SOCIAL HISTORIES OF FOOD Three elegant articles, devoted to ancient, medieval, and modern times, exemplify very different ways of treating the social history of food.

BECOMING NATIONALISTS Two articles explore ways of coming to nationalism from the margins, so to say.

PERFORMING HISTORY History performed is always tendentious, and unable to cloak itself in the dress of the impartial judge while being the zealous advocate. The first three articles seek to understand how exactly these advocacies are constructed, by, respectively, the warring churches of a Sicilian town, the commodification of Jordanian hospitality, and a coronation ceremony in Zambia.

Twenty years ago, in Cooking, Cuisine and Class, Jack Goody trained his sights, those of a social anthropologist, on the conditions prerequisite for the emergence of differentiated cuisine—a high and a low cuisine—in societies and cultures. Sweeping boldly over Europe, Asia, and Africa, and traversing a period of time which extended from the fourth millennium B.C.E. in Egypt to two contemporary societies in northern Ghana, Goody could find space for only a few pages on ancient Rome; these may conveniently serve as my point of departure.

An imaginary Berlin Wall stands between nationalist trajectories of the Western hemisphere and those of the East. While the nationalism of the West is generally associated with Enlightenment, the Eastern version is usually referred to as dormant cultural or linguistic nationalism stirred up by Western education. It is an old academic canon that gained new respectability through Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. But even if political realities in the postcolonial world apparently vindicated this academic canon, the same realities might trap us into writing history retrospectively. A pertinent case in point is the narrative of the emergence of the Indonesian nation in which the notion of a slumbering national identity has been central. A concomitant of that is the almost complete isolation of Indonesian historiography from important discussions in other postcolonial societies. This article proposes a heterodox perspective on the emergence of Indonesian nationalism, which is informed by literature on Senegal and Bengal. This choice is not coincidental, as these locations were the heartlands of the former French and English colonial empires.

In 1982, Eric Wolf published Europe and the People Without History to identify and begin rectifying large gaps in anthropological knowledge. That project remains unfinished. In the past year,This essay was substantially completed in September 2002. Revisions in preparation for publication a year later were kept to a minimum, in order to preserve for the reader a sense of temporal location and orientation. since September 11, 2001, the necessity of filling in some of these gaps has become urgent. The history of relations between Western powers and transnational Muslim societies in the Indian Ocean is one of them.Of the European traditions, Dutch scholarship has retained the greatest awareness of this issue over the past century, and a number of individual Dutch scholars continue to be proficient in the regional languages, such as both Arabic and Malay, today (van den Berg 1886; Hurgronje 1906; 1931; van der Meulen and von Wissman 1932; van Leur 1955; Schrieke 1960; Meilink-Roelofsz 1962; van Bruinessen 1995; Kaptein 1997). An anthropologically nuanced understanding of such societies as diasporas, thought in tandem with their continued relations with Western empires over five hundred years, lends a useful perspective on a set of conflicts which is massively unfolding. Threatening to become a self-fulfilling prophecy of a clash of civilizations (Huntington 1993) in popular discourse and political decision-making, a phenomenon on this horrendous scale remains within the purview of anthropologists if one sees it as an instance of culture contact under conditions of global imperialism, unmitigated by colonial administration.In his book which elaborated on the provocative thesis of his original 1993 essay, Huntington noted that the question mark in the essay title had been generally ignored (1997:13).

Serge Gruzinski (1996), in an analysis of the Feast of Corpus Domini in the colonial Mexico of the modern era, notices the extreme importance that the protagonists of the events that he studied gave to the tiniest details of the ritual procedure. Because he is interested in understanding the political sense of these and other “baroque” ceremonial moments, Gruzinski implicitly rejects all functionalist readings and prefers to examine the connections between power and the elements within the ritual mechanism. He notices, for example, how the Corpus Domini was in no way a moment of controlled expression of the political tensions in colonial Mexican society. On the contrary, the ritual seems to him to be an occasion in which and by means of which the various Corpora constituting that society could publicly display and negotiate status, power, and prerogatives (Gruzinski 1996:150–51). The concrete ceremonial performances establish and contribute to “redefining the status quo” (ibid.:151). This explains the attention to what may seem to us to be insignificant details of the ceremony, but certainly they were not so for the protagonists (ibid.:142).

