Both the theories coming out of the linguistic turn and those running away from it have placed special emphasis on human language (or human symbolic thinking) as a matter of convention and shared meanings. Yet there are other histories that link language and humanness through invention, deceit, and secrecy rather than through convention and publicness. These alternate models have been used as diagnostic of humanness in a range of contexts, from the colonial past into the technologized present. I examine here the ways in which the unshared, non-public symbol has stood at the center of two disparate contexts in which the humanness of speakers of novel languages are put in question. The first case examines the ways in which Christian missionaries started to see Tok Pisin, a novel pidginized language spoken by indentured laborers in colonial Papua New Guinea, as a possible language of evangelism when it became associated with deceit and moral dissolution. The second case examines a 2017 moral panic in the United States about two chatbots that were reported to have invented their own language and then used it to lie to one another. In contrast to the first case, one of the ways that bots get figured as beyond-human is in the fear that there is no way to impose a moral order, no colonial evangelism that could be used to encompass them. By taking on the symbolic while withholding public meanings, the speakers of these unshared symbols sit at the boundaries of humanness.

Historians of Islamic occult science and post-Mongol Persianate kingship in the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires have in recent years made clear just how central this body of knowledge was to the exercise of imperial power. Alongside, scholarship on tantra has pointed to its diffuse persistence in the early modern period. But what dynamics beyond courts and elite initiates did these investments in occult science and tantra unleash? Through a focus on the seventeenth-century Mughal court and the Rajput polity of Marwar in the eighteenth century, this article weaves together the history of animals with that of harmful magic by non-courtly actors. It demonstrates the blended histories of tantra, Islamicate occult sciences, and folk magic to argue that attributions of liminality encoded people, animals, and things with occult potential. For some, like the owl, this liminality could invite violence and death and for others, like expert male practitioners, it could generate authority. By the eighteenth century, the deployment of practical magic towards harmful or disruptive ends was a political tool wielded not only by kings and elite adepts for state or lineage formation but also by non-courtly subjects and “low”-caste specialists in local social life. States and sovereigns responded to the popular use of harmful magic harshly, aiming to cut off non-courtly access to this resource. If the early modern age was one of new ideologies of universal empire, the deployment of occult power outside the court was inconsistent with the ambitions of the kings of this time.

Beginning with the story of the Muslim youth Mehmed bin Abdülcelil of Tunis, this article examines the plight of Ottoman subjects abducted and sold into slavery within the Ottoman Empire and their efforts to regain freedom through Ottoman courts. Freedom suits (hürriyet davaları) were common in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, so much so that contemporary legal praxis manuals (sukuk) always provided examples of how to document them, but they have never been systematically studied for this period in which slave ownership was extremely widespread and the legality of enslavement depended solely on religion and subjecthood. Drawing on a sample of seventy-nine suits from greater Istanbul and eleven sukuk manuscripts, this article considers how the trade in the illegally enslaved was concealed by the immense traffic in licit captives and how the theoretical protections of Ottoman subjecthood clashed with the practical challenges of how to prove it, exposing the gap between slavery as legal institution and slaving in practice. Whereas the vast majority of freedom suits ended in rulings in favor of the victims, most of the illegally enslaved probably never managed to have their cases heard or were turned away for lack of evidence.

Blagoustroistvo is an archaic Russian word used today primarily to refer to urban public works. This article, a collaboration between an anthropologist and a historian, focuses on aesthetics, rhetorics, and concrete practices of blagoustroistvo in Moscow during two temporal junctures: the first decade following the October Revolution (ca. 1917–1930), and the decade of Sergey Sobyanin’s Moscow Mayoralty (2010–). Our juxtaposition reveals striking continuities and contrasts. Both in the 1920s and 2010s, we show, blagoustroistvo was characterized by a semiotically-intense presence in the city; associated with an emphasis on deterministic socio-psychological “engineering”; ideologically framed by a “vernacularized” form of Marxism-Leninism; and invested with a powerful role in reconfiguring society’s spatial hierarchies, political geometry, and class consciousness. In the former period, social transformation referred to the inversion of class hierarchies and a partly illusory reconfiguration of power between center and periphery. In the 2010s, however, blagoustroistvo became a project that sought a reversion to class categories and the re-colonial reconstitution of the center’s coercive domination of the fringes. Our analysis proffers blagoustroistvo—a high-modernist, deterministic “infrastructural ideology” that has endured into and flourished in the twenty-first century—as a uniquely illustrative concept for understanding the shifting ideologies of Soviet and post-Soviet infrastructural modernity and its winding but stubborn colonial logics. Moreover, our explication of blagoustroistvo’s trans-epochal meanderings brings comparative nuance to current global debates around the alleged “return” of “social engineering” to urban governance and design in the guise of artificial intelligence, big data, smart cities, and “surveillance capitalism.”

