Studies of what we call modern societies frequently take one of two major perspectives. The first emphasizes an ever-increasing constraining or regulatory power (Weber's iron cage [1976], or Foucault's discipline and regulation [1979, 1980]). The second tradition seems to contradict the first by emphasizing trends, such as a “democratic revolution” (de Tocqueville 1969:702–5; Laclau and Mouffe 1985:152) or the extension of citizenship rights (Marshall 1973; Bendix 1977). In this essay I argue that the twin processes of increasing regulation on one hand, and institutionalization of individual rights on the other, are closely linked. I make this argument by interpreting the transformation of relations between the state and peasants in Siam (Thailand) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and through an assessment of two books which have been particularly influential in comparative studies during the 1980s: James Scott's Weapons of the Weak (1985) and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983).

Although the concept of social banditry has received much critical attention since E. Hobsbawm published his book in 1969, the debate so far has perhaps been narrowly focused (Blok 1972; Vanderwood 1981; Dreissen 1983; Hart 1987; Koliopoulos 1987). Too often that debate has been framed in terms of whether bandits either express pre-political sentiments or prevent the emergence of peasant solidarity, rather than in terms of which types of rural structures encourage its emergence and reproduction, the psychology and sociology of terror, and how bandit myths may be created and used within nation-states or societies aspiring to nationhood.

The history of tropical forest change over the last millennium is difficult to chart with any confident degree of accuracy. Indeed, systematic attempts even for the last hundred years have been made only recently. In general, more is known at present about the history of tropical forests in Asia and Southeast Asia than forests in Africa or South America. This lack of knowledge is partly due to the fact that the causal factors behind the erosion of tropical forests area are particularly difficult to disentangle. However, important connections can be made between European expansion, the penetration of capitalist economic forces, and the transformation of tropical environments.Above all, the spread of market relations in the tropics has served to encourage the rapid clearance of forests for agriculture. The history of global deforestation has probably been closely associated at many of its fastest stages with the dynamics of the forces of industrialisation and the expansion of a European-centered world-system.

Our view of agricultural slavery tends to be dominated by the plantation model familiar from modern slavery, especially in the Caribbean and the Cotton Kingdom of the southern United States. The well-documented plantation model is in fact a useful comparative tool which, when properly used, can advance our understanding of the less well-documented Roman latifundist slavery. This plantation model is all but irrelevant, however, to the very different slave regime of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries b.c., and one must look elsewhere for a similarly well-documented model to use for the purpose of comparative analysis of Athenian agricultural slavery. Such a model, I would suggest, can be found in the agricultural slave regime of the northern North American colonies (New England and, to a lesser degree, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) in the second half of the eighteenth century. As we shall see, this less familiar regime of slavery in these colonies displays striking similarities to the agricultural slave regime of classical Athens. We will examine some of these similarities and indicate, by illustration, some of the ways by which a knowledge of northern agricultural slavery can be of use to the student of Athenian social history.

The question to which this essay is addressed struck me when, having done ethnographic field work in the Faroe Islands, I undertook another stint on Dominica, at the opposite corner of the North Atlantic.1 In the Faroes, I took part in a couple of slaughters of herds of pilot whales. The grindadráp is dramatic, but apart from the inevitable tumult of the slaughter itself, in which romantically inclined observers have been pleased (or horrified) to find Faroese acting like their Viking ancestors, it is a remarkably orderly business. In a Dominican village called Casse, I took part in another great sea hunt, in which shoals of skipjack tuna were caught inshore. Seining bonik, as these fish are called in the French Creole vernacular, is no less dramatic than the grindadráp, if considerably less difficult and dangerous. But particularly in the division of the spoils, bonik seining is disorderly, even chaotic.

Revolutionary ideologies of both the left and the right have led to genocide and mass murders of unprecedented scope in this century. The survey by Harff and Gurr shows that genocides and politicides—killings of people in groups targeted because of organized political opposition—between 1945 and 1980 may have caused in this same period over twice as many deaths than wars. Such state killings claimed up to 2.6 times the number of lives lost in the aftermath of natural disasters between 1967 and 1986 (1987). Similarly, Rummel argues that four times as many people have been killed in democides, or state mass murders, of citizens in the twentieth century than have been killed in wars (1992).

This is a study of landlordism, agricultural labourers, and the State of Andalusia in southern Spain. This region, a classical case of landlordism, deviates from the typically West European agrarian structure dominated by the family farm. Andalusia's history centers on the conflict over land between a majority of landless peasants and a minority of powerful landlords, which was one of the main causes of the Spanish civil war. This study deals with two periods covering nearly fifty years of this latifundist system and its conflictridden relations of production. It examines the freezing of the agrarian structure for nearly forty years by the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and the adaptation of social and agrarian policy for the next ten years by the socialists. In other words, this is the story of how the agricultural laborers of Andalusia were transformed in less than one-half century from “peasants without land” to “clients of the welfare state” dependent on the social policies of the state.

At the most manifest level, this paper is about agricultural and agronomic terminology as found in the discourse of Tamil-speaking workers on Sri Lanka's tea plantations or tea estates, as they are called there. My use of the terms agricultural and agronomic in this context is admittedly idiosyncratic. In the tea estates of Sri Lanka, two kinds of agricultural (in the unmarked sense) terminology are in use, one belonging to managerial agriculture and the other to folk agriculture. But by and large, the tea estate is the regime of managerial agriculture. Whereas in village India, folk agriculture prevails. I call the class of terms belonging to managerial agriculture, agronomic terminology, and reserve the term “agricultural terminology” for the domain of folk agriculture. By analyzing four communicative events that I observed and recorded on tea estates in Sri Lanka, I attempt to show how these two terminological worlds interact. The nature of that interaction is such that the dominant terminology of agronomy may be seen to be deconstructed by the subdominant terminology of village agriculture.

Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie has observed that in medieval Montaillou ”time was always vague,” so that “history was absent or almost absent from Montaillou culture.” According to the inquisition record on which LeRoy Ladurie depended, Montaillou villagers often found it difficult to determine exactly how long ago a given event had occurred. They described past events as having happened “three or four years ago,” “seventeen or eighteen years ago,” “twenty or twenty-four years since.” Others quantified the past by referring to “the time when the heretics predominated in Montaillou, before the round-up by the Inquisition in Carcassonne.” Unsurprisingly, the same imprecision governed their sense of age. In rural Montaillou, the rhythm of transhumance more readily marked time than did any abstract calendar (LeRoy Ladurie 1979:280–1).

During the period of Ottoman rule over the Arab East, from 1516 until the end of the First World War, the term Palestine (Filastin) denoted a geographic region, part of what the Arabs called al-Sham (historic Syria), rather than a specific Ottoman province or administrative district. By contrast, from 1920 to 1948, Palestine existed as a distinct and unified political (and to a considerable extent economic) entity with well-defined boundaries. Ruled by Britain under a so-called mandate granted by the League of Nations, Palestine in that period encompassed an Arab majority and a Jewish minority.

This essay reflects a year of field work in what was then the Soviet Union, in a study regarded as the first ethnographic research conducted by a Western anthropologist in a Russian city. The Russians are particularly important for anthropological study, not only because of recent historic events indicating changes in their political and economic structures but because they are one of several groups of northern people organized into urban industrial societies characterized by varying amounts of mass violence. This violence has been employed in subjugating minority peoples within their normal borders and outside of their borders, in absorbing those cultures, and has taken on the various forms of genocide, purges, propaganda and fear.