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.

Two European missionary teams, one Catholic and the other Protestant, encountered each other in the Tamil country in the first decade of the eighteenth century. They acted as if and thought that their goals were irreconcilable, even if the Protestants in Tranquebar admitted that the Catholic Jesuit proselytism in the region had been efficient as “preparatio evangelicae” for the Protestant mission. Jesuits and Pietists were not only rivals; they also collaborated, uneasily and unequally, in collecting, processing, and disseminating knowledge. Missionary linguistic and medico-botanical expertise was considered an indispensable proselytizing tool, and it showcased their “scientific” achievements that were admired and envied in Europe. Both Pietists and Jesuits of this period were fighting the early Enlightenment atheists while feeding them the materials from the missions. Both missionary groups were also victims of Enlightenment historiography. Despite their theological differences, they were far closer in their practices than either the missionaries themselves or their historians, who have mostly written from the same denominational perspective, have been willing to acknowledge. In part this was because the Protestants, especially their mission's founders, relied on both texts and converts produced by their Catholic rivals.

Our two authors have taken positive stands on contemporary art. Mr. Ackerman is clearly attached to tradition and ‘values’, and he is troubled by that episodic character of all actuality, which so disturbs the historian's view. Mr. Hafner, on the other hand, does not turn away from actuality, but he seems to smother contemporary art under a blanket comparison with science, whereby artists and scientists pursue a common enterprise in defining the ‘new reality’.

Dès qu'il aborde les textes, le médiéviste rencontre des nobiles. Ouvre-t-il Grégoire de Tours, il y voit bientôt cités des nobiles, un nobile genus, un nobilissimus in genre sua. Parcourt-il les Capitulaires francs, il y trouve rapidement un article applicable aux omnes homines laïci, tam nobiles quam ignobiles. Sources narratives ou sources diplomatiques, partout il butte d'emblée sur le problème des “nobles”.

Recent German history has produced a remarkable succession of state forms: an empire riddled with internal social tensions, brought down by external defeat in a world war for which it bore a large degree of responsibility; an unstable and ultimately suicidal parliamentary democracy; a genocidal dictatorship which eventually collapsed, totally defeated by opponents of its expansionist and increasingly radical foreign and domestic plans; and, concurrently, two remarkably stable and enduring instances of quite different political types, liberal parliamentary democracy in the capitalist west, and “actually existing socialism” based in democratic centralism in the communist east. Compared to their respective Western and Eastern European neighbours, the Germans on both sides of the inner-German border are now sustaining and reproducing their respective political systems with remarkable efficiency. Put crudely, it seems that good Nazis have been turned into good democrats and good communists, respectively.

Politics became a revolutionary activity for the people of France in 1789. In a few months they learned how to formulate their interests, organize to demand changes, and mobilize to achieve their goals. This politicization was most intensive in the towns because it was there that people met most frequently to confront the constitutional and political issues posed by the bankruptcy of the crown. Many townspeople had been at least vaguely aware of the constitutional crisis since 1787, but their political education did not begin in earnest until the spring of 1789 when they participated in the many long and often agitated meetings to elect deputies and draft grievance lists for the meeting of the Estates General.

The Rastafarians have been a social problem for Jamaica ever since 1933, when one of their earliest leaders, Howell, sold 5000 postcards of the Emperor Haille Selassie at a shilling each making them out to be passports to Ethiopia. They gained greater publicity in 1941 when the police raided Howell's community at Pinnacle and arrested seventy of his followers on charges of growing ganja (marijuana) and of violence. In the 1950's many more were arrested, and - Rastas assert - flogged and forcibly shaved by the police; some were imprisoned on charges of rioting, and there were two separate cases charging that children were sacrificed by fire in Trenchtown, a slum area of the capital.

This paper is a semiological attempt to derive meaning from the recent reconceptualization of the German nation: the thesis of the separate socialist nation as advanced by the Socialist Unity Party (SED) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Before entering upon the question of how the-socialist nation of the GDR is defined and what this definition means in contrast to the definition of the nation current in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), we may well ask whether it makes any difference. In spite of the furor aroused by this idea in the West German press, non-Germans may legitimately wonder whether it is not silly to quibble over whether to the GDR a separate state or a separate nation.

Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations raises intriguing questions about the ways in which various countries' economic fates have been affected by the activities of what he calls distributional coalitions and vested interests. According to Olson, the development of such strategically placed groups has often enabled relatively small segments of society to impede the workings of a country's productive and distributive processes by distorting their functions to serve essentially their own interests more than the broader community interest. This ensures the perpetuation of a beneficial position for themselves, but at the cost of creating rigidities in the economic system that, in the long run, bring about in-built resistance to change, loss of competitiveness, and ultimate stagnation (Olson 1982:74–81). In itself this is not an especially remarkable proposition, but Olson has developed it into an unusually rigorous and at the same time illuminating theoretical edifice. His data have been drawn mainly from studies of the developed nations, the theory being used to explain macro-level economic performance rather than the workings of microlevel institutions, firms, or industries. But there is no compelling reason why his theory cannot be used just as fruitfully to illuminate the situation in developing countries. It may also be applicable to the micro-level analysis of institutions or industries there as well as the macro-level of national economies. Here we propose essentially to apply it to both, using Olson's basic theory as an explanatory guideline in an investigation into the causes of declining productivity in a single industry-the sugar industry-in one developing country-Indonesia.

