MILK RELATIONS Blood is thicker than water, but milk is another substance through which relations of kinship can be embodied, as the first article explains. (Also on kinship and its fluids: Gillian Feeley-Harnik, “Communities of Blood: The Natural History of Kinship in Nineteenth-century America,” 1999: 215–62.)

RURAL ECONOMIES Our understanding of the countryside is under continuing risk of being simplified and flattened in a world becoming ever more urban. The first three articles illustrate the importance of resisting this steady pressure and looking closely at rural economies. The richness of this terrain reveals itself to the long historical view and the close-grained ethnography of a family farm.

POSTCOLONIAL REMEDIATION How to remedy the postcolonial problems of former colonies depends greatly on how we assess the legacy of colonialism.

GLOBALIZATIONS World markets and nation-states have been the strong forces of history for the last two centuries, interacting in complex ways. Are markets getting the upper hand over states? Many argue that the current quantum leap of global economic integration has brought about conditions that are altogether different from those of the past. The first two papers, examining effects of an earlier globalization which began in the mid-nineteenth century, tend against that view.

The academic world has undoubtedly become smaller in recent decades. Chinese-, Spanish-, English-, Arabic-, French-, Russian-, German- and Italian-speaking academics, intellectuals, and feuilletonists discuss ‘the end of history' or ‘the clash of civilizations.' We all seem driven by the cycles of boom and bust that govern the planetary intellectual marketplace. New concepts such as ‘modernization' or ‘post-modernity' periodically appear in the centers of academic and political power, then diffuse through mechanisms of persuasion and mimicry, until they become part of mainstream discourse—only to disappear ten or fifteen years later under the impact of other key concepts that come to conquer the minds of a new generation of scholars and intellectuals. Nowadays, such processes of diffusion and convergence are called globalization. Indeed, globalization itself is such a buzz word that seems to have achieved hegemonic status in the social science vocabulary.

My starting point is the generation that inherited Africa's colonial legacy. Our generation followed on the heels of nationalists. We went to school in the colonial period and to university after independence. We were Africa's first generation of postcolonial intellectuals. Our political consciousness was shaped by a central assumption: we were convinced that the impact of colonialism on our societies was mainly economic. In the decade that followed African political independence, militant nationalist intellectuals focused on the expropriation of the native as the great crime of colonialism. Walter Rodney wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Dar-es-Salaam: TPH, 1971). But no one wrote of how Europe ruled Africa.

In looking at the production of pottery and cheese in the southwest of France, we want to suggest that over the long term the region had a much more complicated history of production than its present, predominantly rural economy might suggest. The manufacturing processes were linked symbiotically with other local activities, and were often carried out by “peasants” working in agriculture for a good part of the year.

This article is a comparative elaboration of Eugene Hammel's pioneering analysis of “fictive kinship,” Alternative Social Structures and Ritual Relations in the Balkans (1968). In place of godparenthood, I examine the structurally similar institution of fosterage or “milk kinship” as documented in former mountain kingdoms of the Hindu Kush in northern Pakistan. Comparable structures of interdomestic allegiance and tributary patronage organized through milk kinship are attested more fragmentarily elsewhere in the Middle East and Central Asia, and there is further evidence that such hierarchized foster relations also extended into many peripheral regions of premodern Europe (E. Goody 1982:280–1; Parkes n.d.). Hammel himself mentioned Serbian “kinship by milk” (srodstvo po mleku)—“meaning the fictive kinship relationship between two children suckled by the same woman, but otherwise unrelated” (1968:31 n.27)—with reference to Filopovich's (1963) earlier survey of South Slavonic ritual kinship. Yet Hammel did not pursue the possible analogies of such fosterage ties with kumstvo godparenthood: as structurally equivalent institutions of constructed kinship, once orchestrating transitive chains of interdomestic allegiance and tributary governance in peripheral polities throughout Eurasia.

Bruce Sterling's novel, Islands In The Net, opens with a scene on a Gulf of Mexico beach. Laura, the novel's protagonist, jogs along the seaside, “in pure animal ease, like an antelope,” when suddenly she trips and falls, snagged by “a black, peeling length of electrical cable. Junked flotsam from the hurricane, buried in the sand” (Sterling 1989:1). It is also flotsam of another era. Tugging on the cable to find its source, she unearths a video-cassette recorder, corroded by “twenty years of grit and brine” (p. 2). The novel's opening occasions, for the protagonist and the reader, reflection on modern communications, capitalism, and media. It is also an unsubtle foreshadowing of what will become of Laura as the novel progresses. On a mission to root out shady dealings in offshore “data havens,” like Grenada and Singapore, Laura eventually finds herself ensnared by the interlinking corporate connections bridging her world of “legitimate” business enterprise with the havens' illicit world of “bad” capitalism and illegitimate trade. Digging deeper, she uncovers the gritty, briny truth about her own corporation and, indeed, an entire corporate order in which the line between legitimate and illegitimate corporate activity simply vanishes into virtual space.

