Anthropology, the relativizing countercurrent to Enlightenment notions of civilization and progress, has long challenged notions of backwardness. By contrast, Marxist-Leninist regimes had no doubts about the world-historical backwardness of the largely agrarian societies in which they came to power, which they sought to transform through rapid industrialization. According to some indicators, this socialist civilizing mission was rather successful. Yet memories are mixed, and complicated by the reappearance of typical features of backwardness in the postsocialist era. This article explores changing political economies and the spatiotemporal imaginaries of elites and villagers in Hungary. Historical and theoretical insight is drawn from Ferenc Erdei (1910–1971), a left-leaning populist whose analysis of rural Hungary has more general relevance. Case materials are presented from a region of the Great Plain that in the longue durée exemplifies the “development of underdevelopment” on the margins of Western capitalism. Civilizational transformations were instigated from the east in the socialist decades, but their vehicle was a collectivist ideology that remained alien. The politics and economics of time now render villagers susceptible to populist imaginaries entirely different from those of Erdei.

The politics of meritocracy at the Indian Institutes of Technology illuminates the social life of caste in contemporary India. I argue that the IIT graduate's status depends on the transformation of privilege into merit, or the conversion of caste capital into modern capital. Analysis of this process calls for a relational approach to merit. My ethnographic research on the southeastern state of Tamilnadu, and on IIT Madras located in the state capital of Chennai, illuminates claims to merit, not simply as the transformation of capital but also as responses to subaltern assertion. Analyzing meritocracy in relation to subaltern politics allows us to see the contextual specificity of such claims: at one moment, they are articulated through the disavowal of caste, at another, through caste affiliation. This marking and unmarking of caste suggests a rethinking of meritocracy, typically assumed to be a modernist ideal that disclaims social embeddedness and disdains the particularisms of caste and race. I show instead that claims to collective belonging and to merit are eminently commensurable, and become more so when subaltern assertion forces privilege into the foreground. Rather than the progressive erasure of ascribed identities in favor of putatively universal ones, we are witnessing the re-articulation of caste as an explicit basis for merit and the generation of newly consolidated forms of upper-casteness.

This article challenges the tendency, both academic and popular, to assign empathy the status of a virtue. The widespread inclination to associate empathy with the morally and socially “good”—with compassion, understanding, cultural bonding, and non-violent sociality—ignores what we propose to call the “dark side of empathy”: that is, the multiple ways in which empathy is routinely deployed to manipulate, seduce, deceive, and dehumanize others by means of vicariousness. Two diverse ethnographic cases, of hunting in Siberia and political violence in Indonesia, provide the empirical background for a discussion of the complex relationship of empathy to mimesis, deception, violence, and sociality.

South Carolina was a staggeringly weak polity from its founding in 1670 until the 1730s. Nevertheless, in that time, and while facing significant opposition from powerful indigenous neighbors, the colony constructed a robust plantation system that boasted the highest slave-to-freeman ratio in mainland North America. Taking this fact as a point of departure, I examine the early management of unfree labor in South Carolina as an exemplary moment of settler-colonial state formation. Departing from the treatment of state formation as a process of centralizing “legitimate violence,” I investigate how the colonial state, and in particular the Commons House of Assembly, asserted an exclusive claim to authority by monopolizing the question of legitimacy itself. In managing unfree laborers, the colonial state extended its authority over supposedly private relations between master and slave and increasingly recast slavery in racial terms. This recasting of racial slavery rested, I argue, on a distinction, pervasive throughout English North America, which divided the world into spheres of savagery and civility. Beneath the racial reordering of colonial life, the institution of slavery was rooted in the same ideological distinction by which the colonial state's claims to authority were justified, with the putative “savagery” of the slave or of the Indian being counterpoised to the supposed civility of English settlers. This article contributes to the literatures on Atlantic slavery and American colonial history, and invites comparison with accounts of state formation and settler colonialism beyond Anglo-America.

