For more than forty years now, the French state has produced, legitimized, and supported local identities through national policies of historic preservation and public discourses about heritage. Rather than simply replaying the old, anxious, and nostalgic tune of national identity, the advent of heritage in France marked a singular moment of cultural transformation and rupture. The national past became articulated, in public speech and political practice, with the cultures and identities of local and regional territories. Given France's centralist tradition, and its political culture that is often cast as the archetype of “an ideology concerned with boundedness, continuity, and homogeneity” (Handler 1988: 6), this historical transformation presents a puzzle, to which this paper provides answers through historical and theoretical inquiry.

Genealogies—representations of kinship and narratives of origin—are in the transnational Shi‘ite world intimately connected to politics of piety, the production of nationalism, and struggles over authority. In this essay, I am concerned with certain inflections in the links between genealogy and piety that make these terms central to contests over notions of territoriality in contemporary Shi‘ite politics. Nationalism replaces the sovereignty of God with the exclusive sovereignty of a “people” over a clearly demarcated territory, but religious language, identifications, and imagery often play prominent roles in how the imagined community of the nation is fashioned and delimited. Here I will show how, mediated through genealogy, religious leaders and pious movements with transnational ties produce religious authority, and create links to territory, to assert themselves as exemplary cultural citizens.

In this paper I examine the economic and political factors that undermined the social class structure in an ethnic community—the Jews of Russia and eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Compared with the documented rise and articulation of working classes in non-Jewish society in that region, Jews were caught in an opposite process, largely owing to discriminatory state policies and social pressures: Among Jews, artisans and petty merchants were increasingly reduced to a single, caste-like status. A Jewish middle class of significant size did not emerge from the petty trade sector and no significant industrial working class emerged from the crafts sector. Historians have largely overlooked the significance of these facts, in part because they have viewed this east European situation as a mere preamble to more sophisticated, modern class formation processes among immigrant Jews in Western societies, particularly in light of the long-term middle-class trajectory of their children. Those historians interested in labor history have mainly shown interest in such continuity as they could infer from the self-narratives of the Jewish labor movement, and have thus overstated the case for a long-standing Jewish “proletarian” tradition. In reassessing the historical record, I wish to put the Jewish social and economic situation in eastern Europe into better perspective by looking at the overall social and economic situation, rather than at incipient worker organizations alone. I also query whether a developing class culture, along the lines suggested by E. P. Thompson, was at all in evidence before Jewish mass emigration. This paper is thus a contribution to the history of labor—rather than organized labor—as well as a discussion of the roots of ethnic economic identity.

This paper draws on archival research to trace the techniques used by scientists and government officials involved with palm oil at the turn of the twentieth century. For them, mundane practices of “carefulness” were paramount as they worked on collecting, identifying, marketing, and improving the oil palm. But they also applied this so-called care to people: care of the oil palm was thought to presuppose care of the “native,” providing a correction for what were seen as “careless” local manners of cultivation. Colonial techniques of care thus sought to encompass both plants and peoples within contemporary liberal rhetorics of efficiency and moral improvement. This embodies how scientific and political care can interlink through their undersides of control, exploitation, and domination, which remain obscured by narratives of care themselves. Examining these links between commodity histories and scientific techniques is therefore essential for understanding environmental and social concerns regarding oil palm plantations today. An awareness of the afterlives of colonial discourses might encourage a more critical “care” in response to these issues today, challenging taken-for-granted notions of the benefits of corporate care.

This paper examines the ways in which “ordinariness” can come to be exemplified as a virtue. It does so by comparing the status of ordinariness in historical and present-day Predappio, the town in which Mussolini was born and is buried. It describes the ways in which Predappio was mobilized by the Fascist regime as an exemplar of an ordinary Italian town, rendered extraordinary by its wholesale reconstruction as a jewel in the crown of Fascist urban planning. In similar fashion, Mussolini’s ordinary rural upbringing was mobilized in the service of propagandizing his extraordinary and exemplary leadership. In contemporary Predappio, by contrast, ordinariness is what locals reach for to contest understandings of their home as irrevocably associated with the extraordinary Fascist heritage they have inherited. One of the ways in which they do so is to celebrate a local exemplar of this ordinariness, Giuseppe Ferlini, the town’s first postwar mayor. In contrast to Mussolini, Ferlini’s ordinariness is not a backdrop to future greatness, but exactly the quality for which he is celebrated. I assert that these cases demonstrate the need for vigilance in analytic usage of the category of “the ordinary,” which sometimes tacitly assumes the existence of “the ordinary” as a scale in itself, independent of human action. I argue instead that “the ordinary” may be the object of ethical labor, rather than its site, and that exemplification may be a form of such labor, in both our accounts and the lives of those we study.

