Caste has always generated political and scholarly controversy, but the forms that this takes today newly combine anti-caste activism with counter-claims that caste is irrelevant or non-existent, or claims to castelessness. Claims to castelessness are, in turn, viewed by some as a new disguise for caste power and privilege, while castlessness is also an aspiration for people subject to caste-based discrimination. This article looks at elite claims to “enclose” caste within religion, specifically Hinduism, and the Indian nation so as to restrict the field of social policy that caste applies to, to exempt caste-based discrimination from the law, and to limit the social politics of caste. It does so through a comparative analysis of two cases. The first is the exclusion of Christian and Muslim Dalits—members of castes subordinated as “untouchable”—from provisions and protections as Scheduled Castes in India. The other case is that of responses to the introduction of caste into anti-discrimination law in the UK. While Hindu organizations in the UK reject “caste” as a colonial and racist term and deploy postcolonial scholarship to deny caste discrimination, Dalit organizations, representing its potential victims, turn to scholarly discourse on caste, race, or human rights to support their cause. These are epistemological disputes about categories of description and how “the social” is made available for public debate, and especially for law. Such disputes engage with anthropology, whose analytical terms animate and change the social world that is their subject.

Etymologically related, the concepts of terroir and territoriality display divergent cultural histories. While one designates the palatable characteristics of place as a branded story of geographic distinction, the other imbues the soil with political meaning. This paper traces the production of eno-locality in a contested space on both sides of the Green Line in Israel/Palestine. The case of the Yatir award-winning winery shows how terroir and territory are blended in the political economy and cultural politics of colonial place-making. Located on a multiscalar frontier—climatic, geopolitical, and viticultural—Yatir Winery positions itself simultaneously within the Mediterranean transnational landscape and in a biblical site of historical authenticity. Enacting strategic regimes of signification to target the increasing demand for high-end wines on both the global and local markets, it makes a claim for place, while appropriating Palestinian land and redefining ancient Jewish heritage. The result articulates a settler colonial landscape whose symbolic and material transformations are reflected in the Israeli search for rooted identity. Analytically, we explore the power of border and frontier wines to reconfigure the differences between New World and Old World paradigms. We conclude by outlining a comparative framework of the charged relations between terroir and territory that articulates the nexus between border typologies and the colonial politics of wine.

The role played by Christianity and Christian churches in the demonization of the Jews by the German National Socialist and Italian Fascist regimes remains a subject of intense controversy. The historiography at the base of this debate has been largely rooted in research on either Germany or Italy, yet comparative empirical study is particularly well-suited to allow broader generalizations. Such work is especially valuable given the very different relationships the two regimes maintained with the churches. This article identifies similarities and differences in the Nazi and Italian Fascist uses of Christianity in their efforts to turn their populations against the Jews through examination of two of their most influential popular anti-Semitic propaganda vehicles: La difesa della razza in Italy and Der Stürmer in Germany. Both mixed pseudoscientific racial theories with arguments based on Christian religious authority, and both presented themselves as defenders of Christianity against the Jewish threat. Yet while the Italian publication, reflecting the Fascist regime's close relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, took care to present itself as in harmony with the Church, the German publication adopted a much more critical attitude toward contemporary German churches and churchmen, casting them as having strayed from the true teachings of Jesus.

Child soldiers are often viewed as a contemporary, “new war” phenomenon, but international concern about their use first emerged in response to anti-colonial liberation struggles. Youth were important actors in anti-colonial insurgencies, but their involvement has been neglected in existing historiographies of decolonization and counterinsurgency due to the absence and marginalization of youth voices in colonial archives. This article analyses the causes of youth insurgency and colonial counterinsurgency responses to their involvement in conflict between ca. 1945 and 1960, particularly comparing Kenya and Cyprus, but also drawing on evidence from Malaya, Indochina/Vietnam, and Algeria. It employs a generational lens to explore the experiences of “youth insurgents” primarily between the ages of twelve and twenty. Youth insurgents were most common where the legitimate grievances of youth were mobilized by anti-colonial groups who could recruit children through colonial organizations as well as family and social networks. While some teenagers fought due to coercion or necessity, others were politically motivated and willing to risk their lives for independence. Youth soldiers served in multiple capacities in insurgencies, from protestors to couriers to armed fighters, in roles that were shaped by multiple logics: the need for troop fortification and sustained manpower; the tactical exploitation of youth liminality, and the symbolic mobilization of childhood and discourses of childhood innocence. Counterinsurgency responses to youthful insurgents commonly combined violence and development, highlighting tensions within late colonial governance: juveniles were beaten, detained, and flogged, but also constructed as “delinquents” rather than “terrorists” to facilitate their subsequent “rehabilitation.”

