Like other dramatic and discontinuous historical processes, the Meiji Restoration of 1868 possesses the inherent fascination to sustain yet another rehearsal of its basic course of events. The present one differs from others in several ways. It does not center on samurai heroes and villains contesting foreign incursion. Instead it identifies fully four groups that acted during the late Tokugawa era, the years 1850–68, known by the generic periodizing word bakumatsu—“the end of the bakufu,” that is, of the shogun's government situated at Edo. It presents each group according to the experiences and motives of its members. It points to the interactions between the four narrative structures, the plots or mythoi, but without homogenizing them into a unitary historiographical line. It also recognizes the necessary prefiguration of the historian's field but tries nevertheless to convey the perceived intentions of the four groups of historical actors.

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.

One of the most important developments in the relationship between the state and the individual citizen during the present century has been the growth in the rights of the citizen to claim economic services and cash benefits from the state. Social security programs, which have appeared in nearly every country of the world, are a central feature of this development. Their main purpose has been the prevention of poverty through protection of the individual and his family against loss of income and against certain financial burdens. The growth of these rights, while greatly enriching the status of citizenship, has always been confronted with certain fundamental economic and social questions. What is likely to be the long-run effect on the work habits and productivity of the mass of the people once a nation has eliminated the fear of destitution? Will a growing sense of security increase productivity? Or is it likely that the more surely individuals can count on essential services and minimal incomes, the greater will be the danger of drifting into indifferent work habits? Such a drift would probably take the form of a subtle change in values rather than a dramatic shift in attitude. Whatever the effect may be, it must certainly depend on the nature of the rights granted, social values and attitudes, and a country's economic and socio-political order.

In 1905 the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon of Kedleston, was forced to resign as a result of a disagreement with his Commander-in-Chief, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum. What began as a mild bureaucratic affair soon escalated into a major power battle, and the scene of the struggle shifted in turn from the narrow confines of Indian bureaucracy to the exalted chambers of Imperial decision-makers to the public forum of two continents.

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.

The Mexican ejido, the Soviet kolkhoz, the Chinese commune and the Tanzanian Ujamaa village have all been encouraged by governments as a means of reorganizing the countryside on a communal basis. Few policies have had so profound an effect on people's lives as have those associated with the collectivization of agriculture. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the degree of similarity in the collectivization experiences.

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.”

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.

This article examines the concept of the “true hunter” (vrai chasseur) among big game hunters in French colonial Indochina. Drawing primarily on French language texts published by highly experienced European hunters between 1910 and 1950, it first examines in detail the true hunter ethic, which required hunters to hunt and kill their prey in a “sporting” (sportif) manner. This ethic involved adherence to an expansive and complicated set of rules related to stalking, marksmanship, knowledge possession, restraint, prey selection, choice of firearms and ammunition, and others. True hunting was regarded as by definition difficult and, as is argued, the practical realization of the true hunter ideal entailed not simply engaging in hunting as an activity, but instead successfully performing a very difficult but specific type of killing. The article's second purpose is to engage a paradox associated with the texts, their authors, and the ethic. While critical of other hunters for “unnecessary slaughter,” many killed staggering numbers of animals. This paradox is accounted for by placing the true hunters in the broader social context of colonial Indochina. Both their type of sport hunting and the virtuosity of their killing distinguished them from the indigenous populations that served their hunts and other European hunters. This virtuosity also legitimized the scale of their killing and placed these hunters into a distinctive social and moral community.

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.

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.

The qadi, or Muslim judge, strikes one as an anomalous figure in the contexts of colonial Algeria and Senegal, areas better known for their mahdi-like resistance leaders, quietist Sufi shaikhs, and strongly assimilationist colonial regimes. In both cases, there were in fact attempts to eliminate the Muslim courts–in Algeria in the 1880s, and in the communes of Senegal in the early 1900s. While the two court systems were rather different, it is striking that the eventual crises had similar dynamics and that both occurred just as indigenous urban elites were beginning to seek an active role in politics. A comparative study of the two cases should not only help to put the problem of Islamic law in colonial settings into wider perspective, but also shed light on the antecedents of some well-known twentieth-century political developments.

