This paper is built upon the assumption that modernization consists of processes of structural transformation which tend to increase both the resource-producing or energy-producing capacity of a social configuration and the extent to which this capacity may be realized and coordinated by strategic elites. There are a number of qualifications. For example, modernization involves an increase in resources or energy produced and/or an increase in the extent to which such resources are channelled into the hands of groups such as capitalist entrepreneurs and state officials. In the short run, rapid increases may occur in either of these aspects while the other remains relatively stable. ‘Resources’ and ‘energies’ are terms broadly interpreted to include the enthusiasms and allegiances of a population experiencing profound alterations in the conditions of its existence, the fruits of colonial expansion and frontier exploration, and the outcomes of scientific research and technological innovation. A proportion of resources is likely to be drawn from outside the national polity (for example through colonial receipts or ‘development aid’); a proportion is also likely to be applied outside this polity (as in warfare and commercial activity).

My purpose in this study is to refine understanding of the functional role of conventional religion for the viability of communal life (Bainbridge 1985). I shall endeavor to do this by broadly coordinating Talcott Parsons's evolutionary perspective of human society (1966, 1971) with that of Robert Bellah on religion (1964), and applying them to the formation and development of the Religious Kibbutz Federation (RFK) in Israel. By examining the historical experience of the groups that formed religious communes during the Mandatory period in Palestine, I shall attempt to demonstrate that religion can play a dysfunctional as well as a functional role in a communal system.

A host of social movements which had as their goal the improvement of the living conditions of the working classes emerged in England in the 1820s and 1830s. Owenism and Chartism come first to mind, but historians have recently acknowledged the social significance of a number of less well-known groups that proclaimed the benefits of temperance or mechanics' institutes or phrenology or infidel missions. The birth control movement in its early years has as yet received little attention from the historians of the English working classes. A possible reason is that the opposition of the 'pauper press' to the movement has led later observers to adopt the view that it was simply a middle-class Malthusian crusade which set out to convince the poor that the only escape from poverty lay in individual self-help. In what follows I shall sketch out the general lines of argument advanced by the advocates of birth control and their antagonists in the working-class movement. The purpose of the paper is not to provide yet another history of the first neo-Malthusians, but to use the arguments their activities elicited to gain a better understanding of nineteenth-century working-class culture.

A charismatic leader is like a beautiful woman. Taken as a whole and looked on from afar we can all agree as to the extraordinary nature of the creature. Yet once we begin a detailed analysis of each part we find we have difficulty pointing to exactly those elements that produce the effect. Clinical descriptions may incline us to lust or disgust, but they may fail to inform us as to the ephemeral nature of the phenomenon. For that we often engage, as here, in metaphor.

At the present day the African hailing from a primitive society, who comes to live in the towns side by side with Africans of other tribal origins and with Europeans, is a familiar figure. This has resulted in the influencing by alien cultures of the African's traditional way of life and the formation of a new type of society governed by a complex set of rules to which the old traditional order affords little or no guide. It is only to be expected in the circumstances that difficulty will be experienced in reconciling African customary rules of behavior with the western-type law, and that also, where the two systems are being administered side by side, the Western system of law will tend to predominate due to its greater affinity to modern development. As will be shown, this tendency to replace native custom by Western law, as exemplified by the position in the past and present territories of British Africa, even where motivated by the best intentions, is at times dominated by an adherence to Western law patterns and by Western economic and social theories, which may be neither acceptable nor expedient in the present state of African development.

Maclntyre sought to raise a series of crucial questions in an address before the Eighty-First Annual Meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. What is the best way to evaluate two competing languages, conceptual schemes, or cultural approaches to being in the world? May conceptual schemes or theoretical languages be so radically different as to be fully incommensurable, that is, incapable of intertranslation or meaningful comparison?2 Maclntyre, drawing upon the example of the sixteenthcentury Zuni Indian and Spanish colonial frontier, contended that some languages or conceptual schemes might well be partially untranslatable, but this did not necessarily preclude commensurability. His remarks suggest additional questions, namely, what does constitute a frontier situation? What is involved in the symbolic differentiation of one conceptual scheme, one interpretive group—one culture—from another? We might recognize here the familiar problem of boundary construction, the social process of creating a common group identity that marks it as different from others.3