This article traces the impact of Kenya's Mau Mau uprising in Jamaica during the 1950s. Jamaican responses to Mau Mau varied dramatically by class: for members of the middle and upper classes, Mau Mau represented the worst of potential visions for a route to black liberation. But for marginalized Jamaicans in poorer areas, and especially Rastafari, Mau Mau was inspirational and represented an alternative method for procuring genuine freedom and independence. For these people, Mau Mau epitomized a different strand of pan-Africanism that had most in common with the ideas of Marcus Garvey. It was most closely aligned with, and was the forerunner of, Walter Rodney, Stokely Carmichael, and Black Power in the Caribbean. Theirs was a more radical, violent, and black-focused vision that ran alongside and sometimes over more traditional views. Placing Mau Mau in the Jamaican context reveals these additional levels of intellectual thought that are invisible without its presence. It also forces us to rethink the ways we periodize pan-Africanism and consider how pan-African linkages operated in the absence of direct contact between different regions.

For many city dwellers in Pakistan the distant memory of outdoor cinemas in their ancestral villages rekindles the thrill of first contact with film exhibition. This paper considers attempts made in colonial British India and postcolonial Pakistan to understand, wield, and benefit from the staging of such memorable and affective filmic events. In its cultivation of “cinema-minded” subjects, the British Empire commissioned studies of audiences and their reactions to film exhibition in hopes of managing the unruly morality and materiality of the cinematic apparatus. After Partition and the creation of the Dominion of Pakistan, similar studies continued, evincing a residual strategy of elicited contact. The elicitation of film contact aimed at the exertion and commandment of the event of film exhibition for the purposes of knowing their constituent subjects at a moment of malleability. Yet the Empire's struggle with the perceived problems of “Muslim tastes” and audience members’ ambivalence over rural screenings in post-Partition Pakistan calls for a reconsideration of the efficacy of these tactics. I argue that what complicated these encounters are affective responses that questioned the address, permissibility, and efficacy of film exhibition. In these tactics of elucidation, disenchantment, and denial, ruptures are refused and the new is dismissed as inoperable, incompatible, or impermissible.

Starting with the author's own experience of ghostliness in the archive, the article explores the political meaning of the postwar Volkswagen in West Germany as embodiment of the country's “economic miracle.” The investigation follows the uncanny in texts and images about the Volkswagen between 1945 and 1960 and argues that the car carried with it a “public secret” as a “debris” from the Nazi empire that silently transcended the 1945 divide. This reading of the Volkswagen as well as the methodological path toward it highlight a phenomenon that postcolonial scholars have described as “haunting”: a confusion about the relationship between past and present that also bears on those who study the past. Taking this analysis as an encouragement to revisit the powerful myths and “miracles” of postwar consumer cultures in the West from a new angle, the article calls for historical genealogies of these myths that conceive of the postwar West as a—not yet—postcolonial space and that cross the 1945 threshold.

Over the last three decades, the organized American-Jewish community has preoccupied itself with sociodemographic concerns regarding maintenance of a viable Jewish life in the United States. In this article, I study a key dimension of this preoccupation with population trends: the quantity of the Jewish population, that is, the number of Jews. I show the centrality of this dimension in shaping a cluster of anxious discourses and interventionist engagements directed toward stemming numerical decline. Analyzing this policy world in terms of a “Jewish biopolitics,” I assess how the voluntary nature of American Jewry has shaped a distinct biopolitical field, reliant on “making Jews” by both biological and cultural reproduction, enmeshing dimensions of quantity and quality. Juxtaposing this Jewish biopolitical engagement with the one exercised by the Israeli state, I flesh out broader considerations and contributions, and introduce the exploratory concept of “minority community biopolitics.” The article is grounded in an anthropological study of policy, including fieldwork, interviews, and a review of the flurry of archival and public materials related to the topic.

