In worlds of difference, how might certain unities be forged for liberation? This paper pursues this question from the vantage-point of the dialectical tension between Marxism and religion. While some scholars have noted parallels between the two, philosophers of critical realism have aimed to establish a deeper equivalence between Marxism and religion. This paper, however, considers how an equivalence may be forged by subaltern actors in the context of political struggles—how a religious Marxism might look as a theoretical and political practice. I do this by historically reconstructing the life of Sufi Sibghatullah Mazari, a locally influential communist from Pakistan who equated Sufism with Mao-inflected Marxism. Born into a poor farming family from South Punjab, he would go on to lead peasant movements against “feudal” landlords (jagirdars) during the 1970s and be recruited into the Mazdoor Kisan Party, the country’s historically largest communist party, which drew inspiration from Mao Tse-tung. Sibghatullah’s introduction to Maoist thought and practice, especially its emphasis on a vernacular-driven communist universalism, led him to comparatively reflect on circulating insurgent Sufisms and their own universalist possibilities. Maoism and Sufism’s shared universalist elements then allowed him to equate the two: an equivalence he centered on the concept of Truth (Haqiqat). Sibghatullah also expressed this “mystical Marxism” in his political practice, as he mentored revolutionary Sufi disciples, recruited Sufi-inflected mullahs into the communist party, built alternative insurgent mosques, and even challenged the tribal and patriarchal “honor” codes, practices that, in undermining landlordism’s hegemony over Islam, threatened its reproduction.

British Cochin was a port in southwestern India surrounded by princely states. This article uses a dispute surrounding its limits to interrogate the role international law played in generating novel forms of political claim-making among European and non-European powers at the turn of the twentieth century. Cochin was located in an area where both physical and political boundaries were hard to define. Situated at the tip of a narrow coastline surrounded by water, it was also lodged amid territories belonging to two princely states—Cochin State and Travancore. Its ever-shifting coastline and proximity to princely states forced colonial authorities to adopt a flexible approach to the port’s boundaries, allowing the tiny princely state of Cochin to become progressively more involved with the British port’s development over the nineteenth century. The article starts by examining the forces that shaped these entanglements, and then explores a territorial dispute involving British Cochin to illuminate the ways in which, during the twentieth century’s first quarter, both the colonial administration and the Cochin State deployed the language of international law to try to extend their powers over the port. By highlighting the Cochin State’s partially successful attempts at claiming sovereignty over the waters surrounding the harbor in order to become involved with the development of a port in British India, this article shows how international law emerged as a site through which semi-sovereign territories began testing and even extending the limits of their sovereignty.

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.

Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (2016) challenges Islamic Studies scholars, (art) historians, and anthropologists to reconsider theoretical frameworks underpinning historical and ethnographic research. This article addresses Ahmed’s concerns that studies of Islam often conceptually privilege orthodoxy, by including drinking and intoxication as worthy of close attention in examining the history and the anthropology of Islam. The case of Wine Shop the Philosopher, run by a former Afghan refugee in The Hague and Amsterdam, is presented after establishing the comparative and interdisciplinary relevance of alcohol consumption in studies of Islam and Muslims. Ahmed’s conceptual framework is used and assessed in comparison with the wine shops’ contemporary pluralist reality by exploring the idealized boundaries of Persianate culture and Islam in dialogues between Persian-speaking interlocutors. It is argued that alcoholic drinks lend themselves to competing gastro-nationalisms and prompt ethnolinguistic tensions between and within groups with Turkish, Moroccan, Iranian, and Afghan backgrounds in the Netherlands. The focus on diverse, coexisting and clashing drink regimes, in conclusion, allows us to deconstruct dichotomies between sober Muslims and European drinkers, African and Asian believers and European unbelievers, and refugees and citizens.

