VOICES IN THE WILDERNESS The first essay responds to our call for articles on deep histories of the present, wide-angle lenses “combining past and present as a unitary field of vision” (CSSH 2005: 233).

Judith Adler shows the lineage connecting themes of current wilderness debates with fourth-century Christian ascetic movements. Such movements idealized empty spaces as the most fitting habitat for ascetics, by virtue of whose existence the world and human life was preserved, a revaluation of wilderness propagated more widely by the Christianization of Rome. The tradition of ascetic primitivism has its origins in practical forms of early philosophical anthropology and speculative psychology, and is perpetuated in tropes of wilderness as a book of nature, an educator superior to schools, a space whose purity is necessary for the survival of the world, and a wild space that humans are called upon to protect or transform. As millennial traditions of narrative continually offer themselves to our thoughts about the radical transformation of our planet, the author suggests, historians of late antiquity might find themselves “well situated to throw new light on deeply motivating rhetorical tropes of emerging bitter debates.”

This article offers biographical sketches of the Jewish members of the Bolshevik revolutionary élite. It explores how their commitments to socialist universalism and eventual identification with Bolshevism were influenced by experiences and identities as Jews in fin de siècle Tsarist Russia. Situating them within a comparative historical sociology of ethnicity and identity across the Empire, I consider the ways in which ambiguities of assimilation, ethnic exclusion, and ethnocultural marginality influenced their attraction to Bolshevik socialism. In doing so, I revise the traditional argument that that the Bolsheviks of Jewish origin were highly assimilated “non-Jewish Jews” whose Jewishness played no role in their political radicalism. Instead, the claim is made that for the Jewish Bolshevik élite ascriptive Jewishness was a social fact mediated by ethnopolitical context, and therefore a dimension of varying significance to their radicalism, even for those for whom Jewishness was not a claimed identity.

CIVILIZING FOOD The civilizing process always seems to include a search for ever-more rare and exotic foodstuffs, complex dishes, and exquisitely refined table manners. We see this, for example, in the witty floor mosaic of a Roman dining room depicting the scraps of an elaborate feast, discussed by John D'Arms in “The Culinary Reality of Roman Upper-Class Convivia: Integrating Texts and Images” (2004: 428–50). The first essay, also on convivial feasting, is by another long-standing friend of CSSH.

Environmentalist writers and their critics agree that Western environmental problems, projects and movements have a marked religious dimension. In an often cited but now widely qualified paper, Lynn White located the roots of our ecological ‘crisis’ in a Judeo-Christian orientation to nature (White 1969). Some contemporary environmentalists call for a new “religion of nature” (Crosby 2002; Willers 1999) or, on the model of modernist negative-theologies, proclaim the death of Nature (Merchant 1980; McKibben 1989); others offer new interpretations of scripture and doctrine as guides for action (Bratton 1993; Hessel and Ruether 2000; McGrath 2002). Political opponents of environmentalist politics also focus on its religious dimensions, though with the aim of discrediting it as unscientific or, among Christians, as pagan (Rubin 1994; Huber 1999; Bailey 2002).

The German fascination with the American Indian is legion, enduring, and much more than a current, post-modern enchantment with ‘the primitive.’ Indeed, the special and continuing relationship between Germans and Indians is well known, and in recent years it has received considerable scholarly attention. One striking aspect of this relationship is the seemingly endless effort by scholars, museum curators, pedagogues, and dilettantes of all fashions to control the discourse on ‘Indianness’ in Germany by denouncing popular clichés and attempting to replace them with new versions of ‘the authentic Indian.’ Their ongoing efforts to harness concepts of authenticity while policing this discourse are hardly surprising; indeed they have become predictable. But the lack of self-reflection with which most people participate in this process is remarkable. Few laymen or scholars seem to notice that they are the latest participants in a repetitive process that has been going on in German-speaking lands for close to 200 years, and even fewer seem to notice the ironic turn it has recently taken.

