Archives are, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued, “the institutional sites of mediation between the sociohistorical process and the narrative about that process.”Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 52. How this mediation structures the production of meaning, on the one hand, and historical knowledge, on the other, is the major problematic of this article. I focus on how certain textual models and modes of representation impart a particular sense of purpose to the archives. That is, I am concerned with investigating how it is that texts are construed as documents that are destined for state archives. This project requires questioning how documents are made credible and authoritative in their myriad social contexts, in order to understand the relation between historicity and power relations. To study the potential impact of archival documents thus requires re-evaluating the uneasy relationship between documentary practices, canons of representation, politics, and scholarship.

According to Fatma Arığ, a fifty-one-year-old Turkish woman of Sabbatean heritage, her search for the past began with this shock she recalls experiencing as a child. Her quest was fulfilled by way of history, for lack of memory. Behind her story lies a little-known community, and its three hundred and fifty-year-old relationship with the state and the dominant society in Turkey.

Our current historical conjuncture is marked by a global proliferation of nationalisms that have fundamentally, and often violently, transformed the inherited geopolitical configuration of the post-war era. The apparent resurgence of nationalism has been matched by a growing convergence across disciplinary divides on the problematic of nationalism. A few salient prior works notwithstanding, it is mainly in the last two decades that nationalism has emerged as a central preoccupation of contemporary historical and social-scientific analyses. Remarkably, the stubborn persistence of nationalism in the current context of neo-liberal global restructuring and the dizzying expansion of nationalism research have not enhanced analytical consensus on core theoretical and methodological issues. Indeed, the rush for an analytical “fix” on nationalism has tended to fortify rather than resolve inherited methodological divides, especially that between objectivist and subjectivist approaches to nationalism.

From the middle of the nineteenth century until recently, the only acceptable way to discuss political developments in early modern Europe was in terms of the rise of absolutism. “Absolute monarchy” was the political theory of early modern states formulated by ideologues of their respective regimes. Later historians accepted this ideology as the way these monarchies operated and formulated a model called “absolutism,” which posits a monarch who accrues power at the expense of the nobility. During the last three decades, however, a number of historians, whose studies focus on elite politics, have undermined this historiographical model. Through their archival research on the operation of regimes in early modern Europe, these historians have instead described an interlocking relationship between ruler and nobility in which the ruler acted as legitimizer of the nobility and adjudicator of differences among its members.Adamson has described the emerging pattern of understanding this way: “At the most ‘absolutist' of courts, the exercise of authority was always in some sense a negotiation founded, in the final analysis, upon the community of interest between the crown and the noble elites. The court, far from being an instrument whereby monarchs could weaken the nobility, as was once supposed, provided the forum in which that compact could be subjected to a regular process of revision and renegotiation.” John Adamson, “The Making of the Ancien-Régime Court 1500–1700,” in The Princely Courts of Europe 1500–1750, ed. John Adamson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 39. Then, in a strongly argued book, The Myth of Absolutism, Nicholas Henshall delivered what many specialists consider to be the coup de grâce to the absolutism model as a worthwhile way of discussing early modern European governments.Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy (London: Longman, 1992). See also Henshall “The Myth of Absolutism,” History Today 42 (June 1992): 40–47. He pointed out that “absolutism” is a term coined in 1823 to apply to the contemporary ruler Ferdinand VII of Spain, and argued that it is an anachronism for us to apply it to earlier centuries.

