In Eastern Europe, succeeding generations of intellectuals have been at the forefront of first creating and then demolishing the communist regime. Because communism was ultimately based on ideas (“logocracy,” says C. Milosz), the abandonment of these ideas by intellectuals turned dissidents was a critical factor in the regime's demise. As Daniel Chirot (1991:20) emphasizes, communism died more from ideological exhaustion and “utter moral rot” than from its economic malaise or the pressure of organized opposition movements. The dissident intellectuals, powerless as they seemed to be, delivered the decisive blow when they denounced the regime's underlying ideology as ritualized lies out of touch with reality.

Forests in India are at the center of highly charged conflicts. Use of the past by the different historical subjects engaged in these contests over forest lands in India results in several threads intertwined across a shared frame. I shall try to unravel only one strand in this essay, namely, the official ideologies implicated in colonial forestry and the technologies of power that it spawned. I will show how the colonial state, drawing on several pasts, constructed the question of forests in India.

Caritas has become not just an obsession but indeed emblematic of the profound crisis of the times in which we live. In such times, marked by social and political upheaval and by shortages of all kinds, prophets and quacks arise to heal everything, the coming end of the world gets a precise date, and every day a miracle or two happens. People crushed by hardship and without hope can hardly wait to believe in these things. The Caritas phenomenon is such a miracle.

In the face of the dominating tradition of British structural functionalism, anthropological studies of political leadership represented an important move towards accounting for the dynamics of centralized, as well as acephalous, polities (for example, Barth 1959 and Baily 1970; cf. Schapera 1956). Moreover, in focusing upon political actors and, by extension, political relations, these studies necessarily took account of the role of the subjects. Yet, despite Gluckman's innovative notion of “rituals of rebellion” (1954; cf. Beidelman 1966), the issue of political leadership has rarely focused upon the political dynamics of the ruler-subject relationship, examining the concerns and responses of those who more or less voluntarily subject themselves to an authority figure. Even such an important contribution as Succession to High Office (Goody 1966) completely ignores this issue.

The Thai monarchy, protected by the law of lèse-majesté, appears to be an anachronism in the age of nation-states. Over the past century, the spread of nationalism has leveled most monarchies, reducing kings (or queens) to the status of semiprivate individuals or preserving them as innocuous symbols. Usually considered mere remnants of feudal pasts, the laws protecting monarchies in the twentieth century have received little scholarly attention, even less perhaps in Thailand, where any critical analysis of the monarchy is discouraged by the threat of the lèse-majesté charge.

To begin a revolution is very difficult. To sustain it is even more difficult. To win it is almost impossible. But once you have won, then your troubles really begin.

Stephen Bann states that Utopia “forms the concrete expression of a moment of possibility, which is however annihilated in the very process of being enunciated” (Bann 1993:1, emphasis added). He traces this characteristic to Sir Thomas More, whose neologism Utopia puns on being both the Good Place (eutopia) and No Place (Outopia), and to the modern denial of this No Place, which he labels ”a ritual of double negation” (Bann 1993:1). The present essay focuses on one ethnographic instance of Utopia's annihilation by enunciation. I will demonstrate that, when the enunciation of Utopia requires the implementation of public policy, the process of creating the Good Place is undermined by the mundane demands of practical politics.

With an acidity wholly typical of the Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Samuel Johnson was to observe that “oats,” which “in England is commonly given to horses … in Scotland supports the people.” It has not unnaturally been the assumption of posterity that most eighteenth-century Scotsmen, by then the self-confident inhabitants of a newly civilised and enlightened community, would have been suitably offended by what has since become a notorious imputation of national plainness and pauperism. Yet there are, I want to suggest, substantial grounds for doubting this apparently straightforward conclusion. The meagreness of the early-modern Scottish diet had in fact always been a matter for the most determined moral pride. The elderly Jacobite, Mackintosh of Borlum, for example, had as recently as the 1720s responded to the increasing sophistication of the post-Union table with open disdain: “Formerly I had been served with two or three substantial dishes of beef, mutton, and fowl, garnished with their own wholesome gravy,” the suspicious old laird complained, but “I am now served up little expensive ashets with English pickles, Indian mangoes, and anchovy sauces.” Robert Monro of Opisdale, too, writing nearly a century before, in the 1630s, had described with palpable moral outrage the flagrant indiscipline and consequent military weakness of those Scottish soldiers in the armies of Gustavus Adolphus whose “stomackes could not digest a Gammon of Bacon or cold Beefe without mustard, so farre [they] were out of use.” And in Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (1814), surely the most influential examination of the national culture ever composed, it is also obvious that that patriotic pedant, the Baron of Bradwardine, offering hospitality to his young visitor at Tully-Veolan, the seat of ancient Scottish virtue, finds himself by no means embarrassed at being unable to “rival the luxuries of [his] English table.”

