ANTHROPOLOGY AND POWER Power relations—of masters and servants, of chiefs and tribesmen—continue to provide anthropology with one of its richest terrains, recent notable examples in CSSH being Nicholas B. Dirks, “The Policing of Tradition: Colonialism and Anthropology in Southern India,” 39:182–212 (1997), and Lisa Weeden, “Acting ‘as if': Symbolic Politics and Social Control in Syria,” 40:503–23 (1998). Two essays in this issue propose new ways of looking at them.

THE POLITICS OF CONVERSION Conversion from one to another of the Biblical religions makes for complex, various and unpredictable politics, as the first three essays of this issue illustrate. (See also Lucette Valensi, “Inter-communal Relations and Changes in Religious Affiliation in the Middle East [Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries],” 1997:251–69.)

SPIRIT MATTER The first two essays show that the great unanswerable questions—in this case the relation of spirit to matter—can be rich terrains for investigation of the beliefs of those who struggle to answer them.

This article argues for the culturally productive power of imperial rule by exploring how missionary projects in Russia constituted new understandings of ethnic particularity among one group of imperial subjects—baptized Tatars, or Kräshens.<+>3 I demonstrate that while many Tatars who had been formally baptized into Christianity sought to rejoin the Tatar Islamic community over the course of the nineteenth century, a perhaps larger group, slowly abandoning the complex of Muslim and indigenous Turkic (“pagan”) practices that conditioned their subordination to the church's spiritual authority, constructed an indigenous Orthodox Christian identity. Subsequently, and particularly in the early Soviet years, at least some Kräshen activists sought to transcend the predominantly confessional foundations for this identity and began to contend that Kräshens constituted a secular nation altogether distinct from Tatars. In short, this study considers the (incomplete) transformation of a community that had been defined in religious terms, largely through the intervention of imperial Russian authority, into a self-conscious political and cultural community.The small number of Soviet studies on Kräshens, concerned principally with linguistics and material culture, have made little effort to trace the development of this identity, especially in its politicized forms. See Iu. G. Mukhametshin, Tatary-kriasheny: Istoriko-etnograficheskoe issledovanie material'noi kul'tury, seredina XX–nachalo XX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1977); F. S. Baiazitova, Govory Tatar-kriashen v sravnitel'nom osveshchenii (Moscow: Nauka, 1986); and idem, Keräshennär: Tel üzenchëlekläre häm iola ijaty (Kazan: “Matbugat Iorty” Näshriiaty, 1997).

The theological period of humanity could begin no otherwise than by a complete and usually very durable state of pure Fetichism [sic], which allowed free exercise to that tendency of our nature by which Man conceives of all external bodies as animated by a life analogous to his own, with differences of mere intensity.

Auguste Comte, Cours (1830Ð1842)

We consider here what has happened to one segment of South African capital since the demise of apartheid, of the Indian businessmen of KwaZulu Natal, and especially of its principal port city, Durban. During the long nightmare of apartheid, South Africa's Indians, a small minority constituting only three percent of the national population, suffered many restrictions on their development.

At no time has there been more fascination with the contrast that memories of colonialism afford between the “elegance” of domination and the brutality of its effects.Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” in Culture and Truth, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 68. While images of empire surface and resurface in the public domain, colonial studies has materialized over the last decade as a force of cultural critique, political commentary, and not least as a domain of new expert knowledge. One could argue that the entire field has positioned itself as a counterweight to the waves of colonial nostalgia that have emerged in the post-World War II period in personal memoirs, coffee table books, tropical chic couture, and a film industry that encourages “even politically progressive [North American] audiences” to enjoy “the elegance of manners governing relations of dominance and subordination between the races.”Ibid. Still, Nietzsche's warning against “idle cultivation of the garden of history” resonates today when it is not always clear whether some engagements with the colonial are raking up colonial ground, or vicariously luxuriating in it.Freidrich Nietzsche, “The Uses and Advantages of History,” Untimely Meditations, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996[1874]), 68.

Image and reality interplay in the chiefship of the Basseri tribe of southern Iran. We know the Basseri through the influential and rightly esteemed ethnography, Nomads of South Persia, by Fredrik Barth. Barth's account of the Basseri chief is vivid and striking, and, in placing the chiefship within the complex society of Iran, was an original contribution to the ethnographic literature. And yet there appear to be certain subtleties of the Basseri chiefship, which, while implied in the historical and ethnographic information provided by Barth, are not included in his explicit description. As a result, Barth overstates, I believe, the degree of the Basseri chief's power, and underestimates the extent to which the chief depended upon the consent of his tribemen.

