SYSTEMS OF CONSANGUINITY AND AFFINITY Kinship, so prominent in the previous issue, returns in this. Gillian Feeley-Harnik reevaluates Lewis Henry Morgan and his works, seeing his pioneering anthropological kinship studies and his researches on the beaver as aspects of a unitary vision comprehending the landscape and its inhabitants. She proposes a “natural history of kinship,” the aim of which is to break out of the box which Durkheim built and David Schneider dismantled, in the critique of Morgan's supposed biological notion of kinship: the impossible project of asserting that kinship is purely social, abstracting humans from their landscapes, their animal relatives, their bodies. She finds that Morgan's ideas of relationships were more linguistic and social than physiological, but also entangled with a wide range of geological and zoological phenomena, earthy and watery. Understanding his work in his own terms, “his example may inspire us to search for new ways to integrate phenomenological, political-economic, and ecological analysis into the study of how people understand their life processes.”

KINSHIP IN HISTORY CSSH has a long and continuing commitment to kinship as a topic of study—see, for example, such notable essays as Lawrence Stone's “Marriage among the English nobility in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”, 3:182–206 (1961), Jack Goody's “Adoption in cross-cultural perspective,” 11:55–78 (1969), and James D. Faubion's “Kinship is dead. Long live kinship,” 38:67–91 (1996). In this issue two essays show again to what good effect kinship can be put in the hands of able historians.

MEMORY WORK Never has the work of memory had more advocates and provoked more controversy, whether it is the new business of recovered memories of childhood abuse and national apologies for the past sins or the old business of commemorating the nation's past. Two essays explore this rapidly expanding terrain.

MUSLIMS AND HINDUS IN INDIA The fraught relations of Muslims and Hindus in contemporary India are the precipitating concern for the first two essays, examining different aspects of the question through a tangled history.

I want to begin this paper with two simple points. One is that nations are established by constructing a core or mainstream—the essential, natural, soul of the nation, as it is claimed. The other is that minorities are constituted along with the nation—for they are the means of constituting national majorities or mainstreams. Nations, and nationalisms, are established by defining boundaries. However, these are not always—or perhaps, ever—sharply or easily defined. Nationalisms have therefore commonly moved along the path of identifying the core or mainstream of the nation. Alongside this emerge notions of minorities, marginal communities, or elements,Brackette F. Williams makes the point as follows in her discussion of ethnicity in the context of territorial and cultural nationalism. Like tribe, race, or barbarian, she notes, the label ethnicity identifies those who are at the borders of empire or nation. “Within putatively homogenous nation-states, this border is an ideologically produced boundary between ‘mainstream' and peripheral categorical units of this kind of ‘imagined' social order.” Williams, ‘A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation across Ethnic Terrain,' Annual Review of Anthropology, 18 (1989), 439. the fuzzy edges and grey areas around which the question of boundaries—geographical, social, and cultural—will be negotiated or fought over.

The gorgons had thus the same effect as paradoxes. For paralysis means: immobility; and immobility: to be unable to observe (Niklas Luhmann).Niklas Luhmann, “Sthenographie und Euryalistik,” Paradoxien, Dissonanzen, Zusammenbrüche, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht und K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds. (Frankfurt a. M., 1991), 58. Recently, the “paradoxical” character of sixteenth-century Venetian politics and culture has become the focus of attention among scholars of early modern Venice. In her book on City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice, Martha Feldman states that “Venice was above all a paradoxical city,” given the “divided consciousness” of Venetians whose urban culture oscillated “in a peculiarly ambivalent counterpoise” to contemporary court culture.Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (University of California Press, 1995), 10. Margaret Rosenthal has examined how Veronica Franco, poetess and prostitute in sixteenth-century Venice, portrayed herself as an “honest courtesan,” ingeniously appropriating the oxymoronic Venus-Virgin paradigm in Venetian iconography.Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (University of Chicago Press, 1992). According to Edward Muir, the doge's “two contrasting personae, one so humbled and the other so splendid,” were the complementary features of a “paradoxical prince.”Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton University Press, 1981), 261. I would like to contribute to this debate by analyzing how the social practice of marriage among the patriciate and the language of perfection in sixteenth-century political discourse followed the logic of paradoxical constellations. Rather than arguing for a causal connection between social practice on the one hand and political theory on the other, I propose to apply one analytical framework to investigate the paradoxical qualities of different social, political, economic, and cultural phenomena which were at the center of politics and society in Late Renaissance Venice.

