In this article we rethink the chronotope approach by examining what happened to religious space-times in a Chinese urban development project that completely transformed what had once been five relatively rural townships. What happens to chronotopes when a place is so completely transformed? We focus on multiple chronotopic dimensions in the religious experience of those villagers whose families had long occupied this land, but who now live separated from their old neighbors, without their old livelihoods, having lost their old temples, and surrounded by new migrants who are generally wealthier and better educated. Building on recent anthropological work on chronotopes, coupled with insights taken from Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, this article explores the complex interrelationships and workings of chronotopes through the idea of the fold. This approach reconsiders what the boundaries between chronotopes might look like—not necessarily straight lines that are difficult to cross, but more like the infinite inflections of curves as those curves intersect and interact with each other. Rather than thinking of chronotopes as structured wholes separated by clear boundaries—much as we also tend to think about “states,” “cultures,” or “ontologies”—folding allows us to reconceptualize the kinds of interactions that take place when one space-time touches another. We examine in particular three ways in which folding elucidates how chronotopic boundaries can work: they can make the distant near, separate inside from outside, and complicate the boundary by interdigitating.

For many city dwellers in Pakistan the distant memory of outdoor cinemas in their ancestral villages rekindles the thrill of first contact with film exhibition. This paper considers attempts made in colonial British India and postcolonial Pakistan to understand, wield, and benefit from the staging of such memorable and affective filmic events. In its cultivation of “cinema-minded” subjects, the British Empire commissioned studies of audiences and their reactions to film exhibition in hopes of managing the unruly morality and materiality of the cinematic apparatus. After Partition and the creation of the Dominion of Pakistan, similar studies continued, evincing a residual strategy of elicited contact. The elicitation of film contact aimed at the exertion and commandment of the event of film exhibition for the purposes of knowing their constituent subjects at a moment of malleability. Yet the Empire's struggle with the perceived problems of “Muslim tastes” and audience members’ ambivalence over rural screenings in post-Partition Pakistan calls for a reconsideration of the efficacy of these tactics. I argue that what complicated these encounters are affective responses that questioned the address, permissibility, and efficacy of film exhibition. In these tactics of elucidation, disenchantment, and denial, ruptures are refused and the new is dismissed as inoperable, incompatible, or impermissible.

Despite official narratives of a relatively smooth transition, of the merging of “those things which belong together,” German unification and the formation of a new German state has been an uneven project filled with friction and animosity. While the West German government celebrated the “victory” of unification, and stated that all East Germans wanted unification, one group of East Germans did not look forward to the dissolution of the GDR: members of the East German military, the Nationale Volksarmee (National People's Army, or NVA). Disbanded immediately upon unification, the overwhelming majority of NVA officers were left unemployed overnight, stripped of their status as officers and portrayed by the West Germans as the “losers” of the Cold War. For these men, unification was not a joyous, desired event; rather, it represented the end of their careers, security, status, and the state they had sworn to defend. As such, the “fall” into democracy for these men was from the start fraught with uncertainty, disappointment, anomie, and a profound sense of loss.

Over the past three decades, writings on modernity and post-modernity have emanated from both the social sciences and humanities. In this context, the voluminous works of Niklas Luhmann and his interpreters (Lee 2000; Rasch 2000) have had a lasting impact on how social theory and various expressions of modernity are interconnected. Yet, one of the finest and most critical understandings of modernity and its totality is still found in the writings of Georg Simmel, who is barely referred to in most recent analyses. Now, through the brilliant interpretations and translations by David Frisby and his colleagues over the past two decades, the interest in Simmel and his intellectual efforts has achieved a position which ranks him with Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. Although Simmel (1858–1918) is classically labeled a sociologist, the depth and breadth of his interests simply cannot be limited to any one discipline. Rather, it is best to approach Simmel as a cultural philosopher, one who used the essay format to address a number of subjects, issues, and problems. Simmel wrote some ten to fifteen books of which only a few have been translated into English, The Philosophy of Money (1900, 1907) being the most visible.

The widespread reaction against secret diplomacy which followed the First World War led to demands that statesmen conduct their affairs openly and be responsive to public opinion. The specific forms that Open Diplomacy might take in the post-war world were hard to envision, even for the most ardent advocates of change. At the Paris Peace Conference several hundred newsmen discovered that ‘open covenants openly arrived at’ did not mean that negotiations would be held in public. Similarly, the whole process by which governments were supposed to determine domestic or world opinion on a given issue and then formulate policies in accord with it was easier to talk about than to implement. If supporters of Open Diplomacy wanted simplicity, they were in fact getting a host of new complexities in their quest for a more democratic foreign policy.

The expansion of Western influence during and after the fifteenth century was a pervasive phenomenon. European seamen, traders, and settlers set off one of the most widespread and complex processes of cultural contact and transfer in human history. Students of acculturation are thus presented with a unique opportunity for controlled observation, that of keeping one variable—the culture of Western Europe—relatively constant while allowing others to range widely. European traders carried much the same cultural baggage, material and conceptual, whether they travelled to the Americas, Asia, or the East Indies, but the cultures they encountered and with which they interacted covered a wide spectrum of human conditions.

