It seems remarkable how often we call “myths” the kind of arbitrary constructs in other peoples' worldview that we tend to attribute to the nature of things in our own case. Double standards may be involved, of course; but it could also be the case that one tends to miss the semiotic essence of the cultural construct one calls “reality.” As every anthropologist knows, one's most cherished cultural assumptions tend to remain implicit; otherwise put, worldview is largely unconscious. This paper explores the possibility of plumbing unconscious aspects of one's own culture in order to assess what some might call—regarding other cultures—the mythic underpinnings of worldview.

Private security work can be a brutal world of short-term contracts, exploitation, and under-regulation, where the imperative of profit is expected to trump collective notions of military brotherhood. Why then do so many demobilized soldiers turn to it as a vocation? While a rich body of work has revealed the vulnerabilities of demobilized military life, ethnographic investigations into how contractors experience and make sense of precarity are less common. Drawing on fieldwork with military veterans of European descent working and living in East Africa, this article argues that a central, yet underexplored, feature of contemporary security work is colonial nostalgia. Some contractors read the travelogues of colonial adventurers, while others trace their family genealogy to ancestral colonial frontier soldiers. A few even write their own memoirs in similar fashion. Writing, reading, and living the colonial past through this contractor canon serves several present-day functions. First, the parallels between risk-taking colonial adventurers and the kind of rugged individualism associated with homo economicus masks the tensions and fissures that emerge from soldiers’ discharge from the military and subsequent remobilization as privatized contractors. Secondly, colonial nostalgia forms part of a larger political critique of Western military interventions, of which many of these contractors experienced first-hand. Here, private security work is imagined as replicating an older, more effective tradition of frontier soldiering that is rooted in a logic of settler-colonialism. Finally, fantasies of a colonial past feed into contractors’ attempts to market themselves to clients and to organize their everyday work.

The role played by Christianity and Christian churches in the demonization of the Jews by the German National Socialist and Italian Fascist regimes remains a subject of intense controversy. The historiography at the base of this debate has been largely rooted in research on either Germany or Italy, yet comparative empirical study is particularly well-suited to allow broader generalizations. Such work is especially valuable given the very different relationships the two regimes maintained with the churches. This article identifies similarities and differences in the Nazi and Italian Fascist uses of Christianity in their efforts to turn their populations against the Jews through examination of two of their most influential popular anti-Semitic propaganda vehicles: La difesa della razza in Italy and Der Stürmer in Germany. Both mixed pseudoscientific racial theories with arguments based on Christian religious authority, and both presented themselves as defenders of Christianity against the Jewish threat. Yet while the Italian publication, reflecting the Fascist regime's close relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, took care to present itself as in harmony with the Church, the German publication adopted a much more critical attitude toward contemporary German churches and churchmen, casting them as having strayed from the true teachings of Jesus.

This article investigates exemplarity from the point of view of the subject, the person who leads an exemplary life. Asking how this differs from the case of someone who intends more simply to lead a morally good life, it argues that the former requires sharp prioritizing among the range of possible human virtues. While both kinds of actor should be understood in relational terms, namely relations to the self, direct interlocutors, and wider society, a subject becomes an exemplar by objectifying and conveying to others the chosen specific form of virtue. Taking the case of Ataman Semenov, a White general in the Russian Civil War, the article then examines the pitfalls of having to take a culturally particular exemplary position. Some of these relate to the problems that occur in general when moral exemplarity is demonstrated, the subject being unable to control misreading of the exemplary act, the hesitations of followers, or the leeway with which they attempt to emulate or imitate the act. Other problems concern the historical positioning of the exemplary subject, particularly in a time of war. By making overt certain specific virtues, and by the same token backgrounding or suppressing others, he or she has to “stand out” amid general confusion and uncertainty and therefore is certain to arouse animosity, as much as loyalty.

This article explores the environmental transformation of the moorland (landes) of southwestern France from a much maligned “wilderness” or “empty space” to a forested landscape coveted for its productive potential as well as its aesthetic beauty. This occurred in two stages from the eighteenth century to the present and was effected by the French state and local landowners. It bears resemblance to processes of environmental change in North America, Central Asia, and Africa, where states and colonial or imperial powers took measures to develop alleged empty spaces through seizure, development, and settlement. Drawing on paradigms of colonial rule and Henri Lefebvre’s theory regarding the production of space, the article examines the eradication of the “wilderness” of the region of the Landes, which led to the displacement of its pastoral populations and the end of their way of life. It explores the role of technology in consolidating the power of territorial states and empires and the significance of the parallels that can be drawn between the Landes and France’s overseas empire. Finally, it attests to the porosity of the boundary between man-made and natural landscapes, while illuminating the process by which the artificial forested landscape of the Landes ironically came to be redefined and revalorized as “natural” national heritage that was ripe for environmental protection by the second half of the twentieth century.