Memory is a major theme in contemporary life, a key to personal, social, and cultural identity. Philosophers have long regarded continuity of memory as an essential quality of personhood. But personal and collective identity are intimately linked. Classical works such as Maurice Halbwachs's The Collective Memory, and Sir Frederick Bartlett's Remembering highlight the social nature of what we usually take to be individual memory, an insight reinforced by research on the historical consciousness of non-literate peoples.Sir Frederick Bartlett, Remembering (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1932); Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, Francis and Vida Ditter, trans. (New York: Harper Collins, 1980). For excellent descriptive and theoretical overviews of the problems that Halbwachs opened up, see Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989) and James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992). Here I will explore, in comparative perspective, the social processes through which personal memory becomes collectivized and collective memory is instantiated through autobiographical recollection.

Lewis H. Morgan's Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) is credited with inventing the anthropological study of “kinship” from a comparative perspective (Trautmann 1987). Since Émile Durkheim's critique of 1898, Morgan is also said to have reduced kinship to biology in keeping with Anglo-American cultural assumptions about “blood relations” given in nature. Yet, on closer inspection, Morgan's “consanguinity” proves to be fraught with contradictions. Debates about the degenerative effects of mixing bloods in marriage—consanguinity with affinity—encompassed not only miscegenation but also “consanguineous marriages,” such as Morgan's own marriage to his first cousin (his mother's brother's daughter) in 1851.

Like women in many parts of the world whose husbands predeceased them, widows in China were free electrons, unbound elements in the social chemistry. Economically vulnerable, ritually superfluous, and at the same time socially destabilizing and sexually threatening, they were archetypal liminal figures—marginalized, caricatured, and feared. This has made the widow a good subject for literary critics, anthropologists, and historians interested in the way that societies treat women and in the way that treatment of widows in particular is intended to ward off or contain potential disturbance to the status quo. For China, as pioneering work by Mark Elvin and Susan Mann has shown, examining changing attitudes toward widows can illuminate larger social, political, and economic shifts in the late imperial period, roughly the thirteenth through the early twentieth centuries.Mark Elvin, “Female Virtue and the State,” Past and Present 104, 111–52; and Susan Mann, “Widows in the Kinship, Class, and Community Structures of Qing Dynasty China,” Journal of Asian Studies, 46:1 (February 1987), 37–56. Among newer work, see the excellent discussion in Bettine Birge, “Levirate Marriage and the Revival of Widow Chastity in Yüan China,” Asia Major, 8:2 (Fall 1995), 107–46. By focusing on Manchu widows, the present essay attempts to improve our understanding of widowhood in late imperial China and at the same time shed light on the role of widows, and women generally, in the construction of ethnicity in the Qing period (1644–1911), when the alien Manchu dynasty ruled the country.

Over the past decade, many scholars have put forward the claim that Hinduism was constructed, invented, or imagined by British scholars and colonial administrators in the nineteenth century and did not exist, in any meaningful sense, before this date.I thank many scholars for their comments on this and earlier versions of this essay, particularly Saurabh Dube and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. Prominent among scholars who have made this constructionist argument, if I can call it that, are Vasudha Dalmia, Robert Frykenberg, Christopher Fuller, John Hawley, Gerald Larson, Harjot Oberoi, Brian Smith, and Heinrich von Stietencron.See Dalmia 1995; Frykenberg 1989; Fuller 1992; Hawley 1991; Larson 1995; Oberoi 1994:16–17; B. Smith 1989; Stietencron 1989 and 1995. W. C. Smith is sometimes identified, quite correctly, as a noteworthy precursor of these scholars.Smith 1991. First ed. 1962. Romila Thapar (1985; 1989, 1996) and Dermot Killingley (1993:61–64) have offered somewhat similar arguments, but both display greater sensitivity to historical ambiguities, distributing the construction of a distinctly modern Hinduism among British orientalists and missionaries and indigenous nationalists and communalists. Carl Ernst (1992:22–29, n.b. 23) discusses early Muslim references to “Hindus” and their religion, but he joins the above scholars in claiming that the terms “do not correspond to any indigenous Indian concept, either of geography or religion.” J. Laine (1983) agrees with Smith and his modern epigones that Hinduism was invented in the nineteenth century, but credits the invention to the Indians rather than to the British.