The development of the modern Indian legal system provides, as Marc Galanter notes, a remarkable instance of the total displacement of a major intellectual and institutional complex in a highly developed civilization with one largely of foreign origin or at least inspiration and the replacement of the savants and practitioners of the older system by a new elite. The bulk of this modern elite, the second largest body of legal practitioners in the world, comprises the district lawyers or vakils. This paper describes some aspects of social organization among the vakils of Ambala City, a small district headquarters town in the North Indian state of Haryana.

This article is an attempt to survey, in a thematic fashion, the history of whiteaboriginal relations in Western Australia. Although it is based on research into the period from 1897 to 1954,1 the author believes that the more recent developments have not basically affected the validity of the comments here presented. He is also convinced that, speaking broadly, they are applicable to the Australian scene as a whole. The article should therefore be of interest to the students of white-aboriginal relations anywhere in Australia.

Semper eadem—always the same—was Elizabeth I's motto, but the accounts and appropriations of her legacy have been anything but. In the century after her death, as John Watkins' study shows, Elizabeth received mostly good press, but she was praised for different reasons by different people, and to greatly varying political ends. Jacobean economists linked James and Elizabeth as saviors of the English nation against Catholic threat. Parliamentarians in the 1630s and 1640s (and Whig historians thereafter) praised an Elizabeth whose supposedly moderate, constitutionalist government contrasted with the tyrannical innovations of the Stuarts; Royalists, by contrast, praised her as a defender of royal prerogative. Elizabeth made an uncomfortable model for revolutionaries, and her famous memory was invoked less during the Interregnum than before or after; but Restoration writers such as Clarendon and William Cavendish advocated a return to Elizabethan government, which Clarendon understood as a via media between tyranny and excessive popular concessions, but which Cavendish frankly praised as a successful despotism. After the Glorious Revolution, the power of the monarchy had become too limited for Elizabethan government to serve as a practical political model of any kind; but popular interest in Elizabeth flourished in “secret histories” which purported to reveal the passions of her private life, a genre which appealed to the public appetite for scandal in high places, and which endures to this day.

This paper means to suggest that it is good at times to step out of the glare of modern frames of intelligibility in order to perceive in ethnographic data dim, or subtle, signs of worldviews no longer apparent. It proposes to show, in this strain, that humble attention to folklore allows us to make sense of seemingly pointless trivia. Overall, the article is an experiment in interweaving ethnologic and folkloristic approaches to expand the relevant contexts of problematic cultural details and thus attain theoretical generalization.

This book answers a challenging question: what is the importance of nationalism as a source of identity in the era of globalization? The question is explored through various case studies of the inscription of nationalism in Papua New Guinea (PNG). PNG's experience of nationalism, Foster argues, is revealing because nationalist discourse has been imported to the country first by weak attempts at state-building and second from international non-governmental sources. He follows theories that contend that nationalism is created through mundane, everyday practices that bolster the control of productive forces through the state. What Foster finds interesting about PNG is that there the mundane practices involve engagement with private institutions of international scope as much as, if not more than, state institutions. Each chapter presents a case study in which nationalist discourse is a subtext to the institutions, practices, and messages associated with economic development and the international division of labor. Through these cases, Foster shows how people are placed in nation-like collective identities in their everyday engagement with the global order of production and consumption. Further, the mass culture of the nation-state is useful for creating subjects of new kinds of political power.

The Route nationale 116 runs west from Perpignan, away from the Mediterranean and up the valley of the Tet River towards the heights of the Pyrenees. For about thirty kilometres, the road follows the river through a district known as the Riberal, a densely populated area of substantial villages and bourgs surrounded by river flats which for centuries have nourished up to six crops of vegetables annually. Just past the peach-growing town of Ille-sur-Têt, the valley narrows to no more than a gorge, and the road has to diverge to skirt a rugged granite bluff and cross over a pass called the Col de Ternère. As the road swings back around the other side of the bluff to rejoin the river and begin its steep climb through the conflent to the highlands, it passes a large cluster of ochre and white houses, with their characteristically southern orange-brown tiles, clinging to the lower part of the hill.

The growth of English Nonconformity during the era of the demographic revolution (circa 1750–1850) has long been regarded as an impediment to the reconstruction of reproductive behavior. Historical demographers have relied heavily on Church of England registers of baptisms, burials, and marriages, while treating Protestant dissenters from the Church of England secondarily, as a factor of underestimation in the Anglican record. Such treatment suggests that religious culture played no independent role in determining population growth. This assumption seems problematic, however, considering the central role that social historians have assigned evangelical dissent to the emergence of modern English society and the somewhat greater place that religion has occupied in demographic studies of populations in continental Europe, the United States, and the third world.

A major problem in the civic integration of new states is the quickening of “primordial attachments” based on ties of blood, race, language, region, religion or custom. These attachments give rise to separatist, irredentist or factional groupings whose claims to recognition and autonomy cut across the claims of civic unity based on a common national territory.