My goal in this paper is to revisit a classic text that raises the most contemporary of issues: Marco Polo's stereotyped, highly influential, and highly prejudicial description of the “Old Man of the Mountain,” a text of virtually mythic status and power. Having invoked the category of “myth,” however, in a context where it is not commonly applied, it is useful to indicate how I use this term and why it seems appropriate. To begin, I would reject three widely accepted notions. First, myths are not sacred narratives. Although many myths claim sacred status, in this they misrecognize their own nature, for they are human stories, like any other. They simply make more exaggerated claims to a more elevated kind of authority. Second, myths are not collective narratives or the speech of any group as a whole. Rather, they are stories that are told and retold in countless variants. Often the authorship of these variants is unacknowledged, forgotten, or deliberately hidden, but in its details each variant advances the specific interests of those responsible for its production, revision, and circulation. These anonymous agents and absent authors misrepresent themselves—and those for whom they speak—as the group as a whole. Third, myths are neither false stories, nor true, but simply stories that claim to speak with authority about issues of deep importance. Sometimes these claims succeed and sometimes they fail, and the same story can change its status over time from myth to fable and back again, since such status is a function of reception.

Much history of the West has been dominated by the view that the seeds of modernity began in Greek Antiquity and that the birth of capitalism and the urbanization that created a bourgeoisie lay with the European communes of northern Italy in the Middle Ages. But from the wider perspective of world civilizations, did Europe in fact diverge significantly from the common Eurasiatic cultures of the Bronze Age, delineated by the Marxist Australian prehistorian, Gordon Childe, either in Antiquity or in the Middle Ages? Clearly there was a significant divergence in the nineteenth century, after the Industrial Revolution, and in certain respects after the Renaissance, but does that warrant the teleological search for what Wallerstein (1999) calls “civilizational” as distinct from “conjunctural” factors? I argue that the starting point for historical research into either Asiatic or European “exceptionalism,” as Marx called it, should be the convergences of the urban civilizations of the Bronze Age rather than the divergent paths of the nineteenth century.

The Quincentennial of Columbus's Discovery of the Americas has come and gone. Some people celebrated, others protested. The Discovery has been called either “The greatest event since the creation of the world, save the incarnation and death of Him who created it” (Francisco Lopez de Gomera writing in 1552), or the greatest disaster in world history. Columbus is either a saint (who was actually proposed for canonization), or he is a sinner responsible for genocide. Can one even say that Christopher Columbus discovered America when there were already millions of people living in these lands? Did he discover America when he thought he had found a new route to Asia? The debates are interminable and the issues have become so politicized that an informed and informative discussion has been all but impossible; one steps warily into the fray. Yet, despite the voluminous literature by and about Columbus, Americans outside the rarefied circle of Columbus scholars still know little about the man and his mission. In this paper I discuss some of the little known religious beliefs that underpinned the “Enterprise of the Indies,” for I think they have the potential to change fundamentally our assessment of Columbus and relocate some of the responsibility for the consequences of the encounter.

“Social disciplining” is the name that has been given to attempts by the authorities throughout early modern Europe to regulate people's private lives.1 In explicit contrast to “social control,” the informal mechanisms by which people have always sought to put pressure on one another in traditional societies, “social disciplining” was a set of formal, legislative strategies through which the emerging early modern state sought to “civilize” and “rationalize” its subjects' behavior in order to facilitate well-ordered government and a capitalist modernization of the economy.2 Whether viewed favorably as an essential stage in a beneficent “civilizing process” or more critically as an arbitrary coercion of popular culture in the interests of elites, social disciplining is increasingly regarded as central to most aspects of political, economic, religious, social, and cultural change in Europe between the medieval and the modern periods.3

Radiation is a workplace hazard that eludes the sensing body, or seems to. After Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, Kai Erickson described radiation as “an invisible threat,” “the very embodiment of stealth and treachery.” The first generation of Canadian nuclear power workers, from their four decades of experience around reactors has a different sense of the matter. They describe a physical awareness of the morphology and topography of radiation, a cultivated bodily knowledge that informed their actions as they produced power. They describe a “feel and a touch for the plant,” framed in theoretical studies, made through attentiveness and alert expectation, honed by being out and about in the station, being its intimate, “listening to its very cries.” By their telling, “doesn't feel right” ceased to be a metaphor about their workplace circumstance, and through study and practice, became a bodily effect, a report from the somatic. Key to work safety for Canadian nuclear workers were close study of the theory of ionizing radiation, adeptness with both the instruments which made radiation apparent and the calculations that made the readings on dials into qualitatively and spatially distinctive workplace presences, and skill in choosing, donning, building, and removing physical barriers between their bodies and radiation fields. Through this knowledge and practice, Canadian nuclear workers came to embody the hazards of the job. This working knowledge of the insensible enabled them to be responsible for their own radiation protection and for the safety of those with whom they worked.