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.

This article presents an expansive history of a seemingly discrete event: the decision to extend an indentured labor system created in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean to the British colony of Natal, in South Africa, in 1860. Most work on indenture in Natal takes 1860 as a starting point and treats the migration of Indian workers under indenture in relative isolation. By contrast, this article focuses on the period preceding the first Indian arrivals and examines the colony’s turn to indenture alongside three seemingly separate migrations. In so doing, the article shows how antislavery politics, an early system of indirect rule, conflict between settlers and imperial administrators, and important shifts in race-thinking all contributed to the extension of indenture to Natal. In the process, the article illuminates the entangled, decentered nature of imperial rule by integrating lines of analysis normally kept separate, as a disciplinary matter, as “African colonial” and as “imperial” history.

When enslaved people became “mad,” they lost exchange value as labor capital on the Atlantic market, as neither African nor European merchants considered the mentally distressed to be valuable bondsmen. Historians of slavery in the Americas have drawn on accounts of “mad slaves” to understand how labor value was generated, and disrupted, through the transport and sale of captive Africans. But historians have yet to examine the relationship between psychological distress and enslavement in West Africa, where many of the captives in question originated. This article opens a research agenda on madness in Atlantic-era West Africa through a case study of the role of Ga shrines as spaces of mental healing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gold Coast, today’s coastal Ghana. Ga families confided their mentally distressed kin to shrine priests, who treated severe illnesses caused by ritual afflictions. When shrine priests healed these ailments, they engaged in spiritual pawning: converting mad persons, deemed unfit for sale due to mental incapacity, into potential subjects of enslavement. West African shrines were thus spaces of value conversion that reflected a broader monetary and ritual economy of capture, enslavement, and raiding that proliferated on the Gold Coast.

In part because a single colonial project eventually formally incorporated Burma as an appendage to British colonial rule of India, Burma scholars persistently draw on historiography and anthropology of India to assert that ethnic categories in Burma were “reified” and hierarchized by colonial governmentality and ensuing postcolonial statecraft. This article disputes such assumed equivalences, re-theorizing “reification” through the concept of governmentality to distinguish modes of regulation and the kinds of social responses incited, suggesting that India and Burma stand as respective exemplars of distinct governmental forms. Specifically, scholarship represents Indian population groups (of caste, tribe, ethnicity, etc. permutations) as being reified by dense and reinforcing applications of knowledge/power. Even when these various and interlinking regulatory apparatuses “fail” to accurately describe social reality, they interpellate a response from subject populations, a process that operates to dialectically reinforce the categories. Conversely, similar governmental apparatuses desultorily implemented in Burma have operated differently. While they have succeeded in making South Asian and Muslim subjects into Burma’s self-perceived constitutive outside, governmentality has “doubly failed” on its taingyintha (indigenous) subjects. Poor knowledge of these Burmese peoples has foreclosed intensive projects of knowledge production, leading to “misinterpellation,” a form of metapragmatic awareness in which subjects recognize that discourses misdescribe them, and then strategically maneuver with(in) those labels. Ethnic emblems become hollow integuments navigable with comparative ease, as individuals modify their particular bodily and dispositional indices. The article concludes by encouraging comparative postcolonial governmentality studies that would delineate particularities in a concept (governmentality) that often remains unnuanced.

For centuries, European operas have portrayed dramatic, exotic Others on stage. However, as opera is increasingly adopted around the world, including by those “Eastern” Others it orientalized, its Othering tendencies serve new, more critical purposes. Post-colonial studies of knowledge and cultural production have shown how relations between centers and peripheries, knowledge and power are integral to forms of orientalism. In Tajikistan, the accounts of opera told today by the daughter of a successful Soviet Tajik composer bring to light the ambiguity of power relations and positionalities in Soviet opera’s production. Her accounts, beyond highlighting opera’s readily apparent orientalist tendencies, reveal surprising cosmopolitan aspirations in Soviet Central Asian opera. Cosmopolitan histories and values also feature heavily in post-colonial politics of knowledge production, but the concept appears worlds apart from, even in opposition to that of orientalism: the latter feeds off center-periphery, knowledge-power relations, while the former aspires to evade them. Through this present-day account of opera’s development in Soviet Tajikistan, this article challenges this opposition, theorizing a conceptual ambiguity and interdependence between orientalism and cosmopolitanism, which has important consequences for knowledge-producing fields like opera, as well as anthropology. Multiple forms of orientalism and cosmopolitanism overlapped and interacted in the development of Soviet Central Asian opera as numerous, intersecting meanings and socio-political agendas went into its production. Ultimately, a conceptual space emerges between the orientalism(s) and cosmopolitanism(s) at play. This ambiguous space in-between offers a lens for critically evaluating the complex, uneven practice of portraying and engaging with Others.