This article examines the origins of human shielding—the practice of employing hostages on the battlefield—in Arab Palestine during the Great Revolt in the 1930s. The Palestinian rebellion vexed the British for over three years, and during its second phase (1937–1939), lightly armed rebels beat back the colonial authorities from broad stretches of the country, putting continued colonial control of the territory in serious jeopardy. Britain only defeated the insurgency through a harsh repertoire of collective punishments and “dirty war” tactics. British forces used Palestinians as human shields in a systematic fashion during the revolt's second phase, attempting thereby to stave off the insurgents’ consistent and effective attacks on transportation arteries. Beyond its battlefield rationale, this article contends that human shielding was critically tied to two other dynamic processes. The military's adoption of unauthorized tactics like human shielding was part of a broader pattern of rejecting its institutional subordination to civilian authorities and of seeking direct control over the Palestine government in order to assure its unfettered command over the revolt's suppression. At the same time, the conversion of colonized bodies into literal shields bespoke a process of deepening, corporeal racialization that had profound consequences for the Palestinians, stripping them of any figment of legal rights or protections and signaling the utter disposability of Arab life.

One of the most salient features of the medieval Mediterranean is that it was a zone of intense interaction and long-term cohabitation of members of various ethno-religious communities whose relations are usually conceived of as fundamentally adversarial. Yet Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived amongst each other in both the Christian- and Muslim-ruled Mediterranean, even during the era of the crusades. Typically, such relationships have been presented as either fundamentally hostile, or cordial, and as related to the “tolerance” that host cultures were inclined to demonstrate as a consequence of their own religious orientation. This paper takes a different, phenomenological approach by focusing on a specific manifestation of this interaction: the emergence of out-group political elites in confessionally defined societies. Through the medium of three case studies—a powerful Jew in Islamic Spain, a powerful Muslim in Norman Sicily and a powerful Coptic Christian in Fatimid Egypt—I demonstrate that the status of minority elites was related to concrete political circumstances grounded in the particular environment of the region, and that, despite cultural differences that might have distinguished them, these societies developed near-identical strategies for engaging with minority elites. The language of religious polemic, exclusion, and marginalization was present, but it tended to serve as a post factum rationalization for repression rather than its cause, and tended to be deployed decisively only in certain circumstances. This provides new insights not only into Muslim-Christian-Jewish relations, but the fundamental nature of Mediterranean history and society.

My original idea was to discuss, in the group of sociologists from different Asian countries, the applicability of Western sociological concepts in an Asian environment. After thinking it over, I decided to tackle the problem the other way around and to ask myself to what extent a sociological study of Asian societies could contribute to general sociological theory, and perhaps even to a deeper understanding of Western society. As a matter of fact, such an approach will automatically amount to a better understanding of some of the defects, lags, and gaps in general sociological theory, as current in some of the literature.

There has been an unending debate in American historiography about the distinctive features of the ante-bellum South. One widely shared view is that the South, by virtue of its dominant agricultural character, was committed to a set of values “inconsistent with a high rate of industrialization”. Writers in this tradition have assumed that agrarian interests entail an anti-industrial bias. They look upon the civilization of the ante-bellum North as “coarse and materialistic” and that of the South as highly refined and aristocratic. The opposite view is that ante-bellum Southerners were no less commercial capitalists than their Northern brethren. Agrarian capitalism, these critics assume, has conflicts of interest with industrial capitalism, not cultural conflicts. The question this essay seeks to answer is whether Calhoun, admittedly a prominant spokesman of agricultural interests, was thereby committed to either an anti-industrial bias or a conventional capitalist position.

Between 1873 and 1917, the numbers of Barbadian women committed to penal custody on an annual basis surpassed those of men. While women's per capita imprisonment rate was still somewhat below that of men for most of these years, given the wide margins by which women outnumbered men in the population and the labor force, these proportions were nevertheless unprecedented, not only in the British Caribbean but also in other parts of the world. Available figures for Jamaica and Trinidad over sections of the period hover around an 18–20 percent female proportion rate, while in Barbados the rate usually exceeded 50 percent.