The question of the conditions that must prevail before fundamentalist religion can play a significant part in politics has loomed large in recent years with the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. Protestant fundamentalism has drawn somewhat less attention, except for the case of the new Christian right in America. Nowhere in the contemporary world are the politics of conservative Protestantism more clearly visible than in Northern Ireland. Therefore, in this essay we seek to explain why Protestant fundamentalism has achieved such prominence and success in Ulster in recent years. First, we present a comparative analysis of conservative Protestant politics in the English-speaking world. Second, we offer an historically informed analysis of the rise of Ulster's most successful fundamentalist politician, the Reverend Ian Paisley.

The nineteenth-century has been something of a vortex for Spanish American historians. From the collapse of the Empire in 1808 to 1810 until the consolidation of conservative agro-export regimes by the century's end, the dominant features of the region's historiographic landscape have been revolution, civil war, personalist “tyrants,” and bouts of ethnic uprising unmatched since the first century of Conquest. When Latin American historians, such as Lucás Alamán in Mexico or Bartolomé Mitre in Argentina, sat down at mid-century to write national narratives for their emerging republics, their histories were veiled stories of incompletion, failed promise, and unfinished aspirations.

Why do some states resort to more exclusive top-down management of natural resources, while others tend to be more inclusive and solicit participation from civil society? By rejecting the simple characterization of the state within the narrow spectrum of “weak” and “strong,” this article investigates resource-mediated relations in the peripheral social groups that the state has sought to transform as part of the process of modernization. Focusing on Siam and Japan, I highlight alternative explanations based on ethnicity and labor, bureaucratic mindset, and agro-ecological conditions. I argue that the more embedded nature of the labor force in resources sectors made it necessary for the Japanese government to engage with marginal people, whereas the enclave nature of such sectors in Siam allowed elites to establish a distinctively exclusive system. While the Japanese state quickly learned to accommodate people at the fringes through its recognition and acceptance of existing customs in the management of resources, and even facilitated the creation of local organizations such as forest unions, the Siamese were consistently more exclusionary and even oppressed indigenous groups living at the state's territorial periphery. Resource interventions targeted at the fringes of land and society in Japan and Siam produced lasting effects on state-society relations that have extended far beyond their original intention of securing resource procurement. Understanding the historical roots of such relations offers a fresh perspective from which to explain why state inaction prevails in the present debate on state devolution in Thailand.

From the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, a network of young urban migrant men created an underground pulp fiction publishing industry in the city of Dar es Salaam. As texts that were produced in the underground economy of a city whose trajectory was increasingly charted outside of formalized planning and investment, these novellas reveal more than their narrative content alone. These texts were active components in the urban social worlds of the young men who produced them. They reveal a mode of urbanism otherwise obscured by narratives of decolonization, in which urban belonging was constituted less by national citizenship than by the construction of social networks, economic connections, and the crafting of reputations. This article argues that pulp fiction novellas of socialist era Dar es Salaam are artifacts of emergent forms of male sociability and mobility. In printing fictional stories about urban life on pilfered paper and ink, and distributing their texts through informal channels, these writers not only described urban communities, reputations, and networks, but also actually created them.

This article examines an Arabic commentary on the American self-help pioneer Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, written by a one-time leading intellectual of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Muḥammad al-Ghazālī. Ghazālī’s 1956 commentary was perhaps the earliest manifestation of an influential genre of literature within the Islamic world today: “Islamic self-help.” Although scholars treat Islamic self-help as an effect of neoliberalism, this article reorients the study of Islamic self-help beyond neoliberalism by showing first, that Ghazālī’s early version of it emerged through a critical engagement with several ideological forms that relate in complex ways to neoliberalism's antecedent, liberalism; and second, that his Islamic self-help is best understood in terms of an Islamic encounter with American metaphysical religion made possible by Carnegie's text. It argues that Ghazālī’s Islamic self-help constituted a radical reconfiguration of Western self-help, one that replaced the ethics of self-reliance and autonomy with Islamic ethical sensibilities clustered around the notions of human insufficiency and dependence upon God. In doing so, it highlights how scholars of contemporary Islam might fruitfully pose the question of how novel intellectual trends and cultural forms, like self-help, become Islamic, instead of limiting their analysis to how Islam is reshaped by modern Euro-American thought, institutions, and practices.

