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.”

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).

“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

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.

The study of popular memory is necessarily relational. It involves the exploration of two sets of relations: (1) that between dominant memory and oppositional forms across the public field, including academic productions; and (2) the relation between public discourse and a more privatized sense of the past generated within lived culture.2 This paper is concerned with the second of these two constitutive relations in the study of popular memory—the often vexed but close linkages between public constructions and private reminiscences.

Western scholars have long identified the existence of writing systems as a near-universal characteristic of high civilization, with Tawantinsuyu, the Inka empire, representing the only significant exception.1 Although writing was absent in the pre-Hispanic Andes, there existed the means of recording administrative information and preserving narratives of the past. Inka imperial overseers and specialized record-keepers produced tribute levies, population counts, and assessments of provincial development potential, using a system of knotted cords (a khipu) as their principal device.2 Such records fulfilled bureaucratic and administrative functions that were satisfied in other societies by writing; however, the maintenance of narratives of the Inka past contrasts with these practices in its hybrid use of oral tradition in consultation with similar record keeping devices.

Through a comparative discussion of public rituals of national commemoration in India and Turkey, this essay examines the relationship between the formation of the public sphere, the production of national identity, and the establishment of state sovereignty. The central organizing principle is the notion of the “creation of the public” as a historically specific political and cultural project. This departs from the evolutionary understanding of the public sphere as a derivative byproduct or “unintended, rolling effect”1 of social, economic, and political “structural transformations” that took place in the course of the longue durée of European history.2 By theorizing the formation and reproduction of the Indian and Turkish public spheres as deliberate projects or strategies of nationalization and étatization,3 I draw attention to several significant aspects of political modernity that have been obscured in prevailing theories of public sphere formation and transformation.

A string of important articles over the years has established Joel Robbins at the forefront of the anthropological study of Christianity. Although his long awaited book draws on these earlier publications, it presents a powerful and sustained argument that is far greater than the sum of its parts. It is hard to think of another recent work in the anthropology of Christianity, or even of religion more generally, that displays such a command of local knowledge in tandem with so broad and secure a mastery both of social theory and the history of religious doctrine. Moreover, counter to the particularistic tendency of some cultural anthropology today, this book forthrightly lays the groundwork for further comparative research. It is also an exemplary piece of ethnographic and historical writing. Although the volume is long and well documented, every detail works for the analysis. Robbins writes in language so clear, measured, and intellectually sober that those whose palates have become accustomed to the harsher spices and artificial flavorings so often served up in the name of cultural theory may miss its significance. They should not: this is a monumental book with which all subsequent writers on religious conversion, culture theory, social transformation, and globalization should have to contend.

What is the relationship between language and community in early modern Europe? How is language ‘discovered’ during this time and what are the tensions and changes in community wrought with and by this discovery? These are the questions that Peter Burke's Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe asks as he brings much needed attention to the distinctive role of language in both expressing and constituting community and vice versa in the early modern period. Burke's work is structured around five thematic trends embedded in a historical framework: (1) the continued importance of Latin, (2) vernaculars competing for dominance in newly available domains, (3) standardization before ‘language policy,’ (4) the centripetal force of language mixing, and (5) the centrifugal force of language purism. All of these prefigured the new link between language and nation that developed from the French Revolution onwards. By engaging with the multiple and inter-animated languages and communities of Europe during this time, Burke provides a counterpoint to national(ist) histories, which create a simplified picture of the organic growth of a single language and claim an isomorphic relationship with community as (proto-)nation. Burke focuses on the standardization of vernaculars in tension with increased codification of Latin and a new linguistic purism reacting to an increase in and even celebration of language mixing, and thereby resists subordinating complexity to a historical narrative.

This book is a primer on financial globalization, specifically the emergence and operation of a particular set of complicated financial instruments that the authors see as signaling a far-reaching transformation of the domain conventionally referred to as “the economy:” derivatives. While derivatives have sometimes entered into public consciousness due to scandal, crises, and crime, the authors use derivatives as a window into the new everyday operations of global capital and the new normalcy of “systemic risk”—the risk that the entire international financial and banking architecture may implode.