Forced branding, tattooing, and bodily inscriptions were linked to a complex intersection of meanings and uses in nineteenth-century Iran. Drawing on insights from studies of bodily inscriptions in other world historical contexts, this paper discusses branding as a marker of ownership, both of human slaves and of animals; Islamic attitudes toward bodily inscription and its symbolic significance in the afterlife; and associations between branding and human or divine love in Persian poetry. From this semiotic foundation, it turns to judicial uses of branding in nineteenth-century Iran: as torture for the extraction of incriminating admissions, and as punishment intended to shame (symbolically casting the criminal from society, stigmatizing their crime) and identify (tracking convicted criminals). Throughout the paper, branding’s legal place is understood in relation to silence and speaking, writing and reading, pain, humiliation, and the inversion of branding’s meaning by its victims, in Iran and a number of other societies.

Soghomon Tehlirian was acquitted in Berlin in 1921 for the killing of Talat Paşa, Ottoman minister and architect of the Armenian Genocide. Complicating clear-cut distinctions between truth and fabulation, and personal revenge and legal justice, this paper examines the 1921 trial in light of Tehlirian’s 1953 memoir, to show the legal, moral, and epistemological work done by the ghost of Tehlirian’s mother. I move beyond the usual designations of Tehlirian as mere political assassin or self-evident moral witness and consider him instead as an “empirical fabulist.” My coinage of the term empirical fabulation is animated by Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) call for “critical fabulation,” and my reading of Tehlirian as an empirical fabulist recognizes him as a genocide survivor who aspired for collective justice, a son haunted by his mother’s ghost, and a historical actor who gave a fabricated testimony that was nonetheless based on the empirical facts of genocide. This paper is an invitation to explore the political and ethical potential, and perhaps even the necessity, of fabulation in recounting acts of genocidal violence that strain or defy straightforward representation, especially in cases when the existing rule of law does not rise to the demands for justice.

This article provides a textured history of the multivalent term “hindu” over 2,500 years, with the goal of productively unsettling what we think we know. “Hindu” is a ubiquitous word in modern times, used by scholars and practitioners in dozens of languages to denote members of a religious tradition. But the religious meaning of “hindu” and its common use are quite new. Here I trace the layered history of “hindu,” part of an array of shifting identities in early and medieval India. In so doing, I draw upon an archive of primary sources—in Old Persian, New Persian, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, and more—that offers the kind of multilingual story needed to understand a term that has long cut across languages in South Asia. Also, I do not treat premodernity as a prelude but rather recognize it as the heart of this tale. So much of South Asian history—including over two thousand years of using the term “hindu”—has been misconstrued by those who focus only on British colonialism and later. We need a deeper consideration of South Asian pasts if we are to think more fruitfully about the terms and concepts that order our knowledge. Here, I offer one such contribution that marshals historical material on the multiform and fluid word “hindu” that can help us think more critically and precisely about this discursive category.

Decolonization in East Africa was a regional affair that required the remaking of temporal orders. The staggered independence timelines of Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya caused considerable consternation due to transnational solidarities and visions for East African Federation. The interminable delays of Kenyan decolonization also threatened the linked economy of the region and diluted the sovereignty of neighboring states. At issue was “liminal sovereignty,” with polities and people languishing between normative legal orders. Against expectations about self-determination, East Africans found themselves in partial control of their collective endeavors. I analyze the tactics of temporal activism by Africans who aimed to undo British control over the pacing, sequencing, and synchronicity of decolonization. The indeterminate geography of decolonization was linked to uncertain temporalities of independence which threatened to subvert self-determination. In East Africa, federation was a style of claims-making and chronopolitics intended to orchestrate the distribution of rights, resources, and authority in a new layering of sovereignty between postcolonies.