This article describes the development of the moral economy of merit among the fishermen and rural poor of Dalai Village, Magtaal soum, Mongolia. In 1971, the historian E. P. Thompson used the term “moral economy” to describe a popular consensus on what was considered right and wrong in economic behavior, arguing that its provocation motivated the eighteenth-century English poor to engage in crowd-based political action. In contemporary, post-socialist eastern Mongolia, the rural poor have constructed a pervasive local discourse on what is considered legitimate (“merit-making” or buyantai) versus what is illegitimate in economic behavior that morally-condones their illegal wildlife procurement, selling, and smuggling activities. The political contexts of these case studies are compared in order to detail a similar political-economic progression: (1) the recent market liberalization of the commons, sparking moral outrage amongst those classes newly disadvantaged through this shift to the market; and (2) the formation of an anti-profiteering moral discourse among these classes, designed to limit the ability of others to economically capitalize off of these circumstances. Comparing the case studies, the moral economy is manifested as exchange practices involving commons-marked goods that distribute their benefits among the participants, envisioned as thereby promoting group wellbeing rather than the uneven accumulation by individuals.

The assassination of Talat Pasha by Soghomon Tehlirian on 15 March 1921 in Berlin, as well as Tehlirian’s trial and acquittal on 2–3 June 1921, have contributed to the formation of conflicting legacies of the Armenian Genocide. Though minuscule in terms of violence and legal ramifications, these events and their reimagination in contentious narratives have shaped a dominant prism of sensemaking in Turkish-Armenian relations. In the imagination of rival groups, Talat and Tehlirian compete for the very same normative categories of hero and victim at once and each are demonized as a villain and perpetrator. Moreover, it is each figure’s embodiment of martyrdom and revenge that explains why their heroizations have proved so enduring and effective across time and space. This mutual framework of sensemaking, which I call the Talat-Tehlirian complex, ultimately denies the chances of historical reconciliation. In terms of its theoretical implications, this case study explains how a martyr-avenger complex can continuously demand solidarity, sustain grievances, and sacralize violence in post-conflict societies. Based on a thick description of what happened in Berlin in 1921 and its contentious narratives across different generations, this paper calls for a transition to a post-heroic age in Turkish-Armenian relations.

Chinese practices of matchmaking have been controversial for over a century. Their continued transformations reveal a complex nexus of sentimental and material dimensions in the marriage-decision process at the heart of the negotiations between families and in their selections of proper candidates. This interplay between personal sentiments, concrete considerations, and the desire for success makes marriage controversial, as “love” is claimed and proclaimed at the same time. Moral debates around materialism, which have reverberated through the public sphere over the last decade, show how “love” acts as a tool of social reproduction while it also expresses sincere aspirations for an emotionally satisfying life. In comparative perspective, the complex of romantic love examined here reveals a recent, original synthesis of the tradition of parental arrangement and the political question of the place of love in modernity. The paper elucidates one of the contradictions within Chinese society today: the family remains central, but wider trends of individualization continue to unfold. A multifaceted understanding of love clarifies how it can bind families together while it also discourages others from pursuing romance.

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 aims to dissect the nature of exemplarity in Italian Fascism. The social and political structures that emerged in Fascist Italy were highly reliant on a sense of morality, largely because of the degree of violence inherent in those structures. Under Fascism, morality was founded on concrete examples rather than on abstract principles. Exemplars were idealized sources of moral strength, and figures with the capacity to inspire or persuade. In particular, the fallen soldier and those who died for the nation constituted a major category of Fascist exemplars. Thus, soldiers who fell in the First World War were awarded exemplary status in order to encourage behaviors favorable to the regime. With the goal to demonstrate the importance awarded to exemplars, this paper focuses on a group of ossuaries, or bone depositaries, that were built under Mussolini’s dictatorship, and within which the regime reburied the remains of soldiers who fell in the First World War. The main purpose of the ossuaries was to present the dead as role models that might boost support for a program of nationalism, militarism, and imperialism. Thus, while their creation drew on factors such as Romantic literature and Italy’s religious and political traditions, the ossuaries represent an ideal case study of how Fascist morality was aided by and expressed through the use of exemplars.