This study asks how human trafficking in Ming China (1368–1644) became enveloped in the emerging global economy of the sixteenth century. Utilizing theoretical insights from the model of “slaving zones,” the essay examines recorded incidents of human trafficking along China’s littoral from 1370 to 1565 and contends that its presence and persistence were intertwined with the Ming court’s economic policies and problems. Here the history of human trafficking in early-to-mid-Ming China is viewed from the perspective of a series of challenges to the country’s economic well-being but also to its power to govern according to its own laws and norms. These challenges include the Ming regime’s efforts: to eradicate piracy and smuggling through their integration into the lawful framework of tribute trade; to support provincial requests for extra revenue to promote military security; to acquire Japanese silver but deny Japan mercantile access to China; to profit from Portugal’s Southeast Asian and Japanese commercial networks. This study argues that the increasing prevalence of human trafficking along China’s coastline was the result of competing forces anxious for power and riches that fused into the thrust of sixteenth-century China’s expanding economy, as well as the adaptability of those in authority to ignore the consequences of allowing safe havens for persons bartering and selling human beings. These factors turned the status of Ming China’s littoral from a “no slaving zone” into an “imperfect no slaving zone.”

With the rise of HIV and other “emerging diseases” having global reach over the past twenty years, interest in historic plague has flourished. The Justinianic plague in and around the Roman empire from a.d. 541 to 750, however, has received far less attention that the Black Death of 1348 and its recurrent strikes in Europe to the eighteenth century. This difference results in part from the comparative paucity of sources for the former and its greater linguistic demands, which require a knowledge of ancient Middle Eastern as well as Western languages. Because of these demands, Lester Little argues persuasively that a multiple-authored work by authorities in different parts of Europe is now needed before a single-authored synthesis can be adequately written.

Why does civil society in some cases become a tool of elite organization and domination of non-elites, and in others a sphere for non-elite self-organization and self-determination? To answer this question, this article compares the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century divergent developments of civil society in two regions of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Russian-ruled Congress Poland, with a focus on the Warsaw Governorate (1815–1915), and Austrian-ruled western-Galicia, concentrating on the Grand Duchy of Krakow (1846–1914). This analysis of variation in elite domination of civil society shifts the focus of civil society debates away from the market and the state and toward elites. It argues that while imperial policies of regional integration and socioeconomic changes spurred by the transition from feudalism shaped the potential paths of civil society's development in both regions, their effects on civil society's relative autonomy in each were mediated, and thus steered, by the interests and conflicts of local elites.

Explaining why restraint of violence becomes a strategy for armed groups has recently attracted the attention of researchers, especially political scientists. The emergent literature generally argues by way of macro-level statistical correlation, in which a single factor, such as the desire of armed groups to adhere to international norms about human rights or the existence of high levels of political education among fighters, is believed to explain the presence of restraint. Missing in this approach are close analyses of actual historical episodes of restraint. We thus lack comprehension of how those with ideas about restraining violence translate their thoughts into actions, especially in contexts such as civil wars. This article addresses this weakness by examining the history of a Balkan community wracked by intercommunal violence during 1941 to explain the puzzling practice of restraint in the midst of waves of retaliatory violence. Rather than identify a single factor, this micro-comparative case study reveals that a cluster of mostly endogenous factors, shaped significantly by ongoing violence, explains the successful practice of restraint. Methodologically, this article stresses the need for researchers of restraint to employ microhistorical and comparative methods. They hold the greatest potential to illuminate what remains insufficiently explained in the extant political science literature: the contingent local processes whereby a desire for restraint or escalation of violence—the existence of which may be conditioned by longer-term historical developments—becomes a reality in certain moments.

This article traces the genealogy of a Jewish-owned botánica located in East Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. Botánicas are understood to manifest an intricate, transatlantic religious, spiritual, and healing world, offering herbal products, sacramental goods, ritual implements, and counseling to Italian, Latinx, Black, and Caribbean practitioners of folk Catholicism, herbalism, hoodoo, Vodou, Santería, Espiritismo, Curanderismo, Òrìṣà worship and other ethnomedical and spiritual systems. Yet this botánica was owned by an Eastern Mediterranean Jew from the Ottoman/Italian island of Rhodes, and it integrated Sephardic and Mediterranean histories and sources of inspiration. Extraordinarily, this history stands for a greater whole. Jews were pioneering spiritual merchants in the United States. Restoring their history requires journeying globally, beginning with Ottomans’ fidelity to herbalism; tracing émigré Sephardic Jews’ uneven dialogue with Black African men and women in colonial Central and Southern Africa; and delving into the commercial, spiritual, and racial interplay furthered by Jewish-owned pharmacies and botánicas in New York City, Baltimore, Atlanta, Memphis, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles and by Jewish spiritual merchants and their Caribbean, Latinx, and Black patrons. All this introduces an unexpected Jewish and Mediterranean history to the botánica, and an unexpectedly multifarious spiritual, mercantile, and racial dimension to Jewish history.