“Naturally, everyone would like to get their hands on kuru brains,” wrote D. Carleton Gajdusek in 1957. A young medical scientist, Gajdusek was writing from his bush laboratory in the eastern highlands of New Guinea, and he had in mind the competition among pathologists in Melbourne, Australia, and Bethesda, Maryland, for the valuable specimens. But he may also have considered his own recent transactions with the Fore people, afflicted with what he thought was the disease of kuru, and on whose hospitality he was then relying. Blood and brains, the germinal objects of his field research, were richly entangled in local community relations and global scientific networks; they could convey one meaning to the Fore, another to Gajdusek, and yet another to laboratory workers in Australia and the United States. These objects could be exchanged as gifts or commodities in different circumstances, or on the same occasion the different parties might confuse gift exchange with commodity transaction. At times, the scientist would try to obtain goods through barter, or even to appropriate them; and, then again, he might find that what he wanted was out of circulation altogether. In the field, Gajdusek had become enmeshed in a complex and fragile web of relationships with the Fore in order to acquire specimens that, through further exchanges with senior colleagues, might yet make his scientific reputation.

In the late thirteenth century, Ida of Louvain scandalized her community. The daughter of a prosperous wine merchant, Ida already had refused marriage and become a recluse in a small cell within her parents' home. One day, however, it seemed that she went mad. Casting aside even the simple clothes she now wore, Ida wrapped herself in a dirty rag and draped a mat over her shoulders for warmth. Aggressively seeking out the most crowded plazas and market places, she preened and “strutted about if mad or a fool, offering a monstrous spectacle of herself to the people.”Vita Venerabilis Idae Virginis. In Acta Sanctorum. (Paris and Rome, 1865) vol. 11 (13 April): 163. Hereafter cited as AASS. Townspeople murmured that Ida was in a frenzy, out of her mind; eventually she was tied up to prevent her from harming herself or others.

In 1639 Manuel Bautista Pérez, along with ten others, were executed by order of the Spanish Inquisition's Lima office for secretly following Jewish beliefs.The classic study of the Inquisition in the viceroyalty of Peru is José Toribio Medina's Historia del Tribunal de la Inquisición de Lima, 2 vols. (Santiago, 1956). For a summary of the auto-de-fe where Manuel Bautista Pérez was executed, see vol. 2, 45–146. More recent studies of the Inquisition in Peru include Paulino Castañeda Delgado and Pilar Hernández Aparicio, La Inquisición de Lima, (Madrid, 1989); Gabriela Ramos, “La privatización del poder: Inquisición y sociedad colonial en el Perú,” in H. Urbano, ed. Violencia y Poder en los Andes, (Lima, 1991), 75–92; Idem, Gabriella Ramos, “La fortuna del inquisidor: Inquisición y poder en el Perú (1594–1611),” Cuadernos para la historia de la evangelización en América Latina, (1989), n. 4, 89–122. See especially Teodoro Hampe-Martínez, “Recent Works on the Inquisition and Peruvian Colonial Society, 1570–1820,” Latin American Research Review 31:2 (1996), 43–63, for a current and comprehensive bibliography.Analyses centered on Peru's New Christian population include Boleslao Lewin, El Santo Oficio en América 1950; Alfonso Quiroz, “La expropiación inquisitorial de cristianos nuevos portugueses en Los Reyes, Cartagena y México (1635–1649),” Histórica 10 (1986), 237–303; and Gonzalo de Reparaz, Os Portugueses no Vice-Reinado do Peru: Seculos XVI e XVII (Lisbon, 1976). Lewin describes the Inquisitorial processes against New Christians with a focus on anti-Semitism; Reparaz presents information from various sources about the Portuguese in Peru; Quiroz relates the indictment of New Christians to the Inquisitors' need to acquire funds to support their operation. In prison for over five years, Pérez was under considerable pressure to confess to “Judaising”: had he admitted to being a crypto-Jew and repented, his life would probably have been spared. Yet he refused. As a result of Pérez's “obstinacy,” so the Inquisitors declared, he was condemned to die.

Among the agro-pastoral Kuria people, whose population straddles the border between Tanzania and Kenya, many young men are actively engaged in an illicit livestock trade in which cattle stolen in Tanzania—from other Kuria, as well as from neighboring peoples such as the Luo, Ngoreme, and Maasai—are sold to buyers, mainly butchers, inside Tanzania or else are run across the border for cash sale in neighboring Kenya. Kenya is a more affluent country than Tanzania—consequently, the demand for beef is greater there and beef prices are considerably higher. The beef and hides from these stolen Tanzanian cattle also fuel Kenya's meat-packing and tanning industries, and live animals as well as canned beef are reportedly also shipped to buyers in Scandinavian countries and the Persian Gulf.

