The protagonist of Intizar Hussain's novel Tazkira (1987) is a hapless muhajir, or refugee, in Lahore, Pakistan in the period shortly after the 1947 Partition of India, which witnessed the pell-mell transfer of Hindus and Sikhs to India and Muslims to Pakistan. He writes that while others were busy seizing abandoned sites in which to live, he was unable to feel at home anywhere. To compound his sense of dislocation, bu amma, his elderly companion, complains bitterly that she misses the sound of the azan, the call to prayer, in the first house they rent in an outlying area of Lahore, as yet forested and relatively un-peopled. Bu amma recollects how the call used to punctuate her days in her haveli, or mansion, in a busy neighborhood back in India. Without it, her days stretch out ahead of her, running uneventfully one into the other. How is it possible, she wonders, that one could be in this place created for Muslims and not hear the azan? In their next house, bu amma quickly realizes what it means to live in the shadow of a mosque. It was once a barkat (blessing), she grumbles, that has been turned into a curse by that satanic instrument (shaitani ala), the loudspeaker. The protagonist describes bu amma's efforts to shut out the sounds from the mosque that now invade her thoughts, shred her concentration, and make her efforts to say her prayers a daily battle. They eventually have to leave this house as well.

Three years after the global financial crisis started academic and popular publications assessing its origins, consequences and wider implications are starting to emerge. The origins of the crisis are generally explained as stemming from the rapid increase in subprime mortgage lending in the United States and the credit default swaps banks and other financial institutions traded amongst themselves based on these loans. As homeowners found it increasingly difficult to make their repayments and housing prices in the United States started to drop, a downward spiral ensued. In this cycle ever-growing numbers of homeowners defaulted on their mortgages, unable to meet interest payments or to re-mortgage, and banks foreclosed on the houses even as their own assets and investments were exposed to the losses stemming from defaulted mortgages. With the foreclosures devaluing house prices further and the exposure of banks making them less willing and able to refinance mortgages, the situation quickly spiraled downwards. The complex global trade in credit default swaps and other derivatives meant that the problems were amplified and spread beyond the United States until ultimately many national governments decided to intervene with financial assistance mainly aimed at the financial institutions.

In September 2003, dozens of Guaraní families from the town of Hipólito Yrigoyen in northwest Argentina decided to take back La Loma, the forested hill that stands at the edge of town and from where they had been expelled decades earlier by the San Martín del Tabacal sugar plantation. On the verge of a cliff from where they could see the town and behind it the sugarcane fields, men, women, and children began clearing a space near their old cemetery in order to plant and begin building homes. In their makeshift camp, people raised an Argentinean flag and erected signs that read “Our Land” and “Argentinean Land.” The participants in the takeover whom I talked to a few months later remembered that their return to La Loma generated an enormous collective enthusiasm and the hope of living “like before,” working the land, raising animals, and free from the urban poverty and overcrowding of Hipólito Yrigoyen. However, six days later, when over a hundred people had gathered in the dark around a bonfire, police officers stormed the place shouting, “Move out!” Some officers accused them of being “undocumented Bolivians”; others asked where the Argentinean flag was, offended the flag was there. Twenty men and two women were arrested, handcuffed, and forced to walk single file down the hill, in an atmosphere of screams and scuffles that included shots in the air and the beating of a young man. A person from the community recalled what the plantation spokesperson subsequently said about their claim, based on the fact that many of their ancestors were plantation workers who came from Bolivia: “What do these immigrants think they're asking for? They should go ask for land in Bolivia.”

Between 1873 and 1917, the numbers of Barbadian women committed to penal custody on an annual basis surpassed those of men. While women's per capita imprisonment rate was still somewhat below that of men for most of these years, given the wide margins by which women outnumbered men in the population and the labor force, these proportions were nevertheless unprecedented, not only in the British Caribbean but also in other parts of the world. Available figures for Jamaica and Trinidad over sections of the period hover around an 18–20 percent female proportion rate, while in Barbados the rate usually exceeded 50 percent.

There are approximately six million Muslims in the United States. They come from a great variety of backgrounds. Among the few things they have in common are Islam as a religion and their American experience. The latter produces some previously unencountered consequences, including the rise of English as the language of Muslim ummah (community) and the reality of being a “minority” in a non-Muslim society. The American experience also raises questions of citizenship, identity, and integration.

This essay compares two communities of common origin that now dwell in separate rural lowland South American settings, one in the Bolivian Chaco and the other in the Paraguayan Chaco (maps 1 and 2). South America's Gran Chaco is sparsely populated, averaging one person per three square kilometers (Censo Nacional Indígena [Paraguay], 2002). Nevertheless, the present essay takes as its analytic-theoretical point of departure a phrase invoked by Michael Warner in his 1999 book on queer publics in New York City: “Urban space is always a host space” (1999: 190).