For over two centuries the Dönme lived an open secret in Ottoman Salonika following their conversion from Judaism to Islam in the wake of the conversion of the messianic rabbi Shabbatai Tzevi in 1666. Neither the category “Jewish” nor “Muslim” expresses their religious identity. Unlike Jews, the Dönme ostensibly followed the requirements of Islam, including fasting at Ramadan and praying in mosques, one of which they built. Unlike Muslims, the Dönme maintained a belief that Shabbatai Tzevi was the messiah, practiced kabbalistic rituals, and recited prayers in Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish. According to the descendants of Dönme in Istanbul, the Dönme in Salonika saw themselves as a community apart; fulfilling the commandments of Shabbatai Tzevi caused Dönme to only marry among themselves, avoid relations with Jews, maintain their separate identity guided by detailed genealogies, and bury their dead in distinct cemeteries. (Dönmeler1919:15; Galanté 1935:67; and Stavroulakis 1993).

Irrigation systems were the first source of great abundance that stemmed from the Agricultural Revolution. They were also humanity's first great environmental curse. Long before issues of global warming and freshwater shortages haunted the modern world, irrigation systems blessed and bedeviled humans with their promise and peril. While a well-ordered functional irrigation system provided inhabitants with seed-to-yield ratios that were the envy of any dry-farming regime, these same irrigation systems could collapse in toto, bringing disaster on a scale never seen in rain-fed agricultural systems.

Four books with one title—Empire—are the subject of this essay.Simply including the plural would have extended the list still further: see Susan E. Alcock, Terence N. D'Altroy, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Carla M. Sinopoli, eds., Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). I am grateful to Jane Burbank, Antonio Feros, and Molly Nolan for comments on a previous draft of this article. All were published within the past few years, and the interest they have generated reveals a widespread concern with the exercise of power on a vast scale, beyond the limits of national or continental boundaries. Yet the contemporary use of the word “empire” as a metaphor for unbounded power sits uneasily with scholarship on actual historical empires. Many historians have been trying to show that the long-term survival of empires depended on their rulers limiting their transformative ambitions even as they extended their power. The new interest in empires is nonetheless valuable because it suggests that scholars and intellectuals are emerging from their obsession with the nation-state, seen as the inevitable outcome of a movement from empire to nation, and as the political form characteristic of the “modern” era, which some scholars think is now giving way to new forms of global connections. Empire is being discovered in the past, in the present, and in the future.

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan evokes a simpler time, a sense of place and a cherished way of life. A visit to Jordan brings a return to respected and hallowed tradition. Immediately upon arrival, the visitor is aware of the inherent hospitality of the Jordanian people as exemplified by the Arabic “Ahlan wa sahlan” (“I Welcome You”), heard at every turn.

During the last week of July, the people of the lower Luapula Valley in northern Zambia gather in the village of Mwansabombwe to celebrate their Lunda traditions and their paramount, Mwata Kazembe. For days prior to the main event, pubs serve bottled beer, much of it imported from nearby Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to quench the thirst of guests who have arrived in the hot, dusty village; women from different village sections deliver pots of millet beer to Mwata Kazembe's palace; and the youth organize special sports competitions and cultural events. Toward the weekend when the main festivities are to take place provincial, and on occasion national political and military dignitaries dressed in their suits and ties arrive. On Saturday afternoon, following the performance of certain rituals in the morning, chiefs, headmen, state dignitaries, and the villagers crowd together in a stadium on the outskirts of Mwansabombwe. A dignitary delivers a speech that highlights the importance of culture and tradition for progress, development, and national well-being. Listening to the national leadership's calls for the preservation of these traditions are chiefs and headman, who appear in the traditional Lunda garb of long imikonso skirts (sing. umukonso), leather inshipo belts and ututasa crowns (sing. akatasa). After the speeches, on the instruction of Mwata Kazembe, selected aristocrats and members of the royal family dance. The day's events culminate in Mwata Kazembe performing the Lunda dance of conquest, the Mutomboko.

This paper means to suggest that it is good at times to step out of the glare of modern frames of intelligibility in order to perceive in ethnographic data dim, or subtle, signs of worldviews no longer apparent. It proposes to show, in this strain, that humble attention to folklore allows us to make sense of seemingly pointless trivia. Overall, the article is an experiment in interweaving ethnologic and folkloristic approaches to expand the relevant contexts of problematic cultural details and thus attain theoretical generalization.

While most American academics and policymakers are familiar with the problems facing the growing elderly population in the United States, many are surprised to learn of the troubles confronting the aged in Africa. In stark contrast to the mythic image of the tightly-knit extended family, where grandparents are lovingly cared for as a respected and integral part of the family unit, is the unforgiving reality of hunger, ill health, and loneliness that is the daily existence for many elderly Africans. It is critical that the problems of the aged in Africa and other parts of the developing world be examined, but we must recognize that these problems do not signify a simple convergence toward a common social ill across the globe. Rather, the nature of inter-generational solidarity varies, sometimes dramatically, over time and across contexts. This study employs a comparative analysis to reveal important differences in the nature of inter-generational solidarity over time between two similar sub-regions in neighboring Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire in West Africa, and asks what explains those differences.

