” a form of metapragmatic awareness in which subjects recognize that discourses misdescribe them, and then strategically maneuver with(in) those labels. Ethnic emblems become hollow integuments navigable with comparative ease, as individuals modify their particular bodily and dispositional indices. The article concludes by encouraging comparative postcolonial governmentality studies that would delineate particularities in a concept (governmentality) that often remains unnuanced.

This essay examines the sociocultural mechanisms which preserved the Jewish ethnic identity in Yemen over the centuries. The Jewish community of Yemen existed continuously as an ethnic minority for over 1,500 years, dating back to the mid-fifth century and ending with the establishment of the state of Israel, when the Jews were declared persona non grata by the Yemeni government and were forced to leave en masse in 1948 (Ratzaby 1978).

In the sociological literature, the study of inter-ethnic relations has been dominated either by the problem of the black-white conflict in the U.S.A. or by the controversy over whether social relations in colonial and excolonial countries are ‘pluralistic’. The history of the Soviet Union provides quite a different context in which various ethnic groups, each with peculiar traditions and languages and at various levels of social, political and economic development, have interacted one with another. Study of the Soviet Union enables one to compare the role of Marxist-Leninist ideology in an ethnically mixed community with the usual examples of the impact of religious and ‘imperialist’ belief systems, and it may help to clarify whether ‘ethnic group’ is a useful analytical category or whether ‘ethnic relations’ can be explained in terms of the more traditional classifications of class, status and power.

Social reality which is remote in time or in space has a charm of its own. A desire to escape one's own time and environment, the longing for the exotic and bygone (a longing that, at times, is reinforced by the spirit of the time, as during the romantic movement), residual dreams of adolescence, the lure which distance offers to the freely roaming fantasy, the urge for new experience, the turning away from daily and trivial matters, the tendency to criticize oneself through the foreign — there are many and subtle motivations that make the distant and the foreign fascinating. Novalis did not only state that everything becomes romantic and poetic “when it is moved into remoteness”; he also spoke of the “dignity of the unknown”.

A very great deal of our knowledge of urban life in Tokugawa Japan relates to the “happy society” of Genroku in the early 18th century, to the life of the theater and the gay quarters, and to the activities of the great merchant houses and the more extravagant and colorful of their heads. Extensive coverage is given theories of the state, administrative arrangements, and the discrepancies between the actual and theoretical positions of the classes of Tokugawa society. Ordinarily, mobility is treated in passing, partly because vertical social mobility is rightly presumed to have been a minor feature of that society until at least its closing period, and partly because the materials required are so difficult to unearth and so resistant to rigorous analysis. Bellah's observation that “…mobility was largely within classes rather than between them,” is apt, although Taeuber reminds us that “…movements of surplus youth from the rural areas to the cities were adjustments of population to resources and employment opportunies that ante-dated modern industrialization by some centuries.” Lampard completes the thought with respect to its implications for the transition to industrialism in his remark that “…old commercial-administrative centers [provide] ready markets, some tradition of urban life, and constant pressure to secure a livelihood from non-farming activity.”

For Dutch Calvinist missionaries in Central Java, two events bookended the radically transformative decade of the 1890s. The first, at the start of the decade, was the severing of relations with a charismatic Javanese leader named Sadrach, a decision that marked a redoubled commitment to suppress local Christian syncretism and to promote Calvinist orthodoxy in its stead. The second, at the decade's end, was the establishment of a modern clinic to serve as the flagship institution of a reformulated and reinvigorated missionary project. This article considers how these two seemingly disparate events are related. It suggests that much of what was troubling to missionaries about Sadrach and his indigenous Christian movement involved their understandings and uses of the body. I then consider how the mission attempted to use modern clinical experience and the anatomical perspective to address a range of ethical and epistemological problems posed by Sadrach and his followers' understandings of the body. The modern clinic would serve as a key pedagogical and disciplinary tool for the reordering of a vocabulary and syntax of bodies and souls, a grammar of religious and social expression.

Flood lights illuminated the southern Brazilian night as thousands of railroad workers struggled to meet their daily trace construction quotas. Brazil Railway Company foremen shouted their orders so as to be heard above the din of massive steam-powered earth movers. These machines, a novelty for the region in 1910, were the North American-owned company's newest ally in its push to meet the rapidly approaching construction deadline. On December 17, 1910, a gayly decorated train crossed the Santa Catarina-Rio Grande do Sul border, thereby inaugurating Brazil's newest railroad line. The company had succeeded in connecting the agricultural south with Brazil's rising industrial star, the state of São Paulo.

The theories which have been offered to explain the governmental instability and persistent political fragmentation of the Third Republic have been of two basic types. Either specific institutional structures have been blamed, or the French national character has been cited. Often-mentioned institutional weaknesses have included the multi-party system, the dominance of the legislative branch, the independent and authoritarian civil service, the various electoral systems tried–especially the two-ballot system and proportional representation–and so on. Aspects of political culture which are said to have contributed to instability and ineffective government include an innate distrust of leaders, the avoidance of face-to-face confrontation and compromise, the lack of a training for democracy in voluntary associations, and an authoritarian educational system. The common element in all of these explanations is that they begin at the top; they see France as a uniform society with “average” ways of doing things. That is, these explanations assume that the explanation to instability and fragmentation can be found at the national level by studying the aggregate characteristics of French men and women or by analyzing the political institutions of the nation-state.