The mid-twentieth-century English novelist, Henry Williamson, wrote nature stories but also romantic and historical fiction, including a fifteen-volume saga that contains a largely favorable characterization of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. This essay considers the challenge of such a fascist character through the prism of the literary imagination of Williamson readers, and more specifically through my longstanding ethnographic work with an English literary society constituted in the author’s name. I am centrally concerned with how literary society members deal with the positive depiction of the Mosley-based character through the stages of the reading process that they identify and describe. Do the immersive values commonly attached to their solitary reading culture, for instance, assist or further problematize that engagement? What role does their subsequent, shared practice of character evaluation play? As well as considering the treatment of characters as objects of sympathy, I explore the vital sympathies that for literary society members tie characters together with historical persons. Across the essay I dialogue with anthropological literature on exemplars, historical commentaries on the fascist cult of leadership, and finally with the philosophical claims that Nussbaum makes for the moral and political consequences of fiction reading.

Mussolini is considered in this article as a figure around whom narratives have been developed for a century or more. Several biographies were published shortly after he came to power and many others have appeared in the decades since his death in 1945. This article explores the place of anecdotes in the construction of a legendary Mussolini in the 1920s and in the demystification that marked the period after World War Two. It is shown that early biographies were marked not only by hero worship but also by a commercially driven need to humanize and to amuse. After the war, humanization persisted as former Fascists and associates of Mussolini spread stories and anecdotes that made the dictator appear not as an evil tyrant but as a flawed and fallible human being. The agenda here was to make support for Fascism and its leader forgivable. A comparison of the anecdotes shows that both adulatory and demystificatory ones reserved a place for minor stories or petite histoire. The resulting image, which placed some emphasis on his sex life, proved influential. It presented a challenge to historians and found its way into the biographical films that were made for cinema and television between the 1970 and the 2000s. It is suggested that, via anecdotes, Mussolini occupied an ambiguous and continuous place in the moral universe of Italians, functioning variously as a political and a gender exemplar.

Based on long-term ethnographic research, this article contributes to the growing scholarship on far-right social movements by presenting an in-depth account of the Italian far-right scene. In presenting personal accounts of three activists and situating them within the milieus in which they are active, it sheds light on a variety of factors that push youth to engage in far-right militancy. Many researchers of far-right extremism have asserted the need to provide more in-depth knowledge on far-right militants, yet there remain important gaps that this article strives to address. First, it demonstrates the value of the ethnographic approach in the study of far right, which offers unique insights into the motivations for involvement and the relations between ideas, beliefs, and practices. Second, it shows the importance of situating present-day activism in a historical context, not only by looking for long-term patterns but also by paying attention to the ways studied actors engage with historical comparisons. Third, in engaging critically with some commonsensical approaches to far-right activists, the paper suggests that ethnographic studies of far-right activism can give us fresh perspectives on broader social phenomena beyond the far right per se.

Based on long-term ethnographic research on contemporary exhumations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), as well as analysis of the exhumation of Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen, this paper looks at the ways in which the dictator’s moral exemplarity has evolved over time since his military victory in 1939. During the early years of his dictatorship, Franco’s propaganda machine built the legend of a historical character touched by divine providence who sacrificed himself to save Spain from communism. His moral charisma was enriched by associating his historical mission with a constellation of moral exemplars drawn from medieval and imperial Spain. After his death, his moral exemplarity dwindled as democratic Spain embraced a political discourse of national reconciliation. Yet, since 2000, a new negative exemplarity of Franco as a war criminal has come into sharp focus, in connection with the exhumation of the mass graves of tens of thousands of Republican civilians executed by his army and paramilitary. In recent years, Franco has reemerged as a fascist exemplar alongside a rise of the extreme right. To understand the revival of his fascist exemplarity, I focus on two processes: the rise of the political party Vox, which claims undisguised admiration for Franco’s legacy (a process I call “neo-exemplarity”), and the dismantling in October 2019 of Franco’s honorable burial and the debate over the treatment that his mortal remains deserve (a process I call “necro-exemplarity”).