In 1997, an “attempted rebellion” erupted in the Professor Barreto Campelo Penitentiary on Itamaracá Island, Pernambuco. A journalist reported that the suspension of conjugal visits sparked a brawl in which three inmates were stabbed before guards restored order. The warden clarified that conjugal visits had been suspended after fights broke out between rival cellblocks when someone pilfered objects visitors had brought to prisoners. A woman who desired anonymity informed, “The convicts notified us in the afternoon by way of notes that they would fight again that night. I think that the lack of contact with their female companions leaves all of the men agitated.” The warden brokered a truce with the inmates' leaders in part by promising that conjugal visits would resume the next week. The reporter concluded, almost as an afterthought, that inmates renewed protests about the overcrowding of eleven hundred inmates into a jail designed for four hundred.

South Africa's liberation, marked by the first democratic elections of 1994, ushered in an unprecedented expansion of large-scale redistributive arrangements. In the post-apartheid period, the collection of money into a central fund administered anonymously and bureaucratically has gained social and political importance, particularly for poor and lower-middle-class Africans. This is most evident in a rapid expansion of government social assistance—from 1997 to 2006 the number of beneficiaries of social grants increased from three to almost eleven million, and today at least a quarter of South African households receive welfare payments. Social assistance “has been the fastest-growing category of government expenditure since 2001, and now amounts to R70 billion [almost US$7 billion in 2006] a year, about 3.4 percent of gross domestic product.” The centrality of redistribution is clear in current debates over the establishment of a Basic Income Grant (BIG) for all South Africans. Political liberation has also brought an increase in redistribution through development projects such as the National Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) grants.

In the mines of Guanajuato, Mexico, when miners drill and dynamite for metallic ore, they dislodge other substances. Among these are elements and compounds known as “minerals,” sold and collected in their own right as scientific specimens or aesthetic collectibles. These minerals often fetch thousands of dollars at mineral shows and collector showrooms in Tucson, Arizona and other mineral collecting hubs. In this process, minerals move from byproducts and even waste to highly valued commodities in their own right.

In September 2002, Buddhist lamas of the Ivolginsk monastery in the post-Soviet Republic of Buryatia in southern Siberia accompanied by independent forensic experts performed an exhumation of the body of Dashi-Dorzho Itigelov, the last head lama from the time of the Russian empire, who died in 1927. The body of the lama, found in the lotus position, allegedly had not deteriorated, and soon rumors spread that the lama was alive and had returned to Buryatia, as he had promised he would. According to the stories told by senior monks, before his death Itigelov asked to have his body exhumed thirty years after. He was first exhumed in 1955 (a little short of thirty years) by his relatives and lamas, in secret for fear of being discovered by the Soviet authorities. As expected, the body was intact, so they reburied him. It was only after the final exhumation in 2002 that the lamas installed the body in a glass case in the Ivolginsk monastery, which very soon became an international and domestic sensation, with articles appearing in The New York Times, and Russian politicians and oligarchs rubbing shoulders with droves of pilgrims and tourists to catch a glimpse of the lama.

Not all spirits have retreated to metaphor, even in the very public sphere of U.S. electoral politics. As we learned during the last presidential campaign, Governor Sarah Palin enlisted the help of Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee during his 2005 visit to Alaska to cast out the spirits that hindered her career. The New York Times elaborated, “Ms. Palin has long associations with religious leaders who practice a … brand of Pentecostalism known as ‘spiritual warfare.’ Its adherents believe that demonic forces can colonize specific geographic areas and individuals.… Critics say the goal of the spiritual warfare movement is to create a theocracy” (Goodstein 2008, my emphasis).

Shrines fill the Eurasian land mass. They can be found from Turkey in the west to China in the east, from the Arctic Circle in the north to Afghanistan in the south. Between town and country, they can consist of full-scale architectural complexes, or they may compose no more than an open field, a pile of stones, a tree, or a small mausoleum. They have been at the centers and peripheries of almost every major religious tradition of the region: Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. Yet in the formerly socialist world, these places of pilgrimage have something even more in common: they were often cast as the last bastions of religious observance when churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues were sent crashing to the ground in rapid succession across the twentieth century.

History often reveals itself at the margins. Hegemony becomes tangible at its peripheries, claims to legitimacy are most emphatically articulated where challenged, and rules are best observed in their breach. For this reason, historians have long been drawn to the study of border zones where sovereignty was contested or subverted rather than tacitly accepted. This work by historians is complemented by, although rarely integrated with, research in other disciplines—most notably in anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science. Social scientists have been particularly interested in the question of economic organization, of how individuals and groups structure commercial exchanges in conditions of insecure property rights and unreliable recourse to official contract enforcement. Such research is frequently motivated by public policy concerns, especially the complex issue of institution-building in transition economies and so-called crisis states. While generally more circumspect about the prescriptive powers of their discipline, historians will nonetheless recognize that the defining characteristics of a contemporary crisis state—limited authority of a central government, weak institutions, ineffectual bureaucracies, widespread corruption—also apply to most, if not all pre-modern polities. Therefore, the study of actors on the fringes of political and legal regimes holds the potential to produce important theoretical insights into the construction of alternative, private-order institutions that are of significance beyond a particular period, region, or methodology.