In a recent CSSH article, Jutta Sperling argued that in early modern Venice, political theory was a hermetically enclosed linguistic system, characterized by paradoxes and tautologies.J. Sperling, “The Paradox of Perfection: Reproducing the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1999), 3–32, at p. 16. I am uneasy when historians (or anthropologists for that matter) insist that the “real” significance of what people said and did was inaccessible to them at the time, a position that might be described as methodological atheism and which is generally associated with functionalism (although Sperling's analysis is more like “dysfunctionalism”). By contrast, like Clifford Geertz, I would argue for methodological agnosticism. I do however entirely agree with Sperling that the “second serrata . . . institutionalized tensions between mutually exclusive requirements” (5), and that the paradoxes of Venetian political discourse were “both constitutive and destructive of the political system” (32). Sperling's approach can also be contrasted with S. Chojnacki, “Identity and Ideology in Renaissance Venice: The Third Serrata,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 12977mdash;1797, (J. Martin and D. Romano, eds., Baltimore, 2000, 263–94), which sees patrician marriage legislation as part of a positive programme of self-definition. In what we might describe as a “deconstruction” of the so-called “myth of Venice,” Sperling argued that it collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions, which reveal it to be “non-sensical.”Sperling's article includes full bibliographic references to the literature on the “myth of Venice.” The insistence that Venice was a perfect state not only prevented nobles from dealing effectively with conspicuous consumption and electoral corruption but made it impossible for them to admit to the real source of their problems without destroying their claims to legitimacy. In particular, Sperling singles out the demographic and social consequences of a commitment to lineal purity among nobles, resulting in limited marriage, inflated dowries, the enforced placement of women in nunneries, and increasing economic divisions within a nobility whose official ideology remained one of Republican equality.

Critical studies of visual culture have established profound connections between capitalism, state power and the “scopic regimes of modernity” (Jay 1988). As the dominant philosophical leitmotif of the European enlightenment, visuality characterized the domain of reason and truth, modeling both the clear and distinct ideas of Continental rationalism and the sense-based epistemology of British empiricism. Compelling in its “given” transparency, the rhetoric of vision continually conceals the historical conditions of its production. Indeed, as Marx first stated in the 1844 manuscripts, the history of seeing belongs to that political economy of the senses so deeply embedded in historical materialism (Marx 1978:89). Critical models of visuality and spectacle, however, remain largely overdetermined, either as bourgeois forms of consumption and display (Debord 1977; Richards 1990), strategic stagecraft serving political ends (Edelman 1988; Falasca-Zamponi 1997; Scott 1998), or as hegemonic forms of objectification incorporating citizens and subjects into the discursive armature of modern states and empires (Crary 1990; Diehl 1986; Foucault 1995; Morris 1982; Mitchell 1988; Coombes 1994:63–108).I do not mean to reduce these theoretically rich and innovative studies to such banal and simplistic propositions, but rather to characterize the dominant orientations within which they fall. For a nuanced collection of perspectives on scopic regimes of surveillance and desire, see Brennan and Jay (1996), with special reference to de Bolla's (1996) discussion of Adam Smith's theory of spectatorial subjectivity. For a more dialectical approach to visual economy, applied to visual images in the Andes, see Poole (1997).

This article seeks to place lament in the context of Asian modernities, theorize memory in relation to genres of performance, and introduce the notion of social technologies of forgetting. Evidence suggests that Bangladeshi culture is changing in ways congruent with some models of globalizing modernity. Indeed, my data indicate that displacing certain performance genres may be key to modernist transformation. Yet, several persons I describe here endured hardship over several years to continue performing genres their neighbors deemed dated or sacrilegious. This problematizes teleological visions of the progress of a monolithic modernity stamping out older expressive forms.

The aim of this paper is to discuss how in the wider context of capital expansion and accumulation in the late twentieth century development initiatives in general, and family planning in particular, have helped to train and produce new bodies and selves.Development projects are primarily geared toward changing the traditional practices and habits of the people in the developing world, in order to help them make the transition to lifestyles of the globalizing model of the West. The “West” here is used as a historical term rather than a geographical construct. It is, as Akhil Gupta (1997:321) argues, a conjugation of place, power, and knowledge (Gupta 1997:321) that has historically imposed its rationalities onto other societies. Using the Egyptian case as an example, I argue that family planning programs do not just reduce the number of children and regulate reproduction; they also introduce or foster notions of individual choice and responsibility, risk aversion, and personal independence. In short, they help to construct a new kind of individuality which is guided by legal constructs of citizenship rather than by communitarian and familial control. Such a construction must be further situated within the global political economy that reorganizes markets and labor relations, and subsequently requires individuals to abstractly self-regulate themselves and respond to the pressures of want and self-interest (Scott 1995:211).