Anyone who sees today's high schoolers sporting beards will be surprised— or incredulous—to read in Homer's Iliad that Achilles, the greatest warrior among the Greeks at Troy, was still beardless. Yet Plato accepted it as a wellknown and unsurprising tradition.

This article explores the migrations of Turkish Muslims after the 1878 Peace Treaty of Berlin, which severed much of the Balkans from the Ottoman Empire as fully independent nation-states or as nominally dependent polities in the borderlands of the empire. I focus on one such polity—the administratively autonomous Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia—which, in wrestling to reconcile liberal principles of equality and political representation understood in ethno-religious terms, prompted emigration of Turkish Muslims while enabling Bulgarian Christian hegemony. Scholars have studied Muslim emigration from the Balkans as the Ottoman Empire gradually lost hold of the region, emphasizing deleterious effects of nationalism and aggressive state-building in the region. Here I look at migration at empire's end, and more specifically at the management of migration as constitutive of sovereignty. The Ottoman government asserted its suzerainty by claiming to protect the rights of Eastern Rumelia's Muslims. The Bulgarian dominated administration of Eastern Rumelia claimed not only administrative but also political autonomy by trying to contain the grievances of Turkish Muslims as a domestic issue abused by ill-meaning outsiders, all the while insisting that the province protected the rights of all subjects. Ultimately, a “corporatist” model of subjecthood obtained in Eastern Rumelia, which fused the traditional religious categorization of Ottoman subjects with an ethnic one under the umbrella of representative government. The tension between group belonging and individual politicization that began unfolding in Eastern Rumelia became a major dilemma of the post-Ottoman world and other post-imperial societies after World War I.

Drawing on ethnographic data from the mid-2000s as well as accounts from French Jewish newspapers and magazines from the 1980s onward, this paper traces the emergence of new French Jewish institutional narratives linking North African Jews to the “European” Holocaust. I argue that these new narratives emerged as a response to the social and political impasses produced by intra-Jewish disagreements over whether and how North African Jews could talk about the Holocaust, which divided French Jews and threatened the relationship between Jewishness and French national identity. These new pedagogical narratives relied on a very different historicity, or way of reckoning time and causality, than those used in more divisive everyday French Jewish Holocaust narratives. By reworking the ways that French Jews reckoned time and causality, they offered an expansive and homogenously “European” Jewishness. This argument works against a growing postcolonial sociological and anthropological literature on religious minorities in France and Europe by emphasizing the contingency, difficulty, and even ambivalence around constructing “Jewishness” as transparently either “European” or “French.” It also highlights the role played by historicity—not just history—in producing what counts as group “identity.”

In a recent essay in CSSH (16:1) Oriol Pi-Sunyer has joined in debate with our article ‘Modernization and Development…’ (CSSH 14:3). The thrust of his critique is that our model of social change in the Western Mediterranean leads us inexorably to lump Sicily and Catalonia together with respect to general social and economic developments since World War II. He argues in terms of modernization theory that Catalans long ago developed industry and have always shown a propensity to organize in corporate groups whenever the central government gives them the opportunity to do so. In short, our model is lacking in ‘time depth and political sensitivity’ (pp. 128–9) since it puts the Catalans in the same class as the Sicilians. We wish here to demonstrate that (1) in our article we discussed the differences between Sicily and Catalonia in much the same way that Pi-Sunyer did in his critique; (2) that, in fact, Sicily and Catalonia have undergone similar processes of social change since World War II, in ways that threaten the historical continuity of these societies, both formed over centuries; and (3) that Pi-Sunyer's misreading of our materials is due to his unfortunate confusion of modernization with development, which is precisely what we tried to get away from in our essay.

Recent dramatic changes in the social and political organization of Eastern Europe and what was the Soviet Union have led to a widespread reformulation of certain generic terms that have long plagued comparative scholarship. Similarly, with the destruction of the monolithic Berlin Wall has come the imperative to deconstruct monolithic terms, such as communism or traditionalism, which have often obfuscated difference and negated geographical and historical specificity. In this essay, and in the spirit of laying to rest the ghost of the ideal type, I compare the work and authority relations in Chinese and Soviet factories in the 1960s and 1970s. When the differing variables that coalesced to form distinctive patterns of labor relations in these two countries during those years are more clearly understood, it will be possible to discuss the current patterns of change with greater accuracy. In addition, when the essentially structuralist constraints of an overarching communist type are loosened, it is also possible to reintroduce actors into the dialectic and to enrich the comparison with finer social and historical detail.