I spent the 1996 Columbus Day holiday weekend in Bayonne in southwest France lecturing on the ethnographic fieldwork research I had conducted among a community of artisanal chocolatiers six years earlier.See Terrio 1998:18–31. 1996 was proclaimed the Year of Chocolate in Bayonne by municipal leaders and local chocolatiers. This event was an ambitious commemoration involving a series of public lectures organized to celebrate the southwest as the historic cradle of French chocolate production. At the gala dinner following my lecture, there was little talk of chocolate but a lively discussion ensued on the Clovis affair.An earlier version of this essay was presented in a session organized by Jill Dubisch at the 1997 American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings in Washington, DC. For their detailed readings of the text and insightful comments I wish to thank the editors; the excellent readers who reviewed the essay for this journal; David Kertzer, who served as the AAA session discussant; Sylvie Durmelat; and Patti Sunderland.L'affaire concerned the polemic surrounding the national ceremony organized two weeks earlier to commemorate the fifteen hundredth anniversary of the Catholic conversion and baptism of the Frankish king Clovis in 496. That polemic centered on an apparently incongruous cast of characters including the fifth-century Frankish king Clovis, the current President Jacques Chirac, Pope Jean Paul II, the Catholic Church and the French Republic.Journalist Adam Gopnik devoted his regular Paris Journal feature in the New Yorker magazine to an insightful and humorous analysis of the Clovis affair (7 October 1996).

In his magisterial studies on the Islamic educational system, George Makdisi (1961, 1981, 1990) traces three stages in the development of the madrasa (Islamic school) into colleges for the study of the Koran, the Traditions of the Prophet, and jurisprudence. These three stages, first suggested by Pedersen (1986), are the following: first, the development of teaching circles (halgas) for various subjects in mosques from the earliest times to the tenth century; second, the emergence of the “mosque-inn colleges” toward the end of the tenth century; and, finally, third, the development of the “madrasa colleges of law,” in which the functions of the mosque and the inn (or hostel, khān) were combined in an institution based on a single deed of endowment (Pedersen 1986: 1123). Makdisi includes the official establishment of the madrasas by the great Seljuq vizier, Nizam al-Murk, in the second half of the eleventh century in this stage. In the twelfth century, the college as developed in the Islamic world was, according to Makdisi, first imported into Europe by the Knights Templar of the Levant who founded the Inns of Court in London. The Inns of Court were attached to churches, as khāns had been attached to mosques. Somewhat later, one John of London who must have seen madrasas in or on the way to Jerusalem, endowed the College des Dix-Huit in Paris for 18 poor students in 1180. In the mid-thirteenth century, the first 3 colleges of Oxford were founded as charitable trusts. (Makdisi 1981:224–30; 1990:311–7). Whatever the merits of this argument for the world-historical importance of the madrasa as the prototype of the European university, the significance of its development in medieval Islam cannot be doubted. The subject is of particular theoretical interest because of the intricate connection between the evolution of the institutions of higher learning and the character of law and government. This connection can illuminate the dynamics of social agency in pre-modern Islamic society.

Melville J. Herskovits (e.g., 1966, 1941) argued that African Americans in virtually every American nation “retained” some greater or lesser cultural “memory” of the African past. Assuming that the cultures of the West African Fon, Yorùbá, and Ashanti (as reconstructed in the “ethnographic present”) represented the extant “base line,” or starting point, of African-American cultural history, Herskovits' “ethnohistorical” method posited that less-acculturated African-American groups instantiated the earlier historical stages of the more acculturated African-American groups. Thus, for example, spirit possession in the Brazilian Candomblé, could be taken to demonstrate the African derivation of “shouting,” or the behavior of those “filled with the Holy Spirit,” in black North American churches (Herskovits 1958[1941]:220–1). No less, the Candomblé, could be taken to represent an earlier stage of black North Americans' gradual syncretic adaptation, accommodation, and acculturation (Herskovits 1958[1941]:218). Herskovits' descriptions tend to represent the distinctive qualities of African-American cultures, in terms of enduring “deep-seated drives,” “bents,” and “underlying patterns.” On the other hand, Herskovits gives little attention to proximate historical and sociological mechanisms of their transmission. Dozens of scholars have usefully employed similar methods in the study of African cultural “memory” and adaptations. E.g., Arthur Ramos, Edison Carneiro, Ruth Landes, and Roger Bastide on Afro-Brazilians; Lydia Cabrera on Afro-Cubans; Herskovits himself on Haitians and Surinam Maroons; Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán on Afro-Mexicans; W. E. B. Du Bois, Joseph Holloway, Sterling Stuckey, Albert Raboteau, Robert Farris Thompson and Margaret Creel on blacks in the United States; and so forth. This study revises Herskovits' cultural history of the African diaspora and proposes, at the Afro-Latin American locus classicus of Herskovitsian studies, some non-linear alternatives to Herskovits' and others' visions of diasporas generally.

Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy made explicit an influential but usually unstated principle for comparative political sociology. In his search for the social sources of different sorts of political systems, Moore devoted chapters to revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary upheavals in England, France, the United States, Japan, China, and India. He did not feel it equally important to consider the history of democracy in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, or Switzerland (not to mention Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). The lesser players on the world stage, buffeted by the prestigious ideologies of the greater players, tied to the latter's economies and sometimes assaulted by their armies, are less rewarding as research sites for comparativists looking for distinct national “cases” to test their ideas. Small, weaker powers are not, in this reasoning, independent cases of anything. One presumes the same logic led Moore to include only third world giants like China and India and not the many other countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Characteristically, it is Germany and Russia that Moore regards as the most significant cases of democratic failure omitted from his study: not Spain or Italy, let alone Bolivia or Burma.Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), pp. xi–xiii. Moore went on to tackle the missing German case in Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1978) and, more briefly, the Russian in Authority and Inequality Under Capitalism and Socialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). In many a theory of “modernization,” England—or England and France—have been taken as prototypes or paradigmatic cases, and the broad outlines of their histories are therefore far more likely to have entered the education of American sociologists than the histories of other places in Europe or beyond. Sometimes the presumed centrality of one or more of these cases is made explicit, sometimes not.

The madrasa is one of the many institutions which have seen recurrent attempts at reform in Muslim societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the eleventh century, when it first emerged as the principal institution of higher Islamic learning, the madrasa has undergone many changes, adapting in varying degrees to local cultures and changing times.On the madrasa in medieval Islam, see George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus 1190–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Given the centrality of this institution in the preservation and production of knowledge as well as in the formation of the religious elite, the madrasa is crucial to the construction of religious authority. Profound changes in Muslim societies in modern times have not necessarily marginalized this institution, but such changes have frequently raised questions about the position and function of the madrasa in society and of the ‘ulama reared in it, about whether this institution ought to be reformed, and if so, to what end, how, and by whom.

In much of rural China, memories of past violence are crucial to people's sense of their own relation to distant centers of state power. In particular, memories of death from hunger during the Great Leap famine (1958–61)1 In the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward, twenty to thirty million people died of hunger-related causes. The famine is usually attributed to overprocurement, bad harvests, disastrous agricultural policies, chaotic transportation, and natural calamities (Kane 1988). In Yunnan the famine was not as severe as in many regions, but the poor, remote counties in the north still suffered badly. In 1960, according to official figures, the crude death rate rose to forty-two per thousand in the northern counties of Yongren, Dayao and Yaoan, while the rate for the province as a whole was twenty-six per thousand (Yunnan Sheng tongji ju renkou ban 1990). Within these counties, high-mountain, cash crop areas such as Zhizuo, where every household relied on sales of hempen cloth to buy food (see Mueggler 1998b), suffered worst. and suicide during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) continue to haunt people's imagination of state and nation in ways that those of us who did not live through these devastations are only beginning to discover (cf. Watson 1994). Many of the diverse, non-Han, Tibeto-Burman speaking communities scattered through the mountains of Southwest China share traditions of poetic speech, explicitly intended to deal with bodily afflictions attributed to spectral memories of the violently dead. In a Lolop'o (officially Yi) minority community, where I did fieldwork from 1991–1993,Thirteen months of field research were conducted in Zhizuo between October 1991 and June 1993. Sponsoring units were the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences in Kunming and the Yi Culture Research Institute in Chuxiong. poetic speech is used to drive the ghosts of those who died of hunger, suicide, or other violence out of the bodies of their descendants and into the surrounding landscape. The ghosts are driven along a specific route through surrounding mountain villages. Their path eventually takes them down the nearby Jinsha river to the Changjiang (Yangtze). They make these rivers their steeds, riding them across the empire's breadth to the richly-imagined cities of Chongqing, Wuhan, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Beijing. En route, they are to feast on piles of meat and barrels of drink, buy beautiful clothing in the markets, and hobnob with officials.