In Love in Times of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1985) creates a powerful image of Latin American modernity in the character of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Urbino is called back from France, where he has studied medicine and embraced European modernity, in order to save the coastal Colombian city in which he was born from that quintessence of the premodern world of ignorance, filth, and backwardness—cholera. García Márquez captures exquisitely the terror that is conjured up by the disease—thousands of bodies wracked by rivers of diarrhea and vomit, cramps, sunken eyes, blue lips, and twisted limbs, many of them dying rapidly. But Urbino is armed with that quintessence of modernity—hygiene. The terror inspired by the epidemic enables Urbino to transform both the urban landscape and bodily practices in keeping with the dictates of Continental biopower, neatly mediated by his own patrician class standing.

“Western” societies today are by and large post-Christian, in the sense that many people do not seriously identify with a religious denomination or sect, major public discourses—particularly academic ones—are secular, and Christian institutions and values are no longer naturalized in public politics.My secular sense that Australia is among the most secular societies in a largely secular “Western” world is evidently shared by committed Christians. A leading Anglican minister refers to Sydney as “a godless city” and differentiates “our Christian counter-culture” from “the world's culture” (Age Good Weekend [Melbourne], 22 Aug. 1998:12). In the United States, confrontation and competition from a host of born-again contenders can force post-Christian religious indifference into quasi-fundamentalist rivalry for the moral and political high ground, but mainstream academic discourses remain as resolutely secular as they have been at least since World War I. Given that this period has seen the heyday of anthropology's disciplinary professionalization,George Stocking locates anthropology's “classical” period from about 1920 to about 1965 (1992:93–4). it is not surprising that its dominant orientations have often been unreflectively sociopolitical, even though its usual proclaimed objects of study were, until relatively recently, putatively “traditional” “societies” with “cultures” aptly categorized as “religious.”

The old man's complaint about maize as “European” food in Audrey Richards' now classic 1939 field study reflected his obvious disdain for the new food of the mines and cities of colonial Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). His perception of maize as “European” food was, however, anachronistic even in 1939, reflecting a landscape of memory rather than the creep of agrarian modernism and the maize-based diet of an urban wage-labor economy. In fact, by the 1930s diets and farm plots all over twentieth-century Africa were rapidly changing their seasonal tastes, textures and colors to reflect the inexorable spread of a food crop with origins in the New World, but with an increasingly African personality. These dramatic changes over the past three decades have now superceded the analysis and speculative data of Marvin Miracle's classic work Maize in Tropical Africa, and call for a reinterpretation of maize's historical trajectory in Africa.Marvin Miracle, Maize in Tropical Africa (Madison, 1966). The chronology and meaning of maize's expansion in Africa are the subjects of this article.

The study of African Christianity by social historians and social scientists currently flourishes after a period in which it excited relatively little interest.For useful recent surveys see: Terence Ranger, “JSAS and the Study of Religion”, Journal of Southern African Studies 25th Anniversary Conference, “Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Regained,” York University (1994); Norman Etherington, “Recent Trends in the Historiography of Christianity in Southern Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 22, 2 (1996), 201–19; Stephen Ellis and Gerrie ter Haar, “Religion and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 36, 2 (1998), 175–201; Adrian Hastings, “African Christian Studies, 1967–1999: Reflections of an Editor,” Journal of Religion in Africa 30, 1 (2000), 30–44. Its revival lies, first, in the re-emergence of what can broadly be defined as intellectual history after a period of materialist dominance which focused research on issues of underdevelopment, dependency and political economy. Since the late 1980s Africanist scholars have been exploring the missionary contribution to ideas about ethnicity, environment, and gender. Secondly, at the same time, partly as a result of the closure of classical research fields, and partly through the belated recognition that the interaction of African cultures and mission Christianities was the supreme anthropological topic, social anthropologists began to turn to work on mission archives. Here the publication initially of a provocative series of articles by Jean and John Comaroff, and then the first of their two-volume study of the London Missionary Society among the Southern Tswana, led the way.Ranger, “JSAS and the Study of Religion,” 3. Jean and John Comaroff, “Christianity and Colonialism in South Africa,” American Ethnologist 13 (1986), 1–20; “Through the Looking Glass: Colonial Encounters of the First Kind,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988), 6–32; The Colonization of Consciousness in South Africa, Economy and Society 18 (1989), 267–95; Of Revelation and Revolution Vol. 1: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997). This revived scholarly interest in African Christianity has evolved in two interrelated ways: there is a growing interest in studying the construction of specifically religious identities, and greater attention is paid to texts produced by African Christians themselves which, with a few notable exceptions, have been hitherto ignored by scholars.An important exception was Wyatt Macgaffey's use of the official catechism of the Kimbanguist Church, in Modern Kongo Prophets. Religion in a Plural Society (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1983).