This paper examines the ways in which “ordinariness” can come to be exemplified as a virtue. It does so by comparing the status of ordinariness in historical and present-day Predappio, the town in which Mussolini was born and is buried. It describes the ways in which Predappio was mobilized by the Fascist regime as an exemplar of an ordinary Italian town, rendered extraordinary by its wholesale reconstruction as a jewel in the crown of Fascist urban planning. In similar fashion, Mussolini’s ordinary rural upbringing was mobilized in the service of propagandizing his extraordinary and exemplary leadership. In contemporary Predappio, by contrast, ordinariness is what locals reach for to contest understandings of their home as irrevocably associated with the extraordinary Fascist heritage they have inherited. One of the ways in which they do so is to celebrate a local exemplar of this ordinariness, Giuseppe Ferlini, the town’s first postwar mayor. In contrast to Mussolini, Ferlini’s ordinariness is not a backdrop to future greatness, but exactly the quality for which he is celebrated. I assert that these cases demonstrate the need for vigilance in analytic usage of the category of “the ordinary,” which sometimes tacitly assumes the existence of “the ordinary” as a scale in itself, independent of human action. I argue instead that “the ordinary” may be the object of ethical labor, rather than its site, and that exemplification may be a form of such labor, in both our accounts and the lives of those we study.

Slavery and warfare were inextricably intertwined in the history of Britain’s North American colonies and, subsequently, the early republic. Yet this deep connection has not been acknowledged in the historiography. In particular, the debate about an “American way of war” has neglected the profound significance of slavery as a formative factor in America’s “first way of war.” Here, these two forms of organized, systemic violence are considered not merely within a comparative framework but as phenomena whose relationship is so deeply enmeshed that they cannot be meaningfully understood in isolation. Slavery is thus placed centrally in an examination of American war making, from the colonial to the antebellum period. Three main areas are highlighted: slave raiding against Native Americans, slavery as a factor in imperial and national strategy-making and diplomacy, and slavery as an “internal war.”

In 2016, the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), which produces Pakistan’s biometric-based national identity card, publicly announced that it would be “re-verifying” identity cards for a national security drive. NADRA relies on the documentation of descent-based relations, including genealogical charts (shajarah-yi-nasab), for its verification procedures. In so doing, NADRA asks the difficult question of who belongs where and who is a citizen, based on who they used to be. This article historically traces the movement of genealogies between the realm of the familial and the bureaucratic. I examine how the colonial state deployed genealogical expertise and how this formation folds into the postcolonial present in ways that shape capacities for genealogy-based claims to identity. It demonstrates how what I term “genealogical computation” extends beyond the domain of governance into articulations of identity that seek to establish status, reliability, and trustworthiness. I argue that “reliable persons” are produced in contemporary Pakistan through an encounter between the genealogical computations of citizens and the expectations of an ethno-securitized state. This encounter is borne out of a rehearsed relation where one’s genealogy, which has held a particular meaning in relation to one kind of security state (the colonial), is now asked to take on another.

This article argues that we need to move beyond the “Atlantic” and “formal” bias in our understanding of the history of slavery. It explores ways forward toward developing a better understanding of the long-term global transformations of slavery. Firstly, it claims we should revisit the historical and contemporary development of slavery by adopting a wider scope that accounts for the adaptable and persistent character of different forms of slavery. Secondly, it stresses the importance of substantially expanding the body of empirical observations on trajectories of slavery regimes, especially outside the Atlantic, and most notable in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, where different slavery regimes existed and developed in interaction. Thirdly, it proposes an integrated analytical framework that will overcome the current fragmentation of research perspectives and allow for a more comparative analysis of the trajectories of slavery regimes in their highly diverse formal and especially informal manifestations. Fourth, the article shows how an integrated framework will enable a collaborative research agenda that focuses not only on comparisons, but also on connections and interactions. It calls for a closer integration of the histories of informal slavery regimes into the wider body of existing scholarship on slavery and its transformations in the Atlantic and other more intensely studied formal slavery regimes. In this way, we can renew and extend our understandings of slavery's long-term, global transformations.