Questions of ontology are socially as consequential as gossip. In saying this, I do not mean to belittle them but, on the contrary, to emphasize their pervasive ubiquity and importance. Paradoxically, however, it is that ubiquity that all too often reduces them to a banal and unthinking obviousness: the relationship between experienced reality and the discourses that render it palpable have often--like gossip--escaped critical attention, filtered out of anthropologistsÕ awareness by the singularly unrewarding opposition between “symbolic” and “materialist” approaches to the study of culture and society.

This essay addresses recent scholarship on Colonial Cuzco, focusing on the complexity of imperial relationships at the colonial interface. Encounters between Europeans and Andeans in highland Peru involved considerable complexity at any given moment, and changed significantly over time. Exploring this complexity through historiography, ethnohistory, art, and anthropology, the four books reviewed here describe Colonial Cuzco as a contested interculture, in which a multiplicity of self-interested individuals and groups exploited inequalities between colonial government and those governed. As Dean (1999) observes, this divide developed out of the innate ambivalence of colonialism, in which colonizers sought to subordinate through enculturation, yet maintain discrete cultural categories. Native resistance to foreign enculturation and periodic rebellions and revitalization movements acted to maintain these categories. Still, the quotidian operation of the colonial system allowed (and even required) the mediation of the colonial interculture, a creative blurring of such categories as government/governed, urban/rural, sacred/secular, and even past/present. Fundamental to appreciating how Spaniards, Andeans, and others wove a variegated social fabric in Colonial Cuzco is the Quechua notion of tinku (or tinkuy), described by Dean, Stavig, and others.

Decades after the Chinese Communists successfully ousted their Nationalist Party rivals and radically remolded the political economy of the countryside, an elderly resident of Guangdong's Zhongshan municipality recounted the onerous burden of taxes imposed under Nationalist rule. In addition to the twenty-six types of taxes exacted from residents by central state authorities, and the twenty excises collected by the provincial administration, he recalled that the local tax office levied fourteen taxes, including a commodity tax imposed on human excrement.

What are the most important cleavages created by political struggles over redistributive economic policies? What are the likely policy outcomes of these struggles? The classic answer to the first question is that the most important cleavage is that of class, dividing rich and poor. The class-based model is usually not taken to yield clear predictions about outcomes, because rich and poor would be expected to engage in an inconclusive bidding war for the support of the median voter or pivotal middle stratum. A more recent answer is that the most important cleavages will reflect the position of a given country in the international economy, pitting those benefiting from international trade against those hurt by it. This trade-based model yields stronger predictions about outcomes, since there is usually a clear majority that either does or does not benefit from international trade. Finally, there is a long, though loose, tradition that largely grows out of empirical observation. This emphasizes the pivotal role that the agricultural population appears to play in the more important political battles concerning institutional development and economic policy.

Over the past three decades, writings on modernity and post-modernity have emanated from both the social sciences and humanities. In this context, the voluminous works of Niklas Luhmann and his interpreters (Lee 2000; Rasch 2000) have had a lasting impact on how social theory and various expressions of modernity are interconnected. Yet, one of the finest and most critical understandings of modernity and its totality is still found in the writings of Georg Simmel, who is barely referred to in most recent analyses. Now, through the brilliant interpretations and translations by David Frisby and his colleagues over the past two decades, the interest in Simmel and his intellectual efforts has achieved a position which ranks him with Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. Although Simmel (1858–1918) is classically labeled a sociologist, the depth and breadth of his interests simply cannot be limited to any one discipline. Rather, it is best to approach Simmel as a cultural philosopher, one who used the essay format to address a number of subjects, issues, and problems. Simmel wrote some ten to fifteen books of which only a few have been translated into English, The Philosophy of Money (1900, 1907) being the most visible.

James Scott is known for portraying the moral world of peasants, showing how they have resisted the encroachment of capitalism and the state. Now he investigates the other side: the experts, bureaucrats, and revolutionaries whose grandiose schemes to improve the human condition have inflicted untold misery on the twentieth century. Seeing Like a State can be read, along with Foucault's Discipline and Punish and James Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine, as a classic of “structural dysfunctionalism.” The point (put metaphorically) is not merely that the cure for social ills has proven inadequate<\m>but that the disease inhered in the diagnosis, and that failure will continue so long as the doctors prevail.

