As the nineteenth century drew to a close, European planters manufacturing indigo on colonial plantations in Bengal faced a major challenge from synthetic indigo. Synthetic indigo was a symbol of the successful integration of chemistry into industrial manufacturing that had occurred in the second half of the century, and it threatened to displace the colonial commodity. It also fundamentally challenged the colonial program of “improvement” that agricultural indigo represented, and the mode of production consisting of stewardship of plants and the extraction of a commodity within the plantation system. The planters pushed back on the synthetic product by emphasizing the merits of agricultural indigo. As part of this resistance, they claimed that the plant-based dye was “natural” and superior because it was produced through agriculture, and they pointed to the grounding of their methods of production in the layout of land and farming. They argued that when setting their product's value the market should give weight to its unique attributes and the extraordinary quality that nature had bred into the dye. This study reads in this response a critique of the growing ties between manufacturing and science and technology. The planters' critique was not a straightforward critique of the vicissitudes of market, but rather a fight to retain a place for the sort of exchanges and value that plant indigo growers were accustomed to dealing in. They viewed plantation manufacturing as wholesome and organic, and defended it in the name of nature.

This essay examines the experience of corruption as an unavoidable and self-destructive dynamic of everyday life in post-crisis Argentina. Embedded in both everyday practices and popular evaluations of those practices, corruption in this context of neoliberal crisis operated as a folk category of socio-moral critique much like witchcraft does in some other settings, for it named a cannibalistic logic that imperiled the very framework of sociality. In order to grasp the reflexive pragmatics of this category, the essay attends first to the conceptual, then to the ethnographic, and finally to the historical dimensions of its practical life. Moving across these three dimensions, it argues that corruption indexed a very particular moral sensibility, marked by the sense of exhausted historical possibilities and inevitable national crisis.

This article examines the recent emergence of homophobia among Muslims in Singapore. While Islamic scriptures were used to justify homophobia, interpretations of these holy texts regarding non-normative sexualities have always been diverse. The anti-homosexuality exegesis of Islamic scriptures gained traction in a particular constellation of contemporary politics. When the state broached a discussion over whether a colonial-era law criminalizing homosexuality should be repealed, evangelical Christians were the first to vigorously support the retention of the law. Evangelical Christian homophobic discourses were soon reproduced by Muslims, whose own conservatism has been rising in recent years. Longstanding state biases against Muslims (who are mostly lower-working-class Malays), however, restricted the expression of their religious conservatism, which makes it useful for them to perform good citizenship by standing alongside evangelical Christians (mostly middle-class Chinese). This article demonstrates that Muslim homophobia has complex roots and explanations that cannot be reduced solely to Islam.

During the past decade, discussions of religious extremism and “fanatical” violence have come to dominate both public and academic discourse. Yet, rarely do these debates engage with the historical and discursive origins of the term “fanatic.” As a result, many of these discussions tend to reproduce uncritically the same Orientalist tropes and stereotypes that have historically shaped the way “fanaticism” and “fanatical” violence have been framed and understood. This paper seeks to provide a corrective to this often problematic and flawed understanding of the history of “fanaticism.” It approaches these topics through an examination of how British colonial authorities conceived of and responded to the problem of “murderous,” “fanatical,” and “ghazi” “outrages” along the North-West Frontier of India. By unpacking the various religious, cultural, and psychiatric explanations underpinning British understandings of these phenomena, I explore how these discourses interacted to create the powerful legal and discursive category of the “fanatic.” I show how this was perceived as an existentially threatening class of criminal that existed entirely outside the bounds of politics, society, and sanity, and therefore needed to be destroyed completely. The subjectification of the “fanatic,” in this case, ultimately served as a way of activating the colonial state's “sovereign” need to punish and kill. Finally, I deconstruct these reductive colonial representations of fanaticism in order to demonstrate how, despite British views to the contrary, these were often complex and deeply political acts of anti-colonial resistance.