Nestled among E. M. Forster's careful studies of Edwardian social mores is a short story called “The Machine Stops.” Set many years in the future, it is a work of science fiction that imagines all humanity housed in giant high-density cities buried deep below a lifeless surface. With each citizen cocooned in an identical private chamber, all interaction is mediated through the workings of “the Machine,” a totalizing social system that controls every aspect of human life. Cultural variety has ceded to rigorous organization: everywhere is the same, everyone lives the same life. So hopelessly reliant is humanity upon the efficient operation of the Machine, that when the system begins to fail there is little the people can do, and so tightly ordered is the system that the failure spreads. At the story's conclusion, the collapse is total, and Forster's closing image offers a condemnation of the world they had built, and a hopeful glimpse of the world that might, in their absence, return: “The whole city was broken like a honeycomb. […] For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky” (2001: 123). In physically breaking apart the city, there is an extent to which Forster is literalizing the device of the broken society, but it is also the case that the infrastructure of the Machine is so inseparable from its social structure that the failure of one causes the failure of the other. The city has—in the vocabulary of present-day engineers—“failed badly.”

What is the relationship between schism and political identity? Existing scholarship has tended to focus on the determinants of schism while treating the ideational basis on which schisms are made as largely fixed. In this paper, I develop a new interpretation of the 1933 “neo-socialist schism” within the French Socialist Party to highlight how new political identities can be constituted in and through the process of schism itself. The 1933 schism is often understood as the convergence of a doctrinal revision called “neo-socialism” and a separate tactical challenge to the party's parliamentary practice. But a careful reading of the factional conflict within the party reveals that it was the preceding tactical debate over ministerial participation that was transformed over time into a debate over socialist doctrine. This distinction between “tactics” and “doctrine” performatively defined the limits of acceptable party discourse, and as such was both a weapon and a stake in the factional conflict. I trace the evolution of this conflict and show that, so long as the minority faction was weak, the issue of participation was widely considered “tactical” and thus safe for discussion. But when minority strength grew, the majority sought to redefine the conflict as doctrinal to delegitimate the challengers. Finally, only when a schism appeared inevitable did the challengers themselves adopt the label of “neo-socialism.” Neo-socialism was thus not a pre-constituted political heresy driving the schismatic process, but the contingent and emergent outcome of this very process.

“Religious authority” remains a ubiquitous but controversial term of comparative analysis. In Islamic studies, authority is generally personified in the form of the ulama and most often viewed through Weber’s lens of charismatic, legal-rational, and traditional types of legitimate domination. Our particular interest, Twelver Shi‘i Islam, seems a paradigmatic case, where the relationship between “the Ayatollahs” and state power has dominated academic discussion since Khomeini. Through ethnography of a Shi‘i diaspora community in the UK, we argue for a radical shift in perspective: away from forms of clerical power and towards non-specialist uses of clerical authority as expert opinion. Far from such “epistemic” authority being opposed to ordinary agency, here they are inextricably linked. Inspirational work in the anthropology of Islam has understood ordinary Muslim experiences of authority in non-liberal ways, as (Foucauldian) ethical discipline and self-care. We maintain the need to transcend not only domination but discipline too, refocusing the comparison between (Shi‘i) Islamic legal and liberal thought, in the form of Raz’s classic “service conception” of authority. Both stress the rationality of following authoritative opinion and its role as reason and justification for individual action. Our ethnography of ordinary practice then shows the sheer diversity of ways that such epistemic authority can be taken up, including, but not limited to, projects of personal piety and adversarial community politics. In our context, as surely also in others, domination and discipline should thus be seen as potential uses of “religious” epistemic authority, rather than as its privileged form.