Ann Anagnost's National Past-times is a collection of exceptionally perceptive essays addressing issues of governmentality: the language, workings and limits of state power; the formation of revolutionary subjects; the representation of national history in contemporary post-socialist China. The essays in this rich collection interrogate state discourse in a myriad of ways, drawing upon newspaper accounts, films, literature, and fieldwork encounters. Subtle changes in the language of state discourse are discussed in relation to how transitions from the superstructural determinism of the Maoist era to evolutionary notions of modernity in the post-Mao era are used to structure normative practice and transform the population into a disciplined labor force ready for global investment. An analysis of governance at the local level reveals how political rituals, such as the bestowal of status awards, actually distribute people into a moral hierarchy while simultaneously creating the appearance of the party and the people speaking in a unified voice. The controversial one-child family policy is interrogated in terms of state and popular understanding of ‘population quality,' a notion drawing on eugenics, commodities as markers of social evolution, fears of disorder, and national progress. A film tracing a rural woman's search for justice is the departure point for probing the workings of rural governance structures, personalized power, and forms of agency enabled by the market economy. The contemporary theme park “Splendid China” is analyzed as a narration of national identity that erases the Maoist era and presents a seamless continuity between symbols of imperial antiquity and the socialist state.

:Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines, by Fenella Cannell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). @TX:Syncretism is a word with a history. Much like fetishism, its famously promiscuous cousin, it has been hurled as an accusation and deployed as a theoretical tool. One can try to neutralize this history by drawing a distinction between “processes of religious synthesis” and the “discourse of syncretism”--read condemnation and/or defense--but the word remains productively problematic (see Stewart and Shaw 1994). It not only conjures an orthodoxy against which deviations can be measured; it also tempts us to presume we can identify the ingredients in any particular mixture, and that we know in advance how and why synthesis occurs. At the heart of the concept lurk daunting questions. What do we mean by religion? How do ethnographers and the people they study produce this category, explicitly and tacitly, institutionally and informally, in texts and the practices of everyday life?

Frontier Fictions begins with the now famous scene of Muhammad Riza Shah's departure from Iran on 16 January 1979. It recalls his father's departure thirty-seven years earlier, and the similar reported stories, that each monarch “departed with a box of Iranian soil tucked away in their belongings”(3).

Intellectual practice is marked by a central asymmetry: we explain the beliefs of others with social scientific theories of causation, but do not seek similar causes for our own (self-evidently more reasonable) ideas. So the “fundamentalist” writings of martyred Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb are normally analyzed as outgrowths of anti-colonial struggle, eroding economic opportunity, official corruption, and changing patterns of education and migration. But the thoughts of Daniel Bell, Hannah Arendt, and Alasdair MacIntyre are examined for their keen insights into the malaise of late modernity. The ideas of Western cultural critics, in other words, have meaning, while those of Muslim cultural critics have only function.

This is a provocative study of post-Communist politics in Slovakia. The author asks important questions and addresses significant approaches to the politics of transition. Her answers, however, will be looked upon skeptically by those who have studied politics, nationalism, and historical consciousness, whether in this region or elsewhere in democratizing nation-states. The author considers Slovakia an emblematic case, even though the particularities of Slovakian history may account for many of the points the author makes. The close analysis of certain politiciansÕ careers and important controversies in the post-communist period are valuable contributions; the broader interpretive framework, however, is flawed.

Historians define their jobs as the writing of history. Often, they look past their discipline to simply carry out the discipline's mandate. Yet Klein's project situates itself in the very question of disciplinarity, epistemology, and narrative. The study questions how history has been written by all sorts of professionals. The main concern of the book is to track historical treatments in general, and those of America in particular. Klein's other concern is with how history has been used and interpreted throughout the professional disciplines of literature, philosophy, and anthropology. Because of the powerful symbolism of the frontier, Klein uses this myth to explore visions of the past.