In the century since Franz Boas began his field work on the Northwest Coast, the Kwakwaka'wakw1 potlatch has proved irresistible to the anthropological imagination. It has been variously interpreted as an interest-bearing investment of property (Boas 1897), as a demonstration of a paranoid, megalomaniacal personality (Benedict 1934), as a substitution for warfare (Codere 1950), as a means of distributing food (Piddcocke 1965; Vayda 1961), as a phenomenon of social morphology (Levi-Strauss 1969; Rosman and Rubel 1971), and as a religious event (Goldman 1975; Walens 1981). Indeed, an intellectual history of anthropology can now be written simply by examining how the Kwakwaka'wakw potlatch has served the various theoretical schools (see Michaelson 1979). If anything unites such disparate accounts, however, I suggest it is an underestimation of the impact of European colonization on Kwakwaka'wakw society.2 Our understanding of the nineteenth-century potlatch has been limited by a tendency to exclude Kwakwaka'wakw cosmology from the colonial power dynamic. This study contributes, then, to the longrunning, and at times vociferous, scholarly discourse on the potlatch by focusing directly on the cultural repercussions of the colonial experience. Consequently, it is not an analysis simply of the funding or logistics of exchange: This essay attempts to situate the cosmologies behind the gift in their changing historical context in order to assess the socio-cultural impact of the colonial encounter on native systems of belief.

Many of the blood dyscrasias show more or less distinct inheritability and the familial character offers no new problem. But the racial specificity [of sickle cell anemia] is unique. If found to hold true, this would indicate that the primary basis for the disease must be laid in conditions far removed from any possible accident of the environment…. [W]e must assume that "the disease depends primarily on some fundamental racial peculiarity of the blood forming tissues.

—G. S. Graham (1924)

Like many other states, Israel was forged through the struggle of a national liberation movement that likely drew inspiration from an ethnic past and that certainly worked to establish a political framework. Once the state existed, however, its leaders did not regard the ethnie as an objective category that would in large measure determine whether a nation would emerge. Instead, they viewed the ethnie as a subject susceptible, in varying degrees, to manipulation, invention, domination, and mobilization. As the prime minister of Piedmont said, “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians”; or as Israel's first prime minister, Ben-Gurion, put it in April 1951 during the election campaign: “I see in these elections the shaping of a nation for the state because there is a state but not a nation.”

The nature of medieval Hindu-Muslim relations is an issue of great relevance in contemporary India. Prior to the 200 years of colonial subjection to the British that ended in 1947, large portions of the Indian subcontinent were under Muslim political control. An upsurge of Hindu nationalism over the past decade has led to demands that the state rectify past wrongs on behalf of India's majority religion.' In the nationalist view, Hindu beliefs were continually suppressed and its institutions repeatedly violated during the many centuries of Muslim rule from 1200 C.E. onward. The focal point of nationalist sentiment is the most visible symbol of Hinduism, its temples. As many as 60,000 Hindu temples are said to have been torn down by Muslim rulers, and mosques built on 3,000 of those temples' foundations. The most famous of these alleged former temple sites is at Ayodhya in North India, long considered the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. The movement to liberate this sacred spot, supposedly defiled in the sixteenth century when the Babri Masjid mosque was erected on the ruins of a Rama temple, was one of the hottest political issues of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Tensions reached a peak in December 1992, when Hindu militants succeeded in demolishing the mosque.

