This article describes the development of family farms within a Kipsigis community in western Kenya. In Kenya, throughout rural Africa, and elsewhere in the “developing world,” family farms figure as key discursive and geographic spaces where the “development process” is located (see Crehan and von Oppen 1988, McCracken 1982, Ferguson 1990). Family farms are hybrid spaces where individual, local, state-based, and various “expert” visions of development intersect. They have the added virtue of being places whose geographic, historical and cultural specificity makes them accessible to ethnographic description.Of course the same applies to family farms everywhere. Quite distinctive forms of “the family farm” exist in different regions of France, the United States, and other places in the “developed” world. Despite the presumed leveling effects of modernization, such regional differences show few signs of disappearing (see Rogers 1991).

:Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines, by Fenella Cannell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). @TX:Syncretism is a word with a history. Much like fetishism, its famously promiscuous cousin, it has been hurled as an accusation and deployed as a theoretical tool. One can try to neutralize this history by drawing a distinction between “processes of religious synthesis” and the “discourse of syncretism”--read condemnation and/or defense--but the word remains productively problematic (see Stewart and Shaw 1994). It not only conjures an orthodoxy against which deviations can be measured; it also tempts us to presume we can identify the ingredients in any particular mixture, and that we know in advance how and why synthesis occurs. At the heart of the concept lurk daunting questions. What do we mean by religion? How do ethnographers and the people they study produce this category, explicitly and tacitly, institutionally and informally, in texts and the practices of everyday life?

This article examines whether and how the figure of Adolf Hitler in particular, and National Socialism more generally, operate as moral exemplars in today’s Germany. In conversation with similar studies about Mosely in England, Franco in Spain, and Mussolini in Italy, it seeks to advance our comparative understanding of neofascism in Europe and beyond. In Germany, legal and discursive constraints limit what can be said about the Third Reich period, while even far-right nationalists often condemn Hitler, for either the Holocaust or his military failure. Here I revise the concept of moral exemplarity as elaborated by Caroline Humphry to argue that Hitler and National Socialism do nevertheless work as contemporary exemplars, in at least three fashions: negativity, substitution, and extension. First, they stand as the most extreme markers of negative exemplarity for broad publics that understand them as illustrations of absolute moral depravity. Second, while Hitler himself is widely unpopular, Führer-substitutes such as Rudolf Hess provide alternative figures that German nationalists admire and seek to emulate. Finally, by extension to the realm of the ordinary, National Socialism introduces a cast of exemplars in the figures of loving grandfathers or anonymous fallen soldiers. The moral values for which they stand, I show, appear to be particularly significant for young nationalists. An extended, more open-ended notion of exemplarity, I conclude, can offer important insights about the lingering afterlife of fascist figures in the moral life of European nationalists today.

How were monarchy, gender, and nationalism entwined? Through contextualized comparisons of selected case studies (two generations of royal women in four countries: Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia/Yugoslavia), this article explores, in gendered terms, the instrumentalization of nursing as an evolving relationship between state building, warfare, welfare, and voluntary organizations. It argues that certain queens’ interventions in nursing successfully contributed to the “naturalization” of the ruling foreign dynasties in the Balkans and to the militarization of charity. Through such “soft power” they mobilized nursing in different ways to carve out an autonomous space and visibility in wartime as queen-nurses and in peacetime as queen-benefactors. In both cases, royal women personified the “curing” and “caring” dimensions of the modernizing state. Queens’ honorific leadership clearly linked the monarchy and the philanthropic sector but also discreetly expanded the power of the nationalizing state. Queens skillfully promoted a gendered culture of sacrifice, by representing women as caring “by nature,” and thus reinforced neo-traditionalist patriarchal regimes and weakened women’s effectiveness in pursuing their political and economic demands.

My knowledge of the inner workings of CSSH began when the journal had completed its sixth year and was already well known and widely circulated. A few years before, Sylvia L. Thrupp had brought it with her when she moved to Michigan from the University of Chicago. When I joined the Michigan faculty, its presence was one of the attractions. I had been become aware of CSSH in its first year, pointed to it by Robert R. Palmer, who was working on the second volume of his Age of the Democratic Revolution. As we talked about his project, I expressed surprise that more was not being done with historical comparison, and he mentioned, rather skeptically I thought, that there was a new journal I might be interested in. I found the first issues in the library and mentioned them to another Princeton colleague who commented, “When historians don't know enough to write about one place, they write on two.” So I learned from the first that the venture was controversial. In contrast, Joseph R. Strayer told me he thought the new journal very promising, largely because of the woman who had founded it. (Much later, I learned that he had persuaded Princeton to make a small contribution to the journal's founding, and some twenty-five years after that conversation, when both were in their eighties, Joseph Strayer married Sylvia Thrupp).

In Central Asia, the Soviet state had destroyed most Islamic institutions by the late 1930s, which gradually alienated millions of Soviet Muslims from the basics of Islamic theology and key Islamic practices of virtue cultivation, including the five daily prayers (namaz), Islamic ethics of dressing (like covering certain parts of the body), and certain lifestyle prescriptions (such as the avoidance of alcohol, gambling, and premarital sex). As a result, mainstream Islam in Central Asia came to revolve around the main Islamic life-cycle rites (i.e., male circumcision, the marriage ceremony, and funeral prayer) and occasional practices of uttering blessings, reciting short Qur’anic verses for the souls of the deceased, and visiting shrines, among others. Although more than thirty years have passed since the fall of the USSR, this non-observant form of Islam remains widespread in the region. Inquiring into the conceptual and affective aspects of Soviet forced secularization in Central Asia, I make two interrelated interventions into secularism studies and the anthropology of Islam. First, I theorize Soviet secularism through attending to the modern state’s aspiration to transcend and transform the particularities of lived traditions, which reveals significant overlaps between communist and liberal modes of statecraft and subject formation. Second, reflecting on a non-observant form of Islam in contemporary Kyrgyzstan, I ask: what remains of a tradition of virtue ethics when its modes of abstract reasoning and virtue cultivation have all but vanished?