The past thirty years have seen, particularly in the United States, a transformation in the public image of “Kongo,” an ill-defined entity (a tribe, a kingdom, a culture, a region?) on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa. The efforts of R. F. Thompson, professor of art history at Yale, and A. Fu-kiau, himself Kongolese, have done much to popularize a “Kongo” characterized more by its romantic appeal than by historical or ethnographic verisimilitude. Elsewhere in the Americas, the reputation of “Kongo” has suffered by comparison with “Yoruba,” another historically emergent Atlantic identity, based in West Africa. These identities, and the supposed contrast between them, are products of an increasingly complex trans-Atlantic discourse.

Colonial pharmacists bio-prospected, acclimatized, chemically screened, and tinkered with plants and their parts, hoping to create products to supply colonial public health care, metropolitan industries, and imperial markets. This article's approach is to examine the trajectories of expertise of two French colonial pharmacists, Franck Guichard and Joseph Kerharo, to illuminate the history of modern medicinal plant research. Both men studied medicinal plants as part of their colonial duties, yet their interests in indigenous therapies exceeded and outlived colonial projects. We take this “overflow” as our point of departure to explore how science transformed medicinal plant values in French colonial and postcolonial contexts. Our focus is on the relationship between value and space—on the processes of conceptual and material (de-/re-)localization through which plant value is calculated, intensified, and distributed. We study and compare these processes in French Indochina and French West Africa where Guichard and Kerharo, respectively, engaged in them most intensively. We show that their engagements with matter, value, knowledge, and mobility defy easy categorizations of medicinal plant science as either extractive or neo-traditionalist. By eschewing simple equations of scientists' motivations with political projects and knowledge-production, we argue that approaching plant medicine through trajectories of expertise opens up grounds for finer analyses of how colonial power and projects, and their legacies, shaped scientific activity.

On Rosh Hashanah, 1961, six months before the conclusion of the Evian accords promised independence for Algeria, riots broke out in the city of Oran. Surprisingly to many, the aggressors were overwhelmingly Jews, while those injured or killed were largely Muslims. The events—widely covered in the media but since forgotten—were a product of Oran's particular social chemistry, but were also shaped by far wider set of debates about a chasm that was growing between Jews and Arabs in France, Algeria, and the wider Arab world. This article focuses on responses to these riots, especially how they drew on polemical renderings of a shared Muslim-Jewish history. I make two interrelated arguments based on printed matter of the period, French government archives, and memoirs. First, Algerian Jewish observers and pro-FLN nationalist writers, groups that only rarely agreed on the question of Algerian independence, both recalled that the two groups' shared a largely harmonious history. They vehemently disagreed, however, on what this shared, harmonious history meant in terms of political obligations. The article's second argument is that the Israel-Palestine conflict helped sour relations between Jews and Muslims in Algeria, as well as historical renderings of these relations, during the Algerian War of Independence. Specifically, the question of Palestine frequently appeared as a reference when interpreting the riots. Together, the two arguments demonstrate how international issues helped occlude the particular, local stories and belongingness of Algerians, while they defined the future, religio-ethnic contours of the Algerian nation.

Like most modern institutions in nineteenth-century non-Western states, modern school systems in 1870s Japan and Egypt were initially mimetic of the West. Modeled on the British South Kensington method and on its French equivalent, drawing education in Japanese and Egyptian schools was taught not as an art but as a functional technique that prepared children for modern professions like industrial design. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the South Kensington method of drawing education had lost its popularity in Europe, but more than a decade before its decline Japanese and Egyptian educators began teaching children genres of drawing that did not exist in European schools. In 1888 drawing education in Japan saw the replacement of the pencil with the brush, which was recast from the standard instrument of writing and painting of early modern East Asia to an instrument that came to represent Japanese art. In 1894 drawing education in Egypt saw the introduction of “Arabesque designs” as the Egyptian national art. This transformation of drawing education from a functional method that undergirded industrial capitalism into an art that inscribed national difference marked the end of the mimetic moment. On one hand, a national art served to make the nation into an autonomous subject that could claim a national culture in what was becoming a world of cultural nations. On the other, a national art helped to make the nation into an aesthetically seductive core whose magnetic appeal could bring together the national community.