During the year, the Museum has received from Dr. Haddon a gift of the first importance in the shape of his collection of several thousands of anthropological photographs, accumulated by him over a very long period and from every part of the world. In honour of Dr. Haddon's eightieth birthday these photographs had been put in order, prints made from the negatives, and the whole collection catalogued, uniformly mounted, and arranged in a cabinet specially made for them … The large number of photographs already in the Museum have now been incorporated in the collection, many hundreds have been added, chiefly by friends of Dr. Haddon, and it is hoped that the collection, which will be called the Haddon Photographic Collection, will steadily increase. It is already one of the most comprehensive in existence.

A tendency in studies of science in colonial Africa is to focus on the “big politics” of resource extraction, environmental control, and the governmentality of subject bodies. As a result, we now recognize that colonial science was a highly political enterprise in which the pursuit of knowledge was infused with the dynamics of starkly exclusionary societies and extractive regimes. Scientific improvements in medicine and agriculture yielded benefits that underwrote colonial projects and the construction of authoritative knowledge in medicine, racial biology, and social science created disciplinary power over Africans as scientifically objectified colonial subjects. It has been observed that the failure of science to heed indigenous knowledge led to a “misreading” of the landscape and inappropriate intervention. Recently, some historians have attempted to mitigate overly stark depictions of colonial science, making good cases that the practice of scientific ecology, agronomy, and medicine in colonial Africa had motivations and effects beyond the service of extraction and governmentality. They have rightly informed us that the assessment of applied sciences in colonial Africa cannot be reduced to their role in European domination. Clearly, these are critical issues that merit attention. Yet the focus on ways science did (or did not) support various colonial agendas may have impeded the development of a more representative understanding of Euro-American scientific pursuits in African colonies.

As Marcel Mauss (1967: 46) famously remarked, western societies draw a “marked distinction… between real and personal law, between things and persons.” Writing at the height of self-conscious early twentieth-century western modernism, Mauss was at pains to point out that it was “only our Western societies that quite recently turned man into an economic animal” (ibid.: 74), and that such a distinction was, historically speaking, a contingent elaboration. Commenting on Mauss' insights, James Carrier (1995: 30), thus, speaks of, “an increasing de-socialization of objects, their growing cultural separation from people and their social relationships” and the development of conceptions of “alienability and impersonality of objects and people in commodity relations” as characteristic of this moment. But Carrier is not entirely happy with the uses made of such insights by students of westerns societies. His intent, rather, is to qualify Mauss' famous distinction between forms of enacting object-relations as social relations shaped by sharply contrasting modes of gift or commodity exchange. Carrier, thus, expends much energy on expounding the extent to which “blocked exchanges” (Walzer 1983) “singularized goods” (Kopytoff 1986), conceptions of “market-inalienability” (Radin 1987) and “inalienable possessions” (Weiner 1992) are not random pre-capitalist survivals fortuitously lingering on within western cultures, but constitutive of forms of sociality indispensable to them. Of course, Carrier is largely concerned with dispelling the economistic fictions of forms of “occidentalist” discourse that systematically project a normative language of market functions and failures onto social practices which regularly produce, rather than merely accidentally throw up, what economists call “externalities” inhibiting optimal market allocations. Nevertheless, it is striking that both Mauss and most of his critics (Carrier being merely an example) take a principal, ontological distinction between people and things for granted. As a result, we are treated to sets of contrasting representations of how cultures (capitalist or other) construe such fundamental realities into different configurations of subjects and objects, so that the mystifications of one social formation or cultural order illuminate those of the other—to ultimately prove a Cartesian point.

On 12 June 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte took control of the islands of Malta. The Knights Hospitaller surrendered with little fight, and the independently recognized polity of the Knights of St. John, the last bastion of the medieval chivalric orders, fell. Founded in the Middle Ages as a military order created both to carry the sword against Islam and provide shelter and medical care for pilgrims to the Holy Land, the Knights had by the end of the eighteenth century become an anachronism. The Ottoman Empire, the last of the great Muslim powers of the Mediterranean, had long been considered little more than a pawn in larger political struggles on the Continent. The practical application of crusading as church policy had long fallen out of favor. As a military force, the Order was no longer of any consequence. The Grand Council that directed the Order consisted for the most part of Maltese or Italian nobles of little formal training in the strategy and tactics of “modern” warfare. Historians of the late eighteenth century had come to the conclusion that the crusades of the Middle Ages were little more than the fanatical hate mongering of an unenlightened time. As Edward Gibbon wrote: “The principle of the crusades was a savage fanaticism; and the most important effects were analogous to the cause…. The belief of the Catholics was corrupted by new legends…. The active spirit of the Latins preyed on the vitals of their reason and religion…. The lives and labours of millions, which were buried in the East, would have been more profitably employed in the improvement of their native country….”