This article explores the interface of multiple legal systems in early modern Daghestan. By comparing colonial engagements with legal plurality with indigenous genres of Daghestani legal discourse, I aim to shed light on the plurality of legal systems that preceded as well as informed legal discourse under colonialism. The Daghestani turn to ijtihād (independent legal reasoning) in the early modern period parallels the turn away from cādāt (indigenous law) that shaped modern Islamic as well as colonial legal regimes, albeit with radically distinctive genealogies. In tracing these internal debates, I offer a preliminary genealogy of Daghestani ijtihād that is grounded in the robust debates concerning the sources of Islamic authority that originated in Yemen and were transmitted to Daghestan by traveling scholars. This essay is a contribution to the study of legal norms on colonial borderlands, as well as to the study of Islamic modernity before colonialism.

Foucauldian analyses and studies in the sociology of knowledge have provided vibrant accounts of the effects and lives of knowledge practices, yet they have been less attuned to their unexpected consequences upon reception in disparate settings. This article examines the employment of survey methodology as a means to enact modernization theory in non-Western areas during the early phases of the Cold War. An examination of the original questionnaires employed in sociologist Daniel Lerner's seminal text, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, reveals an alignment between the ideal subject of modernization theory and the expectations placed upon the respondent. These expectations included familiarity with the conditions of the survey setting, impersonal relationships, the promise of anonymity, and the capacity for having and voicing opinions regarding otherwise improbable situations. Lerner's work and the studies it spawned did not merely measure and describe the attitudes of peasants, students, and administrators; they were intended to be performative: the interviews were designed to occasion the forms of subjectivity and interpersonal relations articulated and idealized by modernization theory. However, the researchers’ interest in the very activity of survey-taking as a modernizing edifice was undercut by skeptical respondents, disorderly interviewer behavior, and the relentless remaking of coding procedures. In this reading, the questionnaires and their specific stipulations surface as artifacts of knowledge practices that nonetheless overflow the intentions of their coders, sponsors, and creators.

Why do some states fail to establish the capacity of legal regulation among significant sections of their population, and instead allow alternative norms of social order to take the place of those promoted by the state? Existing models of state building in the sociological literature treat the building of modern bureaucratic authority as a political process in which weak state authority results from a state's inability to defeat rival bases of power. On the other hand, neo-institutionalist theory highlights the significant effects that institutional environments have on organization building, but its elaborations of state building have mainly emphasized processes of the diffusion of world society models as central to the making of the modern nation-state. Both models fail to explain how limitations in new states' capacities to govern populations emerge in cases when states fulfill conditions specified by each model. I use the case of state building in the Albanian highlands to show that jurisdictional struggles and resistance that emerge out of distinct cultures of legality are key to understanding why organizationally capable states may fail to establish durable mechanisms of governance among marginal social groups.

This paper challenges the broad consensus in current historiography that holds the Indian stereotype of criminal tribe to be a myth of colonial making. Drawing on a selection of precolonial descriptions of robber castes—ancient legal texts and folktales; Jain, Buddhist and Brahmanic narratives; Mughal sources; and Early Modern European travel accounts—I show that the idea of castes of congenital robbers was not a British import, but instead a label of much older vintage on the subcontinent. Enjoying pride of place in the postcolonial critics' pageant of “colonial stereotypes,” the case of criminal tribes is representative and it bears on broader questions about colonial knowledge and its relation to power. The study contributes to the literature that challenges the still widespread tendency to view colonial social categories, and indeed the bulk of colonial knowledge, as the imaginative residue of imperial politics. I argue that while colonial uses of the idea of a criminal tribe comprises a lurid history of violence against communities branded as born criminals in British law, the stereotype itself has indigenous roots. The case is representative and it bears on larger problems of method and analysis in “post-Orientalist” historiography.

