This paper analyzes a housing project in Santiago, Chile that now lies in ruins and has become a contested memory site. The project was once an ambitious, modernist project that housed former squatters during Salvador Allende’s socialist presidency (1970–1973) and its demise has subsequently become emblematic of the violent processes of neoliberal urban restructuring that marked the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). Yet efforts to memorialize the site also contain within them certain silences and elisions, gaps which can help to reveal the complex, embedded nature of liberal property relations in Chile. These relations underscore certain dynamics through which squatters have historically been able to gain housing rights and a foothold in the city. They also provide a key location through which to better understand the specific contours of neoliberalism’s trajectory, including its haunted forms of ruination, its points of tension, its limits, and the making of its counterpublics.

This essay provides an interpretation of parallel attempts to represent ruination in the cities of Warsaw and Berlin after the Holocaust—the architectural projects of Bohdan Lachert and Daniel Libeskind. Lachert strove to represent the ruination of Jewish life in Warsaw through a modernist housing project, whereas Libeskind sought to represent Jewish ruination in a museum. While these two projects might seem different, they come together around a shared aspiration: to represent absence and ruination. Both projects endeavored to create a new kind of memorial that moved away from the conventional form. Rather than turning away from ruination and suffering as the conventional monument has done, Libeskind and Lachert sought to develop a new, non-salvific kind of monument that would reflect on death, suffering, and emptiness. This essay emphasizes the novelty of their attempts to create a different relationship to the absence that is the past, while it also explores some of the central challenges—both historical and theoretical—that both architects faced in implementing their artistic visions.

Real knowledge emerges from “impossible” worldviews. Or, put differently, it is possible to accept knowledge that is produced by people whose ontological presuppositions–their baseline assumptions about the nature of reality–one entirely rejects. How can this fact be accommodated, not by advancing a wishful post-dualism, dangerous post-secularism, or implausible ontological relativism, but by working within the tradition of secular political philosophy so that indigenous knowledge, too, can be a basis for public policy and collective action in secular societies? Via a reframing Amazonian multinaturalist perspectivism–which has so inspired post-dualist civilizational critiques–as a social theory of health and illness that informs contemporary Western epidemiology’s struggles to theorize the distribution of health and illness in mass society, this article advances a general approach to recognizing knowledge that has been developed on the other side of boundaries of ontological difference. It argues that the accuracy or efficacy of any particular indigenous knowledge-practice implies the generative potential as theory of the ontological presuppositions that facilitated the knowledge-practice’s evolution. Combining the ontological turn’s interest in the innovativeness of indigenous concepts with a proposal for superseding its incommensurable worlds and abandonment of the aspiration to more-than-local knowledge, the article shows that indigenous ideas and their underlying ontologies are more than generic alternatives to inspire Western civilizational renewal, and opens a path to their legitimization as actionable knowledge in the terms of secular public reason.

Economic anthropology has two ‘sacred' field sites—one in Melanesia, the other in Central America—and the empirical data gathered from these sites has set the theoretical agenda for the sub-discipline. Malinowski conducted seminal fieldwork in both of these areas and the respective subjects of his investigations tells us much about the socio-economic concerns of people in Melanesia and Central America. His classic ethnography on the Kula exchange system of the Milne Bay area of Papua New Guinea, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, established Melanesia as the classic home of gift exchange. The postwar ethnographies have only served to confirm the passion Melanesians have for creating intricate forms of gift exchange: Andrew Strathern's The Rope of Moka, introduced us to the ties that bind the ‘big men' in the Highlands; Michael Young's Fighting with Food: Leadership, Values and Social Control in a Massim Society, challenged us to rethink the social role of food, and so on. These ethnographies, and many others like them, have provided the ethnographic base on which general theories of the gift have risen, Marilyn Strathern's The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, being the best-known recent synthesis. The product of Malinowski's Central American fieldwork, Malinowski in Mexico: The Economics of a Mexican Market System (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), which he wrote with J. de la Fuente, has not had the impact of Argonauts, for a number of reasons, including the fact that an English translation of the 1957 Spanish edition took some twenty-five years to appear, and that his research, carried out in 1940, was not pioneering in the same ethnographic and theoretical way that Argonauts was. His Mexican work was part of a long tradition of American scholarship on the peasant-artisan commodity producers of this area. Commodity production and exchange is to the people of Central America what gift exchange is to Melanesians. However, the exchange of commodities in Central America is a not ceremonial ritual, but rather everyday reality that the people must undertake in order to survive. It has been this way for centuries, which is why Central American ethnographers have devoted so much time to describing and analyzing petty commodity reproduction. This is not to say that market exchange is unimportant for the people of Melanesia, but what sets Melanesia apart is that gift exchange has flourished under the impact of capitalism, and it is this question that commentators have tried to describe and explain. What then are the peculiar social conditions found in Central America that account for the specificities of the economy found there? What conceptual frameworks have economic anthropologists developed to come to terms with these facts?