I review and critique three important recent books to clarify the ways in which empires amass territories, dominate the peoples within them, and sooner or later decline and disappear. I review definitions of empires and contrast empires with nation-states. Empires succeed to the extent to which they manage differences among subjects, and I examine explanations for empires’ varying strategies for accomplishing that necessary task. I examine how empires both suppress and inadvertently foster nationalism. Imperial dynamics were influenced by competition with rival empires even as empires learned from each other's successes and failures. Throughout the modern era ancient Rome was a model and a caution. I identify the ways in which wars led to imperial expansion and moments when wars weakened or fatally undermined empires. I contrast ancient and modern and European and Asian empires. Finally, I look at the nineteenth-century expansion and twentieth-century collapses of modern empires and speculate on the extent to which those trajectories hold lessons for the contemporary United States.

This article explores the history of “Islamic Society” (al-Mujtamaʿ al-Islāmī), a concept whose widespread usage is paralleled by shallow understandings of its origins. Scholars of premodern Islamic history often use this term to describe the ideas and practices of Muslim communities under Islamic political rule, while historians of the Muslim Brotherhood highlight this leading Islamist movement’s commitment to forming such a collective yet treat the concept as sui generis. This article, in turn, draws on a wide array of Islamic print media published by leading Islamic movements and state institutions in Egypt between 1898 and 1981 to tell a story of how this concept became intellectually viable and politically meaningful in the context of transition from colonial to postcolonial rule in the mid-twentieth century. Building on histories of religious nationalism which trace how religious nationalist visions produce novel understandings of religious identity rather than replicating prior models, the article explores the ways in which identity is linked to particular projects of religious practice. In doing so, it casts light on how religious nationalist projects seek to structure social life through calls to continuity with the past even as they adopt the core assumptions of the nation-state project. Specifically, it argues that, as Muslim thinkers, activists, and scholars navigated the transition from colonial to postcolonial rule, they turned to this concept to articulate dueling conceptions of religious change through state power and social mobilization alike.

In January 1909, the students of the Azhar, the Islamic world’s most prestigious university, went on strike. Protesting recent curricular and administrative changes introduced by the Egyptian Khedive, they demanded increased material support and asserted the university’s right to govern itself. After several weeks of demonstrations that drew thousands of supporters into the streets of Cairo, the Khedive suspended the reforms that first caused the Azharis to walk out. Oddly, this remarkable mobilization has nearly vanished into obscurity. Drawing on reporting from the Egyptian press and intelligence memoranda from the Egyptian Ministry of Interior, this article argues that the apparent incongruity of Azharis on strike was no mistake. Their willful rejection of ascribed categories helps to explain both why this movement of unionized seminarians speaking a language of self-government proved so striking for contemporary supporters and critics alike and why this event has slipped through the cracks of a historiography still framed by those very categories. Long forgotten in histories of both nationalism and organized labor, the Azhar strike represented a pivotal moment in the emergence of mass politics in Egypt. In invoking “union,” the Azharis engaged in multiple, overlapping acts of comparison. Inspired by the modular repertoires of militant labor, they simultaneously hailed the constitutional revolution of the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress as a model for political transformation. Rooted in a self-conscious critique of colonial comparativism, their struggle thereby furnished new materials with which to elaborate a telescopic series of anti-colonial solidarities that were themselves fundamentally comparative.

This article explores the relationship between tax law and settler colonialism by looking at the ways in which taxes can be part of the “civilizing” process of Indigenous peoples. In 1921, the Territory of Alaska enacted a “license tax on the business of fur-farming, trapping and trading in pelts and skins of fur-bearing animals.” Since most trappers were Natives, the “fur tax” de facto targeted them. This article unpacks the sociocultural and political dimensions of the fur tax against the backdrop of Alaska’s settler colonial history. Despite what the Alaska attorney general claimed was its “strict” revenue-raising function, the tax was part of a much broader settler colonial agenda. That agenda sought to turn semi-nomadic, “uncivilized” Native hunters into spatially grounded, “civilized” farmers, gardeners, reindeer herders, or wage workers. Ultimately, I suggest, within many if not most settler colonial spaces political and sociocultural ideologies alter the initial revenue-raising function of taxes.

The Hutterites are an Anabaptist sect that was founded early in the sixteenth century. Their society today is characterized on the one hand by a traditional social order and on the other by the pursuit of rationally structured economic activities. How is it possible to combine these seemingly contradictory characteristics in the daily life of communities whose populations hardly exceed 140 members? Would it not be much more reasonable for Hutterites not only to uphold their traditional social order, but also to follow conservative economic practices as some of the Old Order Amish do? How is it possible that a Hutterite individual can at one moment give detailed technical instructions for repair of a complicated machine over shortwave radio and an hour later expose himself to a religious sermon, the text of which has not changed for 350 years?