In April of 2004, only a few months into my fieldwork, I was struck by the level and variety of doubt expressed by the physicians at the Midwest Sleep Disorder Center (MSDC). The MSDC is a group of physicians recognized in the field as experts in many areas of sleep medicine, especially parasomnias—such as sleepwalking, sleep-related eating, and REM behavior disorder. Dr. Richards, the clinic's senior researcher and a neurologist by training, began the weekly departmental rounds. Generally, these consisted of case studies presented by the assembled clinicians and fellows, but at times rounds wandered into more philosophical discussions or ribald joking. On this day, Dr. Richards asked Dr. Pym if he had seen any patients of note. Pym was trained as a pediatrician, and his patients, at both the MSDC and the neighboring Children's Hospital, were mostly adolescents and young children. Pym had been in Nicaragua for the previous three weeks as part of a volunteer program to provide medical aid to the rural poor, and so had no cases, but he took the opportunity to make some observations on sleep disorders in Central America. He remarked that most of the places he had been to had about eleven hours of night and thirteen of daylight, and with only intermittent electrical lighting in the evening, most people went to bed at nightfall and arose with the sun. As a result, he postulated, most of the sleep disorders that physicians dealt with in the United States were not found there. He went on to blame electric lighting for many of the sleep problems in the United States—including insomnia and advanced and delayed sleep phase disorders—since it negatively affected biological impulses to sleep. Pym claimed that sleep disorders were “rare” in Nicaragua. He said most children there slept with their parents, who attended to their sleep problems as they happened, and so they did not develop into more acute pathological forms. This led into a broader conversation about light and its effects on human sleep patterns, in which some of the discussion revolved around sleeplessness in intensive care units; apparently, Richards reported, many people never entered REM sleep while in the units due to lighting disruptions, which, he said, might account for “ICU psychosis,” as people hallucinated due to sleepiness. At this point, Dr. Blake, a young pediatrician, remarked in relation to the newness of sleep medicine, “We're all flying by the seats of our pants,” to which Richards said, “We don't know anything.”

It is noteworthy—and at the same time a bit disappointing in a what-took-so-long sort of way—that a recent innovation in the study of human rights should involve a focus on the lives of the people directly affected by them. To explain this delay of the obvious would probably call for a review of the persistent influence of Kantian transcendentalism, the quasi-utopian search for ideal justice, and the inherently abstract nature of law in its quest for impartiality. A similar effort could be applied toward fully understanding the changed circumstances that encouraged the shift toward practical realism. It would have to take into account the surprisingly late elaboration and popularization of human rights instruments, the proliferation of transnational NGOs that act on new opportunities to exercise moral and political influence, and the growing reach of new technologies of information and communication (necessary tools for the emergence of transnational NGOs). All of these developments have raised the prominence of legal issues and strategies among those once considered isolated and, in varying degrees, uncivilized. But whatever the dominant trends might once have been, and whatever new, enabling circumstances have recently emerged, there can be little doubt that over the last several decades a shift has taken place in the study of human rights toward practical or applied realism, with a focus on ordinary actors.

In recent years, discussion of technology in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century colonial world has moved away from earlier insistence on the centrality of imperial agency and the instrumentality of empire's technological “tools” of conquest and exploitation. There has been a broad shift from diffusionist preoccupations with a one-way traffic in “technology transfers” that privileged Euro-American innovation and entrepreneurship, to consideration of the “social life of things” within the colony. This has corresponded with a move away from understanding technology through European representations of machines as the measure of the imperial self and colonized other, to rethinking technology's role in reconfiguring social hierarchies and cultural practices in colonized or semi-colonized non-Western societies. Without ignoring empire's importance in facilitating change or restricting the socio-economic parameters within which innovative technologies might operate, there has been a growing tendency to identify colonialism as a conduit for technological modernity rather than its primary embodiment. The colony is understood as a locally constituted, rather than merely imperially derivative, site for engagement with techno-modernity and its discontents. Scholars now commonly eschew emphasis on the implanting of “big technologies” such as railroads, telegraphs, steamships, modern weaponry, major irrigation works, and electrification systems (capital-intensive, often state-managed technologies that figured proudly in the rhetoric of imperial achievement), in favor of the ways in which these were understood, assimilated, and utilized by local agency. There has also been growing interest in small-scale, “everyday technologies,” from the sewing machine, wristwatch, and radio, to the typewriter, camera, and bicycle. Colonial regimes were unable to monopolize or disinclined to control these, and they passed with relative ease into the work-regimes, recreational activities, social life, and cultural aspirations of colonized and postcolonial populations.