This essay uses the controversies surrounding the enigmatic Ismet Ali, a yogi working in Chicago and New York in the 1920s, to illuminate the complexities of how the performativity of religion and race are interrelated. I examine several moments in which Ali's “authenticity” as Indian is brought into doubt to open up larger questions regarding the global flows of colonial knowledge, racial tropes, and groups of people between India, the United States, and the Caribbean. I explore the ways in which, in the early twentieth-century United States, East Indian “authenticity” only became legible via identificatory practices that engaged with and adapted orientalized stereotypes. The practices of the yogi persona and its sartorial stylings meant to signify “East Indianness” in the United States, particularly the donning of a turban and beard, were one mode through which both South Asian and African Americans repurposed “Hindoo” stereotypes as models for self-formation. By taking on “Hindoo” identities, peoples of color could circumvent the U.S. black/white racial binary and the violence of Jim Crow. This act of racial passing was also an act of religious passing. However, the ways in which identities had to and could be performed changed with context as individuals moved across national and colonial boundaries.

This article analyzes the introduction of police dogs in early twentieth-century Paris, which formed part of the transnational extension of police powers and their specialization. Within a context of widespread fears of crime and new and contested understandings of animal psychology, police officers, journalists, and canophiles promoted the dogs as inexpensive yet effective agents who could help the police contain the threat posed by criminals. This article responds to a growing number of studies on nonhuman agency by examining how humans in a particular place and time conceptualized and harnessed animal abilities. I argue that while nonhuman agency is an illuminating and important analytical tool, there is a danger that it might become monolithic and static. With these concerns in mind, I show how examining historical actors' conceptualizations of animal abilities takes us closer to the historical stakes and complexities of mobilizing purposeful and capable animals, and provides a better understanding of the constraints within which animals act. Attitudes toward police dogs were entwined with broader discussions of human and animal intelligence. Concerns that dogs' abilities and intelligence were contingent and potentially reversible qualities resembled contemporary biomedical fears that base instincts, desires, and impulses could overwhelm human intelligence and morality, resulting in individual and collective degeneration. To many, it seemed that police dogs' intelligence had not tamed their aggressive instincts, and these worries partly explain the demise of the first wave of police dogs in Paris after World War I.

How did the Japanese Empire, while adamantly adhering to assimilationism, manage the politics of colonial difference in the interwar years? How should we situate the seemingly exceptional conduct of Japanese colonial rule from a comparative perspective? To examine these questions, this article analyzes the mindsets of mid-level colonial bureaucrats who specialized in social work. Social work became a major field of political contestation in the post-World War I period around the globe. Policies on social work tested colonial officials regarding their assumptions about state-society relationships and Japan's assimilationist goals. Their debates on social work reveal that by the end of the 1920s colonial officials in Korea had reached a tacit consensus to use a particular analytical lens and ideological goal that I call “ruralism.” In the ruralist paradigm, these officials viewed Korean society as consisting of “rural peasants” and understood Korean social problems as primarily “rural problems.” Ruralism was a product of many overlapping factors, including pressures to integrate colonial society into the imperial system, the empire-wide popularity of agrarian nationalism, global discourses that increasingly dichotomized the “rural” and the “industrial,” and the rivalry between the colonial government and the metropole. How social work officials re-conceptualized the colonial masses and attempted to engage with social problems under the rhetoric of assimilationism showed a similar dynamic to the “developmental colonialism” that prevailed in the French and British empires after World War II.

Why did nationalism and socialism combine during Serbia's “anti-bureaucratic revolution”? This article critiques the elite-centric approach prevalent in the literature and suggests a cultural argument instead. Three interconnected “elective affinities” brought nationalism and socialism together and separated them from a weak liberal alternative: (1) the emergence of bureaucracy as a “floating signifier”; (2) the search for enemies and a predilection for conspiracy theories; and (3) anti-intellectualism with special emphasis on the search for “one truth.” The elite-centric approach is assessed by looking at actors who, if the thesis is correct, should have been the least likely adopters of nationalist ideas.