The spectacular confrontation between the Chinese government and the Falungong spiritual movement has focused attention on the very visible conflict between state and religion in China's urban areas. Conflict and violence have also accompanied the explosion of popular religious activities in the rural areas of post-Mao China, where much of the conflict is subdued and largely invisible to the outside observer. Christians are denied the permits necessary to make “home worship” legal; popular religious temples are confiscated and occupied by authorities hungry for physical and cultural space; proselytizers seeking to spread the Word or the Way are run out of town on a rail. Other examples, however, are much more spectacular, and recall the mobilizing force enjoyed by certain religious groups in imperial times. Wu Yangming was arrested in 1995 for having founded the “Anointed King Sect” in eastern Anhui, which was to “unite the country” in its spirit (Maclean's 1996). The “Lightening from the East” sect preached the second coming of Christ as a woman, and prophesied the end of the world according to a mixture of folk Buddhist and Christian soteriological motifs (China Study Journal 1997). In the context of the group studied in this essay, the Way of the Temple of the Heavenly Immortals, a sect leader summoned village cadres to a Temple festival in 1985 and delivered—in trance—a message to village cadres:

During the decade before 1914, the central coordinates of factory culture and employer politics in the heavy industrial Saar entered into a process of transformation. In a marked departure from the familial metaphors and representations long associated with the paternalist factory regime in this region of coal mining and iron and steel production in southwest Germany, many Saar industrialists began to reimagine work identities and the social relations of factory production in distinctively corporatist terms. In their industry newspaper, journal publications, and internal reports after the turn of the century, they increasingly referred to a new “social aristocracy” of labor in the “productive economy” and a harmonious “community of work” in the large-scale business enterprise. They also began to link these definitions of work and occupational identity to a larger social imaginary that articulated a corporatist vision of a world composed of “occupational estates” (Berufsstände). In this new ideological idiom, Saar employers began to call for the political organization of a wider “Occupational Estate of Industry and Trade” (Gewerbe- und Handelsstand) and the formation of a corporative state (Ständestaat). Accordingly, the language of Saar employers during the prewar years became corporatist in a dual sense: it articulated a worldview in a vocabulary that invoked forms of social address, natural hierarchy, and community that seem reminiscent of the old regime corporate order; and it formed the basis of programmatic political aims calling for the direct representation of economic interests in the realm of party politics and the state.

This article describes the development of family farms within a Kipsigis community in western Kenya. In Kenya, throughout rural Africa, and elsewhere in the “developing world,” family farms figure as key discursive and geographic spaces where the “development process” is located (see Crehan and von Oppen 1988, McCracken 1982, Ferguson 1990). Family farms are hybrid spaces where individual, local, state-based, and various “expert” visions of development intersect. They have the added virtue of being places whose geographic, historical and cultural specificity makes them accessible to ethnographic description.Of course the same applies to family farms everywhere. Quite distinctive forms of “the family farm” exist in different regions of France, the United States, and other places in the “developed” world. Despite the presumed leveling effects of modernization, such regional differences show few signs of disappearing (see Rogers 1991).

In these remarks Durkheim presages both Mauss's influential discussion of total facts (Mauss 1966) and Bloch's significant analysis of the way human supplicants produce the blessing they subsequently receive from Merina royalty in central Madagascar (Bloch 1989). Not unconnected are the ideas of two of the most influential thinkers on economy. That religion is a human construction whose objects come to appear as autonomous living beings to those who worship them provided a touchstone for Marx's analysis of commodity fetishism (1977). And Polanyi's formulation of the embedded economy (1968) resonates with Durkheimian and Maussian conceptions of the social whole.