During the early Meiji period of the 1870s and 80s, Japanese leaders were in the process of constructing a new state. The old regime of the Tokugawa shogunate had been overthrown in 1867, and its “feudal” ways were to be replaced with institutions that valued another, “Western” set of priorities—including applied science and industrial capitalism, constitutional law and deliberative assemblies. This program of institutional change, called “civilization” or “enlightenment” by its proponents, enlisted a range of foreign consultants, from engineers and military officers to teachers and legal experts. Equally important were Western books, the translation of which had begun under the old regime. Among the works that made a powerful impression on Japanese readers at the start of the Meiji period were William and Robert Chambers' Political Economy, Samuel Smiles' Self-Help, and John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. The “liberal” tradition defined by these authors provided an introduction for the works of Herbert Spencer. Although his reputation today most often places him among conservative or libertarian political philosophers, it was Spencer's liberal defense of natural rights that initially interested Japanese readers in the 1870s. For Spencer's appearance coincided with a growing advocacy of “people's rights” in Japan, as private citizens pressured the authoritarian oligarchy ruling Japan to grant them the rights to freedom of speech, press, and assembly, and to participation in governmental process through the institution of a national assembly.

This essay is a preliminary attempt to place nineteenth century Ottoman conversion policies in a comparative context in relation to both earlier Ottoman centuries and other imperial polities, viz.: the Spanish and Russian. The present study has three aims. First, to ask some practical questions about the fact and nature of the conversion process. Second, to try to ascertain whether there is some pattern to the various cases occurring in the archival documentation for the turbulent years between the declaration of the Tanzimat in 1839 and the Reform Edict of 1856. And third, to put the late Ottoman attitude to conversion and apostasy into a broader comparative framework than has hitherto been attempted.This paper is the first fruit of a larger project that will examine conversion and apostasy in the late Ottoman Empire from the Tanzimat era through to the end of the Empire in 1918.

The Conquest of Everest, the official film of the first ascent of Mount Everest, opens with the famous summit photograph of Tenzing Norgay holding aloft his ice axe, from which the flags of Britain, Nepal, India, and the United Nations flutter in the wind. Tenzing, a Sherpa raised in Nepal but for twenty years a resident of India, reached the summit with Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand beekeeper, on 29 May 1953, in a British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt. In the film, the summit photograph is followed by the opening credits and the scene in London on 2 June 1953, when news of the ascent was announced on the same day as Queen Elizabeth II's coronation. As crowds wave British flags to the beat of military bands, the Queen's gilded carriage rolls through ceremonial archways on the streets of London. The narrator then announces: “And to add to the cheers, the newspapers reported an extra of extras. Britain had one new victory: Men had climbed Mount Everest.”The Conquest of Everest, (1953), National Film and Television Archive, British Film Institute, London.

In October of 1899, General George W. Davis of the United States military government in Puerto Rico issued General Order No. 160. By that time, General Davis and his forces had been occupying Puerto Rico for over a year. The war with Spain which had initially brought them to the island was finally over, and they now claimed complete control over the territory. General Order No. 160 thereby called for the establishment of municipal governments in Puerto Rico. It established municipal elections with a restricted suffrage, and empowered the newly-elected officials to carry out various duties, from policing to taxation to basic administration. Of course, the Puerto Ricans already had municipal governments, established by the Spaniards during their three hundred year reign over the island. But General Order No. 160 was supposed to mark something entirely new in that it manned the municipal governments exclusively with elected Puerto Ricans. The idea was that the Puerto Ricans, “for the first time in their history,” should be given an opportunity to manage their own affairs and acquire practical education in modern liberal governance. As General Davis stated, the new municipal governments were to serve as “a sort of kindergarten” in which Puerto Ricans could learn the ways of “popular government,” Anglo-American style.Headquarters Department of Porto Rico (1899a); United States Congress (1904: 222).

On November 26, 1949, less than two months after the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Ministry of Culture issued a directive to artists and writers about the importance and possible use in a new era of New Year prints (nianhua), a simple and inexpensive Chinese folk medium used to decorate homes in celebration of the New Year.

Historians have documented extensively the fascination of many American intellectuals with the Soviet Union and fascist Italy during the 1920s and 1930s (Diggins 1966; 1972; Feuer 1962; Filene 1967; Warren 1993). They have also drawn a compelling analogy between the sympathetic attitudes of American intellectuals toward Soviet Russia and the sympathy of a later generation of intellectuals towards Cuba, China and North Vietnam (Skotheim 1971: 96–106; Hollander 1981; Caute 1988). However, little effort has been made to examine whether the forgiving attitudes toward fascist Italy might also have had a historical analogue in the form of forgiving attitudes toward other, non-communist, dictatorships.

Two decades after the abolition of slavery, fear-inducing stereotypes of black men emerged in the U.S. South and Cuba that had not been pervasive before emancipation or in its immediate aftermath. Simultaneously, white antiblack violence reached unprecedented levels with the lynching of more than twenty-five hundred blacks in the U.S. South between 1884 and 1930, and the massacre of several thousand blacks in Cuba in 1912.Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence. An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 48–49; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 19–44; Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share. The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 197, 225. Yet beyond this common trajectory toward racial stereotyping and violence, important differences existed in the ideas of these two former slave societies about the place blacks should occupy in freedom, the kinds of images that were applied to them, and the nature of the violence exercised against them.