Based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork among an undercover police investigative team in a southern European Union member state, I argue that moments arise when this team acts “ethically” in spite of the legal and policy mandates surrounding their work. I understand ethical action to include action that people undertake because they refuse to bear any responsibility (active or passive) for events that they deem to be “evil,” lest such events become constitutive of their own personhood. This situation would preclude individuals from living in agreement with themselves. To this end, the article details some basic conditions in which this team works when operating outside of the law. This ethnographic analysis points to a form of political sovereignty that depends squarely upon particular speaking subjects rather than transcends and homogenizes those subjects as made evident in Agamben's “state of exception” argument. Those conditions include their particular place in the investigative process; egalitarianism among particular subjects; deep familiarity with each other; and an understanding of similarities between themselves and the targets of their investigations. Though fleeting in its appearance, the impetus to political action and a sovereign form premised upon particular speaking subjects can be well understood by developing certain implications in phenomenological anthropology and the anthropology of ethics. Most important among them is the need for mutual recognition among particular speaking subjects as political equals.

For Dutch Calvinist missionaries in Central Java, two events bookended the radically transformative decade of the 1890s. The first, at the start of the decade, was the severing of relations with a charismatic Javanese leader named Sadrach, a decision that marked a redoubled commitment to suppress local Christian syncretism and to promote Calvinist orthodoxy in its stead. The second, at the decade's end, was the establishment of a modern clinic to serve as the flagship institution of a reformulated and reinvigorated missionary project. This article considers how these two seemingly disparate events are related. It suggests that much of what was troubling to missionaries about Sadrach and his indigenous Christian movement involved their understandings and uses of the body. I then consider how the mission attempted to use modern clinical experience and the anatomical perspective to address a range of ethical and epistemological problems posed by Sadrach and his followers' understandings of the body. The modern clinic would serve as a key pedagogical and disciplinary tool for the reordering of a vocabulary and syntax of bodies and souls, a grammar of religious and social expression.

This essay explores the fragmentation of provincial rice fields into warring postcolonial territories in mid-twentieth-century South Asia. I focus on rice as a powerful grain that connected the shifting borders of British colonial Assam and Bengal, and later Northeast India and East Pakistan (1930–1970). I show how state repression and competing claims to rice harvests contended with shifting terrains. At important historical junctures, rice came to link cultivation and territorialization, state violence and food, and dispossession and espionage. I engage with the powerful symbolism attached to rice by colonial and post-colonial officials, border guards, and cultivators who were variously conceived of as peasants and adivasis, as they sought to settle, cultivate, demarcate, and govern new national boundaries in a radically changing landscape. This paper situates rice battles within current discussions on Asia's borderlands to show how rice established the border as a space for alterity and to expose the blurred boundaries between static peasants and mobile adivasis, and between cultivation and soldiering.

In the Iranian Empire (226–636 CE), jurists drawn from the ranks of the Zoroastrian priestly elite developed a complex of institutions designed to guarantee the reproduction of aristocratic males as long as the empire endured. To overcome the high rate of mortality characteristic of preindustrial demographic regimes, they aimed to maximize the fertility rate without compromising their endogamous ideals through the institutions of reproductive coercion, temporary marriage, and “substitute-successorship.” Occupying a position between the varieties of monogamy and polygyny hitherto practiced in the Ancient Near East, the Iranian organization of sex enabled elites not only to reproduce their patrilineages reliably across multiple generations, but also to achieve an appropriate ratio of resources to number of offspring. As the backbone of this juridical architecture, the imperial court became the anchor of aristocratic power, and ruling and aristocratic dynasties became increasingly intertwined and interdependent, forming the patrilineal networks of the “Iranians”—the agents and beneficiaries of Iranian imperialism. The empire's aristocratic structure took shape through a sexual economy: the court created and circulated sexual and reproductive incentives that incorporated elite males into its network that was, thanks to its politically enhanced inclusive fitness, reliable and reproducible. In demonstrating the centrality of Zoroastrian cosmology to the construction and operation of the relevant juridical institutions, I seek to join the approaches of evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology to reproduction that have been pursued in opposition, to account for the historical role of sex in the consolidation of the Iranian Empire.

The study of witchcraft seems to be globalizing in many respects. Not only are witches themselves supposedly globalizing, but the people who try to study them are also adopting a more global outlook. Moreover, witchcraft as a topic is no longer tied to specific areas of the world, but seems to crop up everywhere. For this essay I purposely chose three recent studies, out of a wide array of possible books, which come from very different parts of the world. Reading them comparatively can highlight key trends in this field, and also important differences.