Relations between states are usually framed in human terms, from partners to rivals, enemies or allies, polities and persons appear to engage in cognate relationships. Yet whether or not official ties and relationships among people from those states actually correspond remains less clear. “Friendship,” a term first applied to states in eighteenth-century Europe and mobilized in the (post)socialist world since the 1930s, articulates with particular clarity both the promise and the limitations of harmonized personal and state ties. Understandings of friendship vary interculturally, and invocations of state-state friendship may be accompanied by a distinct lack of amity among populations. Such is the case between China and Russia today, and this situation therefore raises wider questions over how we should understand interstate and interpersonal relationships together. Existing social scientific work has generally failed to locate either the everyday in the international or the international in the everyday. Focusing on both Chinese and Russian approaches to daily interactions in a border town and the official Sino-Russian Friendship, I thus suggest a new scalar approach. Applying this to the Sino-Russian case in turn reveals how specific contours of “difference” form a pivot around which relationships at both scales operate. This study thus offers both comparison between Chinese and Russian friendships, and a lens for wider comparative work in a global era of shifting geopolitics and cross-border encounters.

This article examines the origins of human shielding—the practice of employing hostages on the battlefield—in Arab Palestine during the Great Revolt in the 1930s. The Palestinian rebellion vexed the British for over three years, and during its second phase (1937–1939), lightly armed rebels beat back the colonial authorities from broad stretches of the country, putting continued colonial control of the territory in serious jeopardy. Britain only defeated the insurgency through a harsh repertoire of collective punishments and “dirty war” tactics. British forces used Palestinians as human shields in a systematic fashion during the revolt's second phase, attempting thereby to stave off the insurgents’ consistent and effective attacks on transportation arteries. Beyond its battlefield rationale, this article contends that human shielding was critically tied to two other dynamic processes. The military's adoption of unauthorized tactics like human shielding was part of a broader pattern of rejecting its institutional subordination to civilian authorities and of seeking direct control over the Palestine government in order to assure its unfettered command over the revolt's suppression. At the same time, the conversion of colonized bodies into literal shields bespoke a process of deepening, corporeal racialization that had profound consequences for the Palestinians, stripping them of any figment of legal rights or protections and signaling the utter disposability of Arab life.

This article analyzes the role of soil in the making of authoritarian regimes and illustrates twentieth-century practices and discourses related to fertility across the globe. It compares two different approaches to and understandings of soil fertility: the first emerged in North Libya under Italian Fascist rule (1922–1943), the second in Central Brazil during the civil-military dictatorship (1964–1985). We compare two soil-forming processes that changed physical and chemical properties of the original matter and were embedded within specific ideologies of modernization. In both cases, state agendas of agrarian production played a paramount role not only in socioeconomic projects but also as an instrument to suppress opposition. Technocratic and political aspects of building and maintaining fertility were interwoven, although in different patterns in the two countries. We show how the rejuvenation of land bled into the regeneration of communities through processes that anchored the self-definition and development of these authoritarian regimes, and argue that attempts at landscape transformations through agricultural activity and strategies of fertilization are inescapable features of dictatorships. In so doing, we elaborate the concept of “authoritarian soil.” The juxtaposition of these non-synchronous cases reveals how agricultural modernization developed throughout the twentieth century. Our study is rooted in environmental history and contributes to the ongoing dialogue between that field and science and technology studies. Its cross-temporal, comparative methodology draws upon sources and historiographical debates in English, Italian, and Portuguese.