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.”

For centuries, European operas have portrayed dramatic, exotic Others on stage. However, as opera is increasingly adopted around the world, including by those “Eastern” Others it orientalized, its Othering tendencies serve new, more critical purposes. Post-colonial studies of knowledge and cultural production have shown how relations between centers and peripheries, knowledge and power are integral to forms of orientalism. In Tajikistan, the accounts of opera told today by the daughter of a successful Soviet Tajik composer bring to light the ambiguity of power relations and positionalities in Soviet opera’s production. Her accounts, beyond highlighting opera’s readily apparent orientalist tendencies, reveal surprising cosmopolitan aspirations in Soviet Central Asian opera. Cosmopolitan histories and values also feature heavily in post-colonial politics of knowledge production, but the concept appears worlds apart from, even in opposition to that of orientalism: the latter feeds off center-periphery, knowledge-power relations, while the former aspires to evade them. Through this present-day account of opera’s development in Soviet Tajikistan, this article challenges this opposition, theorizing a conceptual ambiguity and interdependence between orientalism and cosmopolitanism, which has important consequences for knowledge-producing fields like opera, as well as anthropology. Multiple forms of orientalism and cosmopolitanism overlapped and interacted in the development of Soviet Central Asian opera as numerous, intersecting meanings and socio-political agendas went into its production. Ultimately, a conceptual space emerges between the orientalism(s) and cosmopolitanism(s) at play. This ambiguous space in-between offers a lens for critically evaluating the complex, uneven practice of portraying and engaging with Others.

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 partakes in the dialogue between history, anthropology, and social theory on the topic of debt as a social relation. Drawing on sources from nineteenth-century Switzerland, it examines everyday routines of debt collection in liberalism by taking the seized collateral object to the center of historical analysis. It is shown how the attached goods in a debtor's household became an object of knowledge for nineteenth-century framers of law as well as for ordinary debtors. I make use of anthropological theory in order to describe the legal techniques of delineating and extracting collateral, and show how these legal techniques implied specific knowledge practices. I then look at two borderline cases of collateralization: the pawning of mobile goods and the imprisonment of insolvent debtors. Further, I discuss how, by the 1880s, the limits of debt collection were debated, when certain goods were exempt for seizure in a projected federal law. Overall, on an epistemological level, debt collection appears as a double movement: it provided basic tools to untangle property relationships, yet all the while it created new, unpredictable complications. Thus debt collection was a distinctive arena in which the uneasy conceptual relationship between people and things in nineteenth-century liberalism unfolded. From this conceptual node I propose a historical epistemology of the collateral object.

For all the attention the rural insurrection of 1789 has received, there is still a great deal to learn. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has suggested that the revolts provide us with a window into a great transformation of the French countryside. He is struck by the contrast with the great seventeenth-century movements of violent resistance to the fiscal pressures of the growing state. After a long interval in which the defeated peasantry raised no major challenge, the distinctive target of the rural upheavals of the early revolution had switched from the claims of the state to those of the lord. Understanding this shift, Le Roy Ladurie suggests, should illuminate the rural history of France in modern times. Why do peasants rise against one target rather than another? To date there is little scholarly consensus on the forms and significance of the rural insurrection.

Eugène Sue's novel Les Mystères de Paris created a stir when it appeared in 1842–43 in serial form in the daily Journal des Débats and in ten one-volume installments, plus a number of truncated and pirated editions. This rambling episodic work comprises over a dozen melodramas held together mainly by the direct or indirect involvement in them of the hero-savior Rudolph Grand Duke of Gerolstein, the miserly notary and arch villain Jacques Ferrand, the vulnerable sullied virgin Fleur-de-Marie, and the well-meaning aristocratic lady Clemence Marquise d'Harville. Longer than most serial novels, Les Mystères maintains its readers' interest with lurid exposés of Paris low life, heart-rending descriptions of the sufferings of the deserving poor, diabolical intrigues, knick-of-time rescues, and scenes of sex and violence at all social levels. Periodically the author interrupts his narrative with moralizing commentaries and proposals for social reform. Contemporary observers claimed that everyone from duchesses to house porters read Les Mystères de Paris for its sensationalism. It has also been argued that the book's working-class readers wrote so many letters to Sue urging him to stress the high moral qualities of his fictional workers—epitomized by the craftsman Jérome Morel—that their “collective constraint” transformed it from a book about the “dangerous” classes into a book about the laboring classes, and converted the author himself into a champion of their cause.