Sai Baba of Shirdi, who died in 1918, was raised as a Muslim but is today revered as a Hindu saint. One of his most important perceived qualities was his ability to provide miraculous cures for his devotees, and this has continued after his death. I argue here that the emphasis in the Hindu tradition on saintly figures healing the sick is a relatively modern phenomenon. Earlier, though such figures were renowned for their miracles, healing played a very minor part in this. Their miracles were generally designed to worst religious rivals and to enable them to speak truth to power. In the modern era, however, such saintly figures can gain a reputation through healing in a way that is presented as beyond the comprehension of modern medical science. Such people are seen to provide living evidence of the superiority of Indian civilization and its religious beliefs. This move became entangled with nationalist sentiments, so that getting the better of the “English” doctor became a means to reveal the limited scope of Western science and culture. Although this appears to suggest that many Indians have rejected the biopolitics associated with Western modernity (as defined by Foucault), I argue that certain elements of such biopolitics are central to this process, and illustrate this through a study of Sai Baba, a village holy man taken up by the Indian middle classes and made into a pan-Indian figure, with a now global presence.

The provisioning of potable water was a microcosm of the Ottoman state's incomplete projects of technopolitical modernization on the Arab frontier. Water questions sat at the intersection between international pressures surrounding cholera, drought, Wahhabi and Bedouin disorder, and the inability of the state to impose its will on the semi-autonomous Amirate of Mecca. To be sure, Ottoman public health reforms and increased attention to water infrastructure were partly a product of the intense international attention generated by the hajj's role in the globalization of cholera. However, like other projects with more overt military and strategic implications, most notably the Hijaz telegraph and railway, the Ottoman state also saw an opportunity to harness the increasing medicalization of the hajj to serve a broader set of efforts to consolidate the empire's most vulnerable frontier provinces. Through the lens of the technopolitical frontier this essay seeks to tell a larger story about the evolution of state building and development in Arabia, one that would otherwise be obscured without reference to both its late Ottoman and Saudi histories. By viewing the evolution of hydraulic management in the Hijaz as a continuous process unfolding across the long nineteenth century, we gain a new perspective on the role that Ottoman technopolitics played in shaping the Saudi state that eventually succeeded it. We find that the quest for water security in the Hijaz, particularly in Jidda, played a critical role in setting the stage for the discovery of the Saudi Arabia's massive petroleum reserves.

This article explores the mimesis of indigenous “customs and law” as a theory of and strategy for colonial government in the period of late imperialism. I draw on the case of colonial administration in the Portuguese colony of Timor during the second-half of the nineteenth century. I introduce the concept of “mimetic governmentality”: the art of governing the Other through the productive inclusion of institutions, symbols, cultural materials, or social forms understood as other than one's own. In Timor, the imperial establishment was characterized by fragility and isolation, and a pragmatic style of colonial action thrived. In Europe, modern doctrines of colonial law rejected assimilationist policies and advocated “specialization.” In this context, between 1860 and 1910, administrators on Timor devised a system of colonial justice that required the colonizers to slip into the indigenous world and govern others from the others' position and perspectives. To efficiently govern the “natives” and apply colonial justice in courts—the so-called justiças—Europeans had to release themselves from European principles and embrace indigenous law, as they understood it. The essay uses the case of Timor to assert the analytic importance and potential of mimesis for the comparative study of colonial administrations during the period of imperial expansion.

This paper explores the development of the Wang Jingwei personality cult during the Japanese occupation of China (1937–1945). It examines how the collaborationist Chinese state led by Wang sought to distinguish its figurehead from the person he had replaced, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. Drawing on visual, archival, and published sources, it traces the development of the Wang cult from the early years of the war, and argues that the unusual context in which the cult evolved ultimately undermined its coherence. The case of Wang Jingwei illustrates how the Chinese case more broadly can enhance our understandings of personality cults that develop under occupation. To this end, I compare the Wang regime with various European “collaborationist” governments that sought to promote their leaders in similar ways.