The term totalitarian has often been used by scholars to characterize the Soviet Union's system of government, and in many studies the emphasis has fallen on assessing the degree of effectiveness of the ruling apparatus in exercising its total control over society. Whatever the actual condition of public life in the Soviet Union (USSR), a desire to use the totalitarian system undeniably existed; and regardless of the degree to which people were able to retain an autonomous private sphere, their lives were shaped by this urge to total control. The best examples of this come not from the realm of high politics but of mundane personal practices such as the pursuit of hobbies. During the period from 1921 to 1939, the Soviet government redefined the hobby of stamp collecting, socially reconstructing it in terms of the regime's values. In the process, the Soviet regime demonstrated its totalitarian goal in ways that had ramifications in everyday life, as can be seen in the state's relations with the philatelists and in the realm of hobbies. The fact that the government strictly controlled and circumscribed something as seemingly innocuous and insignificant as stamp collecting reveals how strongly the state aspired to have total control of society. More important, this urge sprang not from the top of the Soviet apparatus but, rather, from mid-level officials.

Duncan Salkeld's study of madness in the age of Shakespeare is conceived of as being against the grain of both traditional literary criticism and historiography. Noting that the critical contemplation of the inner life of Shakespearean character has been central (as far back as Coleridge) to previous approaches to the study of madness in Shakespeare, Salkeld argues instead that the “inner worlds of the mind of Shakespearean characterization are largely represented by external appearance, in language describing corporeal states.” Thus, the towering constructs of personality in Lear and Hamlet, for example, are turned inside out when critical attention is focused on the “materiality” of madness and its forms. This privileging of “external appearance” and “corporeality” over the imagined inner life of character is licensed by Salkeld's thesis that personal crises in the dramatic lives of Shakespeare's tragic heroes and heroines must invariably be read qua political crisis. The author writes that any “discussion of the internal life of a character then becomes a second order issue, and considerably more problematic when the historical specificity of these conditions is addressed” (p. 2).

In one chapter of Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson draws attention to an obvious, yet seldom remarked, contrast between the anticolonial nationalist movements in the prewar Dutch East Indies and French Indochina. This contrast concerns not class, ideology, or politics but ethnicity and geography. In the Dutch colony, the Indonesian nationalist movement sought to unite all of the scattered islands and diverse ethnic groups into a single Indonesian nation based upon the ambiguous principle of unity in diversity. In Indochina, by contrast, existing ethnogeographic divisions were not abridged by the common reaction against French colonialism; and the colony ultimately disintegrated into the separate nations of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The Indonesian and Indochinese responses to colonialism represent examples of what I will call integrative and exclusive nationalism, respectively.

Since 1978, the Chinese economic reforms that Deng Xiaoping initiated have given more room to market forces, legalized private entrepreneurship, and decentralized considerable decision-making power into the hands of the directors of state-owned enterprises through responsibility or contract systems. These reforms have produced some spectacular successes. Currently, the Chinese are richer, better informed, and have more personal freedom than at any other time since the Communist victory in 1949. Yet, despite these results, there seems to be no clear-cut plan of reform. At the national level, the policies of reform are the object of constant debate and infighting between shifting coalitions of Party and state leaders. As a result, the reforms are often inconsistent and display a continually changing pattern of radicalization and retrenchment through an array of policy initiatives, experiments, and new legislation.

More often than not, women bear the burden of displaying the identifying symbols of their ethnic identity to the outside world, whether these be items of dress, aspects of language, or distinctive behavior. Men of the same ethnic group, especially when filling lower-order positions in the local division of labor, usually appear indistinguishable from men of a different ethnicity but in similar class positions. Thus in Guatemala, for example, one readily identifies a Maya Indian woman by her distinctive and colorful dress, her tendency to speak only the local dialect of a Maya language, and her modest demeanor when in public settings, especially those involving non-Maya. Most Maya men, in contrast, are not so easily distinguished from non-Maya (that is, Ladino) men of equivalent class in Guatemala.