Not long after the arrival of the Mendicant orders in New Spain, a view emerged among the friars that the subjection of the Mexican Indians to Spanish law might not be a goal as practical and desirable as the Crown expected, at least not for the immediate future. Franciscans, in particular, thought that the transfer and application of long-established legal principles to the Mexican Indians, such as the customary distinction of jurisdictions, could ultimately hurt rather than facilitate their full conversion to Christianity. For them, the administration of justice was but a natural extension of the enterprise of evangelization, a point that they made repeatedly in letters and reports throughout the sixteenth century.1 In part, their opposition to seeing the new converts subject to secular law stemmed from a general dissatisfaction with the state of legal affairs in the Peninsula, where an alarming increase in lawsuits and legal costs leading to the further consolidation of a class of letrados appeared to threaten the fabric of social life.

Reflecting on European colonialism in 1950—at a time when discussions about what we now know as the European Union emerged in western Europe—Aimé Césaire wrote, “… Europe is morally, spiritually indefensible.”2 This idea is fairly commonplace in much of the post-colonial world and it has some purchase within certain academic and intellectual circles elsewhere. And yet, in the process of denouncing the widely noted3 presence of racism in Hungary, thirty-six leading Hungarian intellectuals have, in a recent public document, felt compelled to thank France, and through France, a generic, trans-historical notion of “Europe,” for what they saw as the latter's profound, longue-durée goodness.

In the middle of fourteenth century in Western Europe, a turning point occurred in the modern inquiry into the nature of money. While political unification of the states made monetary standardization and centralization key issues (establishing the distinction which still exists today between authentic currency and spurious or quasi-currencies), some of the wisest minds of the period, such as Nicolas Oresme, speculated on the reasons and consequences of the rapid loss in the value of money. The Black Plague, which took lives but not goods, left an accursed legacy: inflation, fed by the excess of wealth in the hands of survivors, dedicated to a ‘sumptuous consumption.’

Once it was thought that kinship was the preeminent subject of anthropology, one about which considerable progress was possible. “Kinship” itself was, for some, fairly unproblematic. Thus Radcliffe-Brown (1952: 46) asserted that, “if any society establishes a system of corporations on the basis of kinship … it must necessarily adopt a system of unilineal reckoning of succession,” and Fortes (1959: 209) announced that, “Kinship, being an irreducible factor in social structure has an axiomatic validity.” However, in the late 1960s and early 1970s one leading figure of anthropology after the other declared that there really was no such thing as kinship. “The process of making kinship into a single theoretical entity seems to me no better than the invention of ‘totemism’” (Terray 1969: 135–36; 1972: 140–41). “There is no such thing as kinship, and it follows that there can be no such thing as kinship theory” (Needham 1971: 5). “‘Kinship,’ like totemism, the matrilineal complex and matriarchy, is a non-subject since it does not exist in any culture known to man” (Schneider 1972: 59). “The whole notion of ‘a kinship system’ as an isolable structure of sentiments, norms, or categorical distinctions is misleading because it assumes, or seems to assume, that the ordering principles of a society are partitionable into natural kinds only adventitiously connected” (Geertz and Geertz 1975: 156). For various political and intellectual reasons, “kinship” appeared to many to have died out as an area of analytic interest within anthropology during the 1970s and 1980s, despite many indications to the contrary. Now Godelier has made a major effort to revive attention to matters usually bunched under the phrase “kinship,” and, at least as concerns French popular taste, seems largely to have succeeded. For him kinship has not died, but instead transformed itself both in fact and “theoretically.”

In the international press Nigeria is represented almost exclusively as a state in crisis. Recurrent military coups, ethnic and religious sectionalism, a civil war, a series of bloody riots and local unrest (of which the Niger delta situation is the best-known example), economic turmoil, and the re-imposition of the Islamic criminal code in many northern states have all been used to paint a picture of chaos and collapse. Journalists and government officials alike tend to find the roots of Nigeria's problems in intractable ethnic conflict, the collapse of oil prices in 1983, structural adjustment mandated by the International Monetary Fund in 1986, and hatred between Muslims and Christians. The trouble with Nigeria is also understood to illustrate the trouble with Africa. With 25 percent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria appears as representative of Africa. Potentially wealthy from its oil revenue, it symbolizes Africa's promise denied.