In 2015, Spain approved a law that offered citizenship to the descendants of Sephardi Jews expelled in 1492. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and historical sources, I show that this law belongs to a political genealogy of philosephardism in which the “return” of Sephardi Jews has been imagined as a way to usher in a deferred Spanish modernity. Borrowing from anthropological theories of “racial fusion,” philosephardic thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century saw Sephardi Jews as inheritors of a racial mixture that made them living repositories of an earlier moment of national greatness. The senator Ángel Pulido, trained as an anthropologist, channeled these intellectual currents into an international campaign advocating the repatriation of Sephardi Jews. Linking this racial logic to an affective one, Pulido asserted that Sephardi Jews did not “harbor rancor” for the Expulsion, but instead felt love and nostalgia toward Spain, and could thus be trusted as loyal subjects who would help resurrect its empire. Today, affective criteria continue to be enmeshed in debates about who qualifies for inclusion and are inextricable from the histories of racial thought that made earlier exclusions possible. Like its precursors, the 2015 Sephardic citizenship law rhetorically fashioned Sephardi Jews as fundamentally Spanish, not only making claims about Sephardi Jews, but also making claims on them. Reckoning with how rancor and other sentiments have helped buttress such claims exposes the recalcitrant hold that philosephardic thought has on Spain's present, even those “progressive” political projects that promise to “return” what has been lost.

This essay addresses recent scholarship on Colonial Cuzco, focusing on the complexity of imperial relationships at the colonial interface. Encounters between Europeans and Andeans in highland Peru involved considerable complexity at any given moment, and changed significantly over time. Exploring this complexity through historiography, ethnohistory, art, and anthropology, the four books reviewed here describe Colonial Cuzco as a contested interculture, in which a multiplicity of self-interested individuals and groups exploited inequalities between colonial government and those governed. As Dean (1999) observes, this divide developed out of the innate ambivalence of colonialism, in which colonizers sought to subordinate through enculturation, yet maintain discrete cultural categories. Native resistance to foreign enculturation and periodic rebellions and revitalization movements acted to maintain these categories. Still, the quotidian operation of the colonial system allowed (and even required) the mediation of the colonial interculture, a creative blurring of such categories as government/governed, urban/rural, sacred/secular, and even past/present. Fundamental to appreciating how Spaniards, Andeans, and others wove a variegated social fabric in Colonial Cuzco is the Quechua notion of tinku (or tinkuy), described by Dean, Stavig, and others.

In Australia, applicants for native title—legal recognition of proprietary interest in land devolving from traditions predating colonization—must meet a stringent standard of continuity of social identity since before the advent of Crown sovereignty. As courts and the legislature have gravitated toward an increasingly strict application of the continuity doctrine, anthropologists involved in land claims cases have found themselves rehearsing an old debate in Australian anthropology over the degree to which post-contact patterns of subsistence, movement, and ritual enactment can support inferences about life in precontact Australia. In the 1960s, at the dawn of the land claims era, a handful of anthropologists shifted the debate to an ecological plane. Characterizing Australia on the cusp of colonization as a late Holocene climax human ecosystem, they argued that certain recently observed patterns in the distribution of marks of social cohesion (mutual intelligibility of language, systems of classificatory kinship) could not represent the outcome of such a climax ecosystem and must indicate disintegration of Aboriginal social structures since contact. Foremost among them was Joseph Birdsell, for whom linguistic boundaries, under climax conditions, would self-evidently be congruent with boundaries in breeding pools. Birdsell's intervention came just as the Northern Territory Supreme Court was hearing evidence on the value of dialect as a marker of membership in corporate landholding groups in Yolngu country, and offers an object lesson in how language, race, mode of subsistence, and law come together in efforts to answer the questions “Who was here first?” and “Are those people still here?”

Like Dr. Zenner, I have carried out field research in the Galilean region of Israel, and like him have had to rely mainly on older respondents—in my case, exclusively Druze—for basic data. But where Dr. Zenner is an anthropologist with historical interests, I am a psychologist; as such, my thoughts on the kinds of materials that we both collected may provide a worthwhile complement to his. Faced with the fact that memories of Aqiili Agha continue to echo through the Galilee long after his death, the historical scholar asks, ‘what manner of man engendered these accounts?’ while the psychologist asks, ‘why do these memories persist, and in what ways are these memories distorted by the same motives that keep them alive?’. Accordingly, Dr. Zenner uses his subjects as informants on an historic figure, Aqiili Agha, a person external to themselves. As a psychologist I use equivalent materials, from a similar respondent group, as projective data.