“Religious authority” remains a ubiquitous but controversial term of comparative analysis. In Islamic studies, authority is generally personified in the form of the ulama and most often viewed through Weber’s lens of charismatic, legal-rational, and traditional types of legitimate domination. Our particular interest, Twelver Shi‘i Islam, seems a paradigmatic case, where the relationship between “the Ayatollahs” and state power has dominated academic discussion since Khomeini. Through ethnography of a Shi‘i diaspora community in the UK, we argue for a radical shift in perspective: away from forms of clerical power and towards non-specialist uses of clerical authority as expert opinion. Far from such “epistemic” authority being opposed to ordinary agency, here they are inextricably linked. Inspirational work in the anthropology of Islam has understood ordinary Muslim experiences of authority in non-liberal ways, as (Foucauldian) ethical discipline and self-care. We maintain the need to transcend not only domination but discipline too, refocusing the comparison between (Shi‘i) Islamic legal and liberal thought, in the form of Raz’s classic “service conception” of authority. Both stress the rationality of following authoritative opinion and its role as reason and justification for individual action. Our ethnography of ordinary practice then shows the sheer diversity of ways that such epistemic authority can be taken up, including, but not limited to, projects of personal piety and adversarial community politics. In our context, as surely also in others, domination and discipline should thus be seen as potential uses of “religious” epistemic authority, rather than as its privileged form.

To date, studies of imprisonment and incarceration have focused on the growth of male-gendered penal institutions. This essay offers a provocative addition to the global study of the prison by tracing the emergence of a carceral system in West Africa in the nineteenth century that was organized around the female body. By examining archival testimonies of female prisoners held in what were called “native prisons” in colonial Gold Coast (southern Ghana), this essay shows how birthing, impregnation, and menstruation shaped West Africa penal practices, including the selection of the captives, the duration of their time in prison, and how the prison factored into the legal infrastructure around tort settlements for debts and crimes. The term “prison of the womb” is used here to describe how the West African prison held bloodlines captive, threatening the impregnation of a female kin member as a ticking clock for tort settlement. Furthermore, it will be shown that this institution was imperative to the spread of mercantile capitalism in nineteenth-century Gold Coast.

Developed in Britain and the United States in the 1980s, genetic profiling has since become a global technology. Today, it is widely regarded as the evidentiary “gold standard” in individual and forensic identification. However, its origins as a technology of post-empire at Britain’s externalized borders in South Asia have remained unexamined. This article will argue that the first state-sanctioned use of “DNA fingerprints,” a pilot program exploring its value in disputed cases of family reunification migration from Bangladesh and Pakistan to Britain’s postcolonial cities, repays closer examination. National and transnational responses to the advent of genetic profiling as an identification technology demonstrate the interplay between imperial and postcolonial models and networks of power and truth production. At the same time, this experiment prefigured and conditioned the wider reception of DNA profiling in matters of kinship. Far from being a footnote, the use of genetic profiling by migrants determined to exercise their legal rights in the face of a hostile state also worked to naturalize genetic ties as the markers of “true” familial relationships.

At the turn of the twentieth century, most of the world’s pearls were extracted from rich oyster and coral reefs on the northern Indian Ocean rim. This paper returns to the sites of extraction, studying imperial maps made from 1889–1925 to delineate oyster reefs on the seafloor. Building from the submarine up, I draw on environmental, animal, and history of science studies to explore the work of mapping oceanic, animate space. Attending to the role of divers, whose labor was required to make the seafloor visible, and the lifecycles of oysters, which changed over time, I argue that the seafloor represents a kind of unruly terrain, out of both the reach and control of imperial authorities. The paper’s final section meditates on reading humans as part of Indian Ocean landscapes and the possibilities this offers for further comparative, transnational work in a materialist vein.

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.

Scholars of state classification practices have long interrogated how official legal categories are constructed. This paper analyzes the construction of “victimhood” in Colombia as a feat that required negotiation among international human rights organizations, local civil society actors, and politicians across the partisan spectrum. The Victims’ Law of 2011, which sought to provide widespread reparations to victims of the civil conflict, originated from the concerns of the human rights community, yet the deliberation process leading up to the law’s passage reveals the extent to which elite historical narratives of the conflict unduly narrowed the universe of eligible victims. Using archival evidence from congressional debates from 2007 to 2011, this paper argues that the broad conception of victimhood originally inherited from United Nations guidelines came to be constrained by disproportionate influence from politicians’ personal understandings of conflict history, shaped by anecdote and the selective use of historical evidence. These rationales interacted with budgetary constraints to ultimately restrict the victim category according to negotiated temporal boundaries of the conflict.