Child soldiers are often viewed as a contemporary, “new war” phenomenon, but international concern about their use first emerged in response to anti-colonial liberation struggles. Youth were important actors in anti-colonial insurgencies, but their involvement has been neglected in existing historiographies of decolonization and counterinsurgency due to the absence and marginalization of youth voices in colonial archives. This article analyses the causes of youth insurgency and colonial counterinsurgency responses to their involvement in conflict between ca. 1945 and 1960, particularly comparing Kenya and Cyprus, but also drawing on evidence from Malaya, Indochina/Vietnam, and Algeria. It employs a generational lens to explore the experiences of “youth insurgents” primarily between the ages of twelve and twenty. Youth insurgents were most common where the legitimate grievances of youth were mobilized by anti-colonial groups who could recruit children through colonial organizations as well as family and social networks. While some teenagers fought due to coercion or necessity, others were politically motivated and willing to risk their lives for independence. Youth soldiers served in multiple capacities in insurgencies, from protestors to couriers to armed fighters, in roles that were shaped by multiple logics: the need for troop fortification and sustained manpower; the tactical exploitation of youth liminality, and the symbolic mobilization of childhood and discourses of childhood innocence. Counterinsurgency responses to youthful insurgents commonly combined violence and development, highlighting tensions within late colonial governance: juveniles were beaten, detained, and flogged, but also constructed as “delinquents” rather than “terrorists” to facilitate their subsequent “rehabilitation.”

It was David Hume who said that “a man acquainted with history may in some respect be said to have lived from the beginning of the world”. At the present juncture of time, when various civilizations are in the process of being more and more closely interlinked, it certainly seems desirable for all of us to “have lived from the beginning of the world”. From this springs the necessity for having a theory of universal history which is applicable to the main historical processes in our world. For without such a theory the facts become unmanageable in their complexity and enormous volume; no sort of intellectual comprehension is possible. A theory or philosophy of history has, of course, to be applicable in the same manner as a scientific hypothesis. That is to say, if it cannot explain important processes, it has to be discarded, either entirely, or partially. Unfortunately, this attitude has not prevailed among philosophers of history, who have thought of their theories in the spirit of quasi-religious revelations. The term “philosophy of history” is a fairly recent one, having apparently been introduced by Voltaire in 1756. But there have been philosophers of history of some sort or other from very much earlier times. In this essay one cannot consider all of them, of course.

What were the consequences of creating jurisdictions against the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world? Answering this question requires a comparative focus on the courts of mixed commission that adjudicated naval captures of slave ships, located at Sierra Leone (the foremost site of British abolition) and Brazil (the primary mid-century target). Court jurisdiction conflicted with sovereign jurisdiction regarding the presence of recaptives (“liberated Africans”), the risk of re-enslavement, and unlawful naval captures. To rescue the re-enslaved and compensate the loss of property, regulating anti-slave-trade jurisdiction involved coercive strategies alternating with negotiated value exchanges. Abolition as a legal field emerged from interactions between liberated Africans, British diplomatic and naval agents, and local political elites in Brazil and on the Upper Guinea Coast.