In 1939, Wisconsin readers of a weekly newspaper column by Mitchell Redcloud, a member of the Ho-Chunk Indian community settled within the rural township of Komensky, were greeted with a set of headlines from the imaginary “Komensky News” about an actual local event. The headlines reported that despite opposition from local whites, Ho-Chunk people had successfully elected a Ho-Chunk candidate to the township board. This article draws on studies of Indigenous media and recent efforts to develop field-theoretic accounts of social action to understand the interdependence of Redcloud's headlines and the Ho-Chunk vote as part of an incipient project of Indigenous political action. Using census records, I first describe the positions in the everyday field of race and class relations that Ho-Chunk people occupied in Komensky, based on their incomes, educations, and occupational statuses. I then draw on this description to understand Redcloud's position-taking strategies before the election. I next examine Redcloud's writing career in the newspaper to understand his strategy of self-positioning as a marked Indian voice within a print-based discursive field that denigrated other Ho-Chunk voices. I finish by examining new position-taking strategies manifest in the 1939 vote and in Redcloud's turn to headline register. I argue that both media and electoral mechanisms offered relatively autonomous fields that made these experiments with Indigenous action possible despite the absence of tribal political institutions necessary to transform the positions Ho-Chunk people occupied in their everyday lives. Together, the headlines and the election suggest the interdependence of activism carried out in media and in governmental structures in the production of transformative acts of political self-representation.

Scholars of democracy from Tocqueville to Habermas have long considered the proliferation of so-called voluntary associations as a sign of a flourishing civil society and as central to the rise of democratic modernity. I contend that the Algerian theatrical and musical associations of the reformist period anticipate another kind of civic history: a history of displays of unanimism in public life. I am interested in how and why Algerians learned to produce public displays of agreement for particular audiences (including themselves) at particular historical moments. I emphasize three factors that contributed to the production of unanimity: the achievement of tawḥīd or unity in the Islamic reform movement, vernacular practices of consensus-based argumentation, and French colonial legal and surveillance mechanisms. The essay engages theories of civil society, colonialism, and performance. It draws primarily on material from the French colonial archives for the city of Constantine, Algeria.

In “The Suggestiveness of Vestiges: Confucianism and Monarchy at the Last”, I wrote of the draining of the monarchical mystique in modern China. Vestigial monarchism, it seemed to me, was related to an equally vestigial Confucianism — really related, that is, not just parallel in some modern course of corrosion. The relation was the thing, a novel one of untroubled association (in a common, new ideology of “national spirit”), unpromising departure from what seemed, more and more, the devious, uncertain, tense partnership of pre-Western days. The loss of this ambivalence, this Confucian-monarchical attraction-repulsion, comprised the Chinese state's attrition. And if in its time that traditional state was a prodigiously hardy perennial, perhaps its vitality, in a truly Nietzschean sense, was the measure of its tolerance of tensions: their release was the bureaucratic monarchy's death.

When Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was a medical student at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, she spent the autumn of 1901 constructing an anatomical model of a young human brain. Most accounts call it an “embryo” brain, although as we shall see it likely belonged to a fetus or infant. The assignment was her final opportunity to obtain the medical degree after failing four classes in the spring of her senior year. Her anatomy professor, Franklin Paine Mall (1982–1917), offered her a second chance to graduate if she would finish her brain model and write an accompanying manuscript. Stein eventually produced sixty-three drawings and “roughly twenty-five pages of text,” in addition to the model itself (Meyer 2001: 89). She submitted the work in January 1902, but Mall judged it as inept and threw it away. Stein set off for Europe, leaving medicine behind forever. She settled in Paris where she became an avant-garde writer most notably known for her book supposedly chronicling the life of Alice Babette Toklas (1877–1967), who was Stein's longtime lover, secretary, editor, cook, and companion. The book, published in 1933, narrated the life of the inimitable Gertrude Stein, although it was playfully titled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

In correlation to the expansion and intensification of capitalist forms of agricultural production in the Malay states during the end of the nineteenth century, the British Colonial administration articulated the need to systematize the policing of agricultural production with increasing strength. The economic prospects of feeding the world market's increasing demand for natural rubber, combined with the objective of decreasing the Malay states' dependence on import of basic staples (notably rice), were taken by the Colonial administration as indicators of an urgent need to spur on the progress of agricultural production. A revolution of agricultural practices, which would transform what was seen as the backward and inefficient techniques of the “native cultivators” into modern and progressive production forms based on scientific knowledge, could only take place, it was argued, by resorting to systematic government intervention.