Among the many unexpected lessons that await the reader of James Mooney's (1991 [1986]) classic account of the Ghost Dance, none is more striking than the one contained in his description of his first meeting with Jack Wilson, the Paiute man also known as Wovoka the messiah. By the time Mooney recounts this meeting, the reader is prepared to encounter a sacred personage of awesome stature. After all, this is the man whose millenarian teachings of the return of the dead and of the lifeways of the past had spread across the West and Midwest and had been blamed for the “Sioux Outbreak” that led to the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. It was that massacre that set Mooney to investigating the Ghost Dance, and it was because of Wovoka's alleged role in fomenting the “outbreak” that Mooney found himself on New Year's Day 1892 in Mason Valley, Nevada looking to meet the messiah.

Haitian Vodou has long been viewed through a distorted lens by outsiders. In the nineteenth century, as the Republic of Haiti suffered from a unique degree of economic and political isolation implemented and enforced by the powerful slaveholding empires and nations that surrounded it, Vodou was commonly represented as the ultimate antithesis of “civilization,” as a case of African superstition reborn in the Americas. During the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, images of Haitian Vodou as a terrain of demonic possession, absurd superstition, and zombis proliferated in the United States. At the same time, the twentieth century has also seen the publication of several careful ethnographic works about Vodou. During the 1930s, Melville Herskovits published his Life in a Haitian Valley, which argued that the Haitian religion had West African roots. During the same period Zora Neale Hurston wrote her less well-known Tell My Horse. Both of these works attentively described aspects of Vodou, as did Alfred Metraux's classic 1959 text Voodoo in Haiti. The next year Harold Courlander's Drum and Hoe provided detailed examinations of Haitian ritual music. The filmmaker and dancer Maya Deren published her at times experimental Divine Horsemen, which drew on Joseph Campbell's theories in seeking to describe the theological system of the religion. Another dancer, Kathryn Dunham, also described Vodou in her Island Possessed, published in 1969. The obstinate, broader stereotypes against which these works were articulated influenced the ways in which all these authors wrote about and interpreted the religion. These texts, notably those by Metraux and Deren, fought a battle for Vodou, confronting the idea that was it was little more than a “cult” or the expression of “superstition,” with carefully crafted descriptions of the belief systems and ritual of what they showed to be a complex and deeply rooted religion. This work on Vodou developed alongside other works on “Afro-Atlantic” religions, such as Cuban Santéria, and Brazilian Candomblé, as well as on the African influences on Afro-American Christianity.Melville Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1971); Zora Neal Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990); Alfred Metraux, Voodoo in Haiti (New York: Schocken Books, 1959); Harold Courlander, The Drum and the Hoe: Life and Lore of the Haitian People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (New York: McPherson and Company, 1953); Katherine Dunham, Island Possessed (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969). Among the classic broader studies of African religion in the New World are Roger Bastide, African Civilizations in the New World (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), and, more recently, Robert Farris Thompson's Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983).

Veenhuizen, an agricultural “colony” for the criminalized poor, is a well-known national historic site in the Netherlands; it is as much a monument to early- nineteenth-century utopian socialist idealism as it is a Dickensian poorhouse, a warehouse for the disenfranchised. Its founder, Johannes van den Bosch, is better known outside the Netherlands for his activities on a different colonial stage as the architect of the Cultivation System, a system of forced crop deliveries by which the Dutch extracted coffee, sugar and indigo from large parts of Java, Sumatra and Minahasa in the mid-nineteenth century. These apparently disparate examples of Van den Bosch's “colonialism” represent more than successive moments in the life of a precocious royal favorite. If we are to take seriously the injunction to “treat metropole and colony in a single analytic field” (Stoler and Cooper 1989:4), we need to focus on the historically specific colonial discourses introduced by figures like Van den Bosch through which “population[s] of degenerate types” were subjected to similar “systems of administration and instruction” (Bhabba 1990:75) in both overseas empires and the newly-conquered territories that were becoming the cores of emerging European nation-states. Veenhuizen and the Cultivation System are the products of a particular strand of colonial discourse that provided new forms of social control in the name of economic development. By focusing on the continuities in the underlying economic ideas that tie these two cases together, I underscore the divergent paths by which social welfare legislation was used in the English and Dutch colonial empires to create and discipline their respective agrarian capitalist regimes. By concentrating on Van den Bosch's Dutch experiments in poverty relief, the role of colonial discourses in forming the metropole is also highlighted. The Dutch state was as much shaped by its imperial project as the colony itself was transformed by European hegemony. This is an example, in other words, of “multi-sited ethnography,” by which the underlying logic of an emerging world system is revealed through the embedded idioms and discourses of local cultural formations (Marcus 1998:97).