In the mid-twentieth century, renewed colonization of the Llanos region of Colombia brought escalated violence to the closely related Guahibo and Cuiva peoples. This violence was made public by two dramatic episodes that became international scandals: a December 1967 massacre of sixteen Cuivas at La Rubiera Ranch, and a 1970 military crackdown on an uprising by members of a Guahibo agricultural cooperative in Planas. The scandals exposed both particular human rights abuses and the regional tradition of literally hunting indigenous people, and provoked widespread outrage. While contemporaries treated these events as aberrations, they can best be explained as the consequence of policies that organize and manage frontiers. Both events took place in a region undergoing rapid settlement by migrants, affected by cattle and oil interests, missionaries, the Colombian military, and U.S. counterinsurgency trainers. This paper draws on archival research to trace the events involved and explains their relation to globally circulating policies, practices, and ideas of frontier making. It illustrates how Colombians eager to expand their frontier in the Llanos emulated and adapted ideas of human inequality, moral geographies that make violence acceptable in frontier areas, economic policies that dispossess native peoples, and strategies of counterinsurgency warfare from distant sources. Ironically, their quest for modernity through frontier expansion licensed new deployments of “archaic” violence. The Llanos frontier was thus enmeshed in an interchange of frontier-making techniques that crisscrosses the world, but particularly unites Latin America and the United States.

Freedom of conscience is widely claimed as a central principle of liberal democracy, but what is conscience and how do we know what it looks like? Rather than treat conscience as a transcendent category, this paper examines claims of conscience as rooted in distinct cultural and political histories. I focus on debates about conscientious objection in Second World War Britain, and argue that, there, persuasive claims of conscience were widely associated with a form of “detached conviction.” Yet evidence of such “detached convictions” always verged on being interpreted as deliberate manipulation and calculation. More broadly, I argue that the protection of freedom of conscience is necessarily incomplete and unstable. The difficulties in recognizing individual conscience point to anxieties within liberal democracy. Not only strangers are suspect and mistrusted, but also those who claim to stand most strongly by the principles of liberal citizenship.

This article describes emergent Chinese regimes of knowledge about “minority nationality medicines.” We adopt Weberian terms of rational and charismatic authority to better understand ethnic healing as it is developing among minorities in southwestern China. In the course of uneven development among diverse ethnic groups over recent decades, modern information regimes and institutional models have started to transform the many forms of healing and heritage that can be found “on the ground” in minority areas. We delineate a shifting border between official (or rational) and wild (or charismatic) forms of medicine, and argue that every healing situation results from a dynamic and sometimes destructive relation between these forms of authority. We draw from research conducted among seven minority nationalities scattered in five provinces in China's south and southwest. After an overview of relevant scholarly work that circulates nationally, we discuss views and practices of three healers belonging to Zhuang, Tujia, and Yao groups, respectively. Ultimately we suggest that all healing, including that taking place in biomedical clinics, relies on some contact with “the wild,” and forges a relationship between rationality and charisma.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the history of the Palestine mandate and its power relations were not determined solely by a series of legal measures, beginning with the 1917 Balfour Declaration and ending with the UNGA partition resolution of 1947. Rather, the emergence of modern Palestine was a process significantly guided by global technocapitalism. Palestine was constituted on the basis of a successful Zionist pitch for the area as an economically viable territory—as an area of production and consumption and crucially also as an entity locatable in the global circulation of capital and commodities. A central vehicle for this technocapitalist vision in Palestine—proposed by the Zionists, and enthusiastically adopted by the British—was a hydroelectrical megasystem in the Jordan Valley. Significant portions of the mandate's borders were mapped onto the station's technical blueprint, and conceiving of and building the powerhouse created not just borders, but also “Palestine,” a bounded entity with a distinct political and economic character. While the electrification, like Zionism in general, was justified in a language of egalitarian universalism, the power system and the “free-market” capitalist system it helped create in Palestine generated familiar kinds of political and economic inequality. Specifically, it conjured a political-economic order based on a Jewish national scale in which the Arabs were expected to supply the menial labor power in return for the economic development that was to lift all boats.