The highest stage in the history of the labor movement came with the unionization of the Fordist-Taylorist factory system.The concept of the “Fordist-Taylorist factory system,” first developed in Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 277–318, was popularized in the 1970s by France's “regulation economists” (Boyer, Aglietta, Lipietz, Coriat). It refers to those mass-production metal-fabrication plants based on the assembly-line techniques devised by Henry Ford and managed according to the “scientific” principles worked out by Frederick Winslow Taylor. The U.S. auto industry of the 1920s and 1930s best exemplifies this form of production. Neither before nor since has labor achieved a comparable influence. In the United States and France, this stage was reached in the same period and through roughly similar means. In June 1936, a massive wave of factory occupations swept across the Paris metal industry, forcing employers to introduce one of the world's most progressive systems of industrial relations. Six months later, sit-in strikes in Flint, Michigan, defeated the open shop at the General Motors Corporation, opening the way to the subsequent unionization of America's mass-production sector. These two events, the dominant peaks in the history of the modern labor movement, have rarely been viewed in the same light, yet they were part of a unique set of circumstances affecting not merely the fate of unionism, but that of industrial society.Most accounts of the French and American occupations make reference to the other national case, but the only actual attempt to compare them is to be found in Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 125–8. Notwithstanding his definitive study of the Flint occupations, Fine's treatment of the Paris strikes, based on a few English language sources, examines only their general contours, not the structural and contingent factors linking them with the Flint movement. Cf. Val R. Lorwin, “Reflections on the History of the French and American Labor Movements,” The Journal of Economic History, 17 (March 1957).

The grandmothers, as they are called—elderly women imprisoned for refusing to testify against their children regarding their resistance involvement—sit on the stone steps leading to the upper floors of the prison and learn from other prisoners how to read, write, and count. They are among the estimated 70 percent of illiterate Greek women at mid-century, and the plan is to reach full literacy within the prison. “I'm learning so I can write about the history of my village during the Albanian war, the resistance, the German occupation, and the civil war. How and why our children were forced to take up arms again and head for the mountains . . . I know this history well because I helped both in Albania and in the resistance,” says Maria Zoga. She has lost two sons, one killed by the Nazis and the other by “Greek fascists.” “My son Stamatis wanted me to learn to read and write. And I will learn, I will learn. I've just started to read,” says Violeta Tsamoutalidou. Stamatis, a communist and member of the resistance, was tortured at the police station and killed during an alleged escape attempt in 1948. “Teach me to read and to count,” says Grannie Regina. “Now that I've lost my husband and I'm by myself, who will count the grains?” The grandmothers scattered about the prison “learning letters” and taking life on their own terms is a prominent theme in the accounts of political prisoners.See Papadouka (1981:36–39). The Averoff Women's Singing Group, formed during the 1940s, sang and continued to perform the song, “The Grandmothers Learn Letters” into the 1980s. Its lyrics depict this peculiar pedagogy: “The grannies are bent over, with their eyeglasses/They are learning their ABC's and yet their hair is white as snow./The grandmothers hold their pencils and paper and write slowly/Their first letters will be sent to their grandchildren, who will receive them with joy./And if in their old age, many problems weigh on their hearts/Closed up just like the young inside the prison, they are learning to read and write./Spreading their gentle caresses among us, they remember the old days/Our every storm, they weathered first, and they put glasses on us.”

Democracy has expanded remarkably throughout the world during the last quarter of the twentieth century. In 1972, there were fifty-two electoral democracies, constituting 33 percent of the world's 160 sovereign nation-states. By 1996, the number had risen to 118 electoral democracies out of 191 states, or 62 percent of the total, for a net gain of 66 democratic states. Among the larger countries with a population of one million people or more, the number of political democracies nearly tripled during the same period.We derive these data on electoral democracies from the annual world surveys that Freedom House has compiled systematically since 1972. Although crucial in its own right, we are critical of the electoral approach in evaluating democracy, as will become clear below. If it took two hundred years of political change from the Age of Revolution to 1970 to generate about fifty new democratic states, it has taken only ten years since the mid-1980s to yield the same number again. This movement of political democratization has swept over every region of the globe, taking root in societies with very different cultures and histories, from Papua New Guinea to Botswana, Brazil, and Bulgaria. In the one region where it has not transformed the nature of national rule, the Middle East, it has nevertheless generated a plethora of local democratic projects and debates. At the end of the millennium, democracy has indisputably become a global value adopted by the most diverse societies.

In order to become the governing authority of the emerging Puerto Rican nation before the invasion of the United States in 1898, a group of letrados constructed the phantasm of a coherent and integrated national Self by excluding a phantasmagoric Other (such as the infirm Puerto Rican iíbaro).The reader will remember that, unlike the majority of Latin America, Puerto Rico was not an independent republic by the end of the nineteenth century but remained a Spanish colony. I borrow the term letrado from Angel Rama. He uses it to describe not only a class of cultured intellectuals but also a particular type of colonized consciousness that accepts the arbitrariness of the connection and, therefore, the implied rupture between signs and referents. A close examination of the works by members of this educated elite makes apparent the complexity of the dynamic between discourses of the Self and the Other that sustains this act of empowerment, as well as acts of empowerment similar to this one.