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.

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.

Based on long-term ethnographic research on contemporary exhumations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), as well as analysis of the exhumation of Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen, this paper looks at the ways in which the dictator’s moral exemplarity has evolved over time since his military victory in 1939. During the early years of his dictatorship, Franco’s propaganda machine built the legend of a historical character touched by divine providence who sacrificed himself to save Spain from communism. His moral charisma was enriched by associating his historical mission with a constellation of moral exemplars drawn from medieval and imperial Spain. After his death, his moral exemplarity dwindled as democratic Spain embraced a political discourse of national reconciliation. Yet, since 2000, a new negative exemplarity of Franco as a war criminal has come into sharp focus, in connection with the exhumation of the mass graves of tens of thousands of Republican civilians executed by his army and paramilitary. In recent years, Franco has reemerged as a fascist exemplar alongside a rise of the extreme right. To understand the revival of his fascist exemplarity, I focus on two processes: the rise of the political party Vox, which claims undisguised admiration for Franco’s legacy (a process I call “neo-exemplarity”), and the dismantling in October 2019 of Franco’s honorable burial and the debate over the treatment that his mortal remains deserve (a process I call “necro-exemplarity”).

This essay addresses the revival of culturalist assumptions in historical archival studies and suggests an alternative framework. Rather than provenance, it privileges textual circulation; rather than civilizational divides between supposedly distinct “European” and “Islamic” archivalities, it highlights mutability and commensurability as defining elements of a broadly shared, if inherently dynamic, internally complex, and transactionally defined early modern archivality. We first show how the historiography on early modern archives has inadvertently perpetuated a myopic Eurocentric view of the centralized archive as a key aspect of European archivality. We analyze how the construct “Islamic archivality,” when proffered as a comparative counterpoint to such European archivality, not only promotes an outdated understanding of “Islam” (and, indeed “Europe”) as a discrete, transhistorical phenomenon, but rests on a limited set of mostly pre-Ottoman, medieval examples. By positing “Islam” as fundamentally premodern, this historiography sidesteps significant shared late antique genealogies of textual practices and mobilities across a vast early modern region that traverses modern continental/civilizational configurations. In lieu of the prevalent comparative mode, which juxtaposes civilizational blocs and then selectively contrasts specific archival institutions and practices, we suggest concentrating on intersections and circulations of documents and practices across ethnolinguistic, territorial, and juridical boundaries. Drawing on examples from our research in Ottoman diplomatic archives, we challenge scholars of early modern archivality to move beyond fixed notions of “European,” and “non-European,” “centralized” and “decentralized” archives, and “original” and “copy,” as primary indices of comparison, and attend to the social life of documents and their mutability through circulation.

How did colonial family law reshape the ethnic and gender norms of a creolized entrepreneurial minority? While the literature on colonial Indonesia has tended to view the Dutch colonial preservation of adat (customary) law as helping to preserve Indonesian women's autonomy and property rights, this essay shows how, in the case of the Indonesian-Chinese entrepreneurial minority, the colonial government's institutionalization of Confucian “Chinese” family law gradually introduced more patriarchal norms for creole Chinese families. The Dutch colonial state's legal regulation of credit and commerce in Java took a moralistic turn in the mid-nineteenth century, giving shape to a more patriarchal and “Chinese” form of the family in Java by the century's end. This legal-moralistic turn took the form of a critique of creole Chinese women on one hand, and the Sinological construction of a body of Confucian “Chinese” private law on the other. For almost half a century, this encroaching colonial ethno-moral critique of creole Chinese credit manipulations and marriage arrangements came up against resistance from Peranakan Chinese matriarchs and patriarchs. In this article, I show how colonial Confucian family law eventually ended creole Chinese women's contract-making and credit-manipulating autonomies by subjecting the “Chinese” household to the civil law authority of the “housefather.”

The purpose of this paper is to argue that reciprocity may be of two types: prestations of things and prestations of actions or, expressed in another way, gift exchanges and cooperation. Evidence from two societies will be used to show that each of these two types of reciprocity is appropriate to a different type of society or social situation.