The long civil war in the Sudan between the government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) is usually simply described as a war between ‘the Arab North’ and ‘the African South.’ Equally simply, it is understood as a continuation, by new means and in new circumstances, of nineteenth-century and earlier inequalities between free people and unfree people, and of hostilities between slavers and those they preyed upon. In the twentieth century these asymmetries came to be represented by a religious distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims. However, these apparent distinctions between free and unfree, and between Muslim and non-Muslim begin to blur when we ask who is making them. Likewise, at closer inspection, the division into “the Arab North” and “the African South” begins to fragment and reconstitute into a complexity of alliances and interest groups. These complexities become more evident as engagement moves from hostile encounters in the remote vastness of the Sudan to peace negotiations and press conferences in hotels and offices in capital cities. In the latter settings marginalized populations can be heard. Of special here interest are the three culturally ‘southern’ populations whose homelands are in the geo-political North: Abyei, the Nuba Mountains, and South Blue Nile. In January 2003, a public statement, headed “Let us not be denied the right to decide on our future,” was delivered to the North-South peace conference in Kenya by a local NGO, the Relief Organisation of Fazugli (ROOF), on behalf of “the people of South Blue Nile.” It demanded that their representatives, along with those of the Nuba Mountains and Abyei be included in the current peace negotiations.

Following Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), there has been considerable interest in studying gender images and engendered practices that emerged out of colonialism, both during the era of colonialism (Cooper and Stoler 1997; R. Lewis 1996; Stoler 1991; 1995; 2002), and subsequently (Altman 2001; Enloe 1993). Many of these studies have shown how colonized women were subject to the gendered and often sexualized gaze of Western men (Carrier 1998; Doy 1996; Grewal 1996; Yegenoglu 1998), and how colonized men were often regarded as either effeminate or “martial” by virtue of their birth into a particular group. Arguably, the latent ambiguity of regarding all colonized men as effete, and yet categorizing some colonized men as strong and aggressively virile, points to one of the many complex contradictions manifest in the cultural politics of colonialism. A similar point could be made with regard to nationalism, wherein women, and the image men want women to present of themselves, reflects masculine ambivalence about modernity (Chatterjee 1993). In any case, even when colonial discourse essentializes the virile masculinity of various subject groups—in particular the so-called martial castes of South Asia (Hopkins 1889; MacMunn 1977)—the putative masculinity of these groups is ascribed to breeding and latent “savagery,” and is rarely, if ever, conceived of as an achieved status, much less something an individual from some other group might achieve on the basis of training or practice.

The Tanzimat—a series of legal and administrative reforms implemented in the Ottoman empire between 1839 and 1876—has been described by Roderic Davison as a modernization campaign whose momentum came “from the top down and from the outside in.” There can be little doubt about the basic historical veracity of this characterization. Ottoman reform was indeed the brainchild of a small, albeit influential, portion of the imperial bureaucratic elite and its direction and timing were undeniably influenced by foreign diplomatic pressure (in the context of the so-called “Eastern Question”). But by characterizing, correctly, the Tanzimat as a state-led, elitist project, Davison's argument enters an interpretive vicious circle which seems to be more a reflection of twentieth-century political sensibilities than of nineteenth-century realities. A “top-down” political project, according to this argument, is by definition less likely to succeed than a project that has “vigorous popular support.” And, since we know that the project in question ultimately failed to stop the breakup of the empire, it must indeed have lacked such support.

In recent years, eugenics has emerged as a major topic in the history of science. As a mixture of science and policy, as a discipline and social movement, eugenics lies at the interface of biological science and society. The primary feature of “eugenics,” a term coined by Francis Galton in 1883, is the conviction that human traits of character, for good or evil, are genetically transmitted. This so-called science, therefore, seeks to regulate human procreation by encouraging the fecundity of allegedly genetically superior groups in society, while discouraging “defectives” from producing children since they would replicate their deficiencies.

Categories of ‘belonging' and ‘owning' have reflexes in both linguistic and broader social spheres, in which the same cover terms lead a curious double life in both linguistic and social scientific terminology. For example, the opposition between ‘inalienable' and ‘alienable' possession exists both as a linguistic category and a category relevant for exchange (gifts versus commodities), and has generated immense parallel and unrelated literatures in both linguistics (e.g. Chappell and Mcgregor 1996, and references there) and anthropology (e.g., Carrier 1995 and references there). This paper explores the changing pragmatics of a single Welsh linguistic form which indexes ‘belonging,' to understand which, I argue, one needs to understand broader changes in the way that social and political-economic categories of belonging and ownership are differentially infused with affect from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries.