During the early 1830s Russian officials drew up plans to reform the educational system of foreign colonists in southern Russia. The colonies of Mennonites there welcomed the proposals as evidence of official interest in plans already formulated by leading Mennonites. In certain quarters, however, educational reform met fierce resistance. Around 1833, Heinrich Balzer, a Lehrer of the Kleine Gemeinde, a small schismatic group in the Mennonite colony at Molochnaia, wrote a number of tracts warning fellow brethren and the other colony Aeltesten of the dangers of close involvement with the “world”, particularly through educational reform. One pamphlet was concerned with the categories of “understanding and reason” (Verstand und Vernuft).

Ideologies of reproduction are social facts, collective representations, of the dramatic ways in which human beings construct and appropriate gender for the imaging of social reality. Such symbolic universes are often centered on the body (Foucault 1980; Martin 1989; Turner 1984; Douglas 1973). As a template of cultural signification, the body becomes a model through which the social order can be apprehended. For instance, gender hierarchies are sometimes envisioned by means of an anatomical or physiological paradigm (Needham 1973; Hugh-Jones 1979; Theweleit 1987). However, the operation of societal power is generally focused on women's bodies and bodily processes. Women, according to a widespread (and controversial) paradigm, are grounded in nature by virtue of the dictates of their bodies: menstruation, pregnancy, birth (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 1969; Ortner 1974; Ardener 1975; Mac-Cormack and Strathern 1986).

The natural condition of history is the paradox. The half century of upheavals which saw the devolution of colonial empires and the humbling of the West's hybris, also witnessed the culminating impact of Western culture upon non-European nations. Toynbee even suggests that this development points to the eventual evolution of a universal civilization, geared to the Westernized rhythm of an industrial society.

There is an uncanny similarity between regulations on merchant activity in various medieval Western European countries, on the one hand, and, on the other, those in the People's Republic of China (PRC) just after its institution (see Appendix). My discovery of this resemblance informed the research on which this paper is based and directed my attention to some crucial relationships in the interaction between commerce and state at a certain level of economic development. The presence of similar regulations in these societies had to point to (1) like activities going on in them all, along with (2) governmental disapproval of these activities. Thus, a preliminary look at materials on Europe led to new insights into the Chinese situation.

In the small provincial cities of the eastern Netherlands, the annual election of magistrates and town councilors was perhaps the most important public ritualof the year under the old regime. The elaborate and often solemn ceremony symbolized ancient chartered liberties—even when results of the co-optative elections were a foregone conclusion—and thus served to reinforce the community's sense of corporate identity. In 1786, however, in the midst of astruggle for control of the city, the annual Petrikeur in Deventer got out of hand. The day started out normally enough with the traditional worship service in the Grote Kerk, but after the black-robed members of the town council had passed in procession across the square to the stadhuis, a group of dissident councilors, who called themselves Patriots and were implacably opposed to the influence of the stadhouder in municipal politics, attacked aportrait of Prince William III of Orange, the stadhouder who in 1675 first insinuated himself into the electoral process.

The purpose of this paper is to present briefly the theories of secular social and economic development which can be found in the work of Karl Marx and to place them within the context of general thought and theorizing on these matters during the nineteenth century. I shall not present in this paper any new interpretations of Marx's theories, but shall merely try to show that Marx's views are related at many points to other theories on social and economic development proposed during his life and that in many ways he must be regarded as a typical thinker of that period of European social thought.

In much of rural China, memories of past violence are crucial to people's sense of their own relation to distant centers of state power. In particular, memories of death from hunger during the Great Leap famine (1958–61)1 In the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward, twenty to thirty million people died of hunger-related causes. The famine is usually attributed to overprocurement, bad harvests, disastrous agricultural policies, chaotic transportation, and natural calamities (Kane 1988). In Yunnan the famine was not as severe as in many regions, but the poor, remote counties in the north still suffered badly. In 1960, according to official figures, the crude death rate rose to forty-two per thousand in the northern counties of Yongren, Dayao and Yaoan, while the rate for the province as a whole was twenty-six per thousand (Yunnan Sheng tongji ju renkou ban 1990). Within these counties, high-mountain, cash crop areas such as Zhizuo, where every household relied on sales of hempen cloth to buy food (see Mueggler 1998b), suffered worst. and suicide during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) continue to haunt people's imagination of state and nation in ways that those of us who did not live through these devastations are only beginning to discover (cf. Watson 1994). Many of the diverse, non-Han, Tibeto-Burman speaking communities scattered through the mountains of Southwest China share traditions of poetic speech, explicitly intended to deal with bodily afflictions attributed to spectral memories of the violently dead. In a Lolop'o (officially Yi) minority community, where I did fieldwork from 1991–1993,Thirteen months of field research were conducted in Zhizuo between October 1991 and June 1993. Sponsoring units were the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences in Kunming and the Yi Culture Research Institute in Chuxiong. poetic speech is used to drive the ghosts of those who died of hunger, suicide, or other violence out of the bodies of their descendants and into the surrounding landscape. The ghosts are driven along a specific route through surrounding mountain villages. Their path eventually takes them down the nearby Jinsha river to the Changjiang (Yangtze). They make these rivers their steeds, riding them across the empire's breadth to the richly-imagined cities of Chongqing, Wuhan, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Beijing. En route, they are to feast on piles of meat and barrels of drink, buy beautiful clothing in the markets, and hobnob with officials.

The European conquest of Asia is one of the major historical movementsof our time. Pannikar calls this the age of Vasco DeGama, Parry writesof the rise of European Hegemony, and McNeill sees it as part of an evenbroader historical process that he calls the rise of the west. For all observers it was truly a conquest, a violent and bloody struggle in which Europe gained the ascendence through superior military might.

The discipline called the “anthropology of Christianity” began to gain traction in the early to mid-2000s when interested scholars focused on Christianity as an object of collaborative and comparative cross-cultural analysis. Along with several landmark works of Joel Robbins, one foundational text is Fenella Cannell's edited volume The Anthropology of Christianity, published in 2006. In her introductory essay, Cannell poses a pointed question for the volume and the discipline itself: “What difference does Christianity make?” Bracketing the question of whether “difference” can or should be defined (Green 2014), several anthropologists have taken inspiration from Cannell, including Naomi Haynes (2014) in the concluding essay to a recent special issue of Current Anthropology, and myself and Debra McDougall (2013) in an edited volume on Christian politics in Oceania. Difference, as the criterion by which continuity and transformation are evaluated, is arguably the key concept for an effective anthropological engagement with Christianity.

Chinese practices of matchmaking have been controversial for over a century. Their continued transformations reveal a complex nexus of sentimental and material dimensions in the marriage-decision process at the heart of the negotiations between families and in their selections of proper candidates. This interplay between personal sentiments, concrete considerations, and the desire for success makes marriage controversial, as “love” is claimed and proclaimed at the same time. Moral debates around materialism, which have reverberated through the public sphere over the last decade, show how “love” acts as a tool of social reproduction while it also expresses sincere aspirations for an emotionally satisfying life. In comparative perspective, the complex of romantic love examined here reveals a recent, original synthesis of the tradition of parental arrangement and the political question of the place of love in modernity. The paper elucidates one of the contradictions within Chinese society today: the family remains central, but wider trends of individualization continue to unfold. A multifaceted understanding of love clarifies how it can bind families together while it also discourages others from pursuing romance.

From the late nineteenth century through the interwar period, the production and consumption of German things played critical roles in delineating and connecting a wide variety of German places in Latin America. Such places became ubiquitous in Chile and Argentina. They flourished because there was ample room in the German imagination for the multiplicity of German places and the cultural hybridity that accompanied them to extend beyond Imperial Germany's national boundaries and colonial possessions. They also flourished because host societies found virtue in having those German places in their states. This essay uses German schools in Argentina and Chile as a window into the emergence of such German places and the soft power that accompanied them. Scholars often overlook that power when they focus on colonial questions or formal and informal imperialism in Latin America. More than any other institution, German schools became sites where the production and consumption of German things were concentrated and multilayered, and where the consistencies and great varieties of Germanness that arrived and evolved in Latin America gained their clearest articulation. Because those schools were both centers of communities and nodes in a global pedagogical network that thrived during the interwar period, they provide us with great insight into a nexus of motivations that created German places in Latin America. Life around these schools also underscores the importance of studying immigrants and their things together.

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.

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.