This study draws on ethnographic and archival evidence from the Italian Archipelago of La Maddalena, offshore from the northeastern corner of Sardinia, where in 1972 the U.S. Navy installed a base for nuclear submarines. It addresses two questions: (1) How do non-experts make sense of radiological risk absent knowledge and classified information about its instantiations and consequences? (2) How do objectifications of risk change and stabilize within the same community over time? STS scholarship has emphasized the epistemic and relational dimensions of lay/expert controversies over risk assessment. Many case studies, mostly focused on the Anglo-Saxon world, have assumed lay and expert ways of knowing are incompatible due to clashing cultural identities. I use Keane's concept of “semiotic ideologies” and Peircean semiotic theory to critically reassess the validity of that assumption and examine the role of material evidence in processes of signification to explain how experts and non-experts fix, challenge, and negotiate the meanings of radiological risk in sociotechnical controversies. I critically review empirical studies and analyze ethnographic and archival data to advance a set of methodological and substantive arguments: meanings of risk change as new signs become available for interpretation; and meanings of risk are semiotically regimented: their emergence or silencing depend upon the power relations in place in a given community and organizational efforts to assemble coherent technopolitical arguments. I call this set of organizational practices “politics of coherence.”

This article examines the question of how architects in São Paulo during the 1950s and 1960s addressed the political nature of their work, and more specifically the connections between their practice and the lives and politics of the urban poor in the context of a rapidly expanding metropolis of the Global South. More specifically, it assesses how they elaborated strategies to articulate the semiotic and material practices of Brutalism and the political repertoire of national developmentalism, initially in its democratic and later in its authoritarian form. The article argues that these architects deployed two semio-material strategies to operationalize the articulation between that political repertoire and the field of architecture: metaphorical indexicality and the impetus for the industrialization of construction. The image of the urban poor reinforced by that political repertoire was marked by a severe distance from their empirical life experiences, which deeply affected the practices of design and construction that progressive architects advanced.

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Latin America became something of a dumping ground for U.S. priests suspected of sexual abuse, with north-to-south clerical transfers sending predatory priests to countries where pedophilia did not exist in any kind of ontological sense. This article, in response, engages the case of Father David Roney of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. After a career of accusations and payouts, with Roney entering and exiting Church-mandated therapy programs, Bishop Raymond Lucker retired this notoriously predatory priest to rural Guatemala in 1994. By placing Roney beyond the reach of psychiatrists, psychologists, and spiritual directors, the Roman Catholic Church leveraged a psychological and juridical difference between two geographical settings in order to render the pedophilia of this priest effectively non-existent, thereby insulating itself from further reputational damage and additional litigation. Given that the Roman Catholic Church has long been an empirical point of reference for studies of subject formation—from pastoralism and mysticism to ritual and the confession—this article adds that the Church also provides ample evidence of an opposite process: of unmaking people.

When religious institutions engage the secular emotively and publicly, they can foster an affective atmosphere of religiosity, which potentially has motivational power, even for non-believers, because it shapes the sensorium of those who circulate in public space. When individuals appeal to “places animated with prayer” for the transformative energy that resides there through ritualized practices, they reaffirm an affective atmosphere of religiosity. In Orthodox Eastern Europe and elsewhere, a confessional tradition is allied with state borders, further normativizing this affective atmosphere and giving it pronounced political implications. When an affective atmosphere of religiosity inspires practices that are intentionally designed to prompt experiences rendered meaningful in otherworldly terms, over time such performativity can create mimetic instincts that become second nature. This is an essential step to religion becoming an expedient political resource and to the emergence of religious nationalism or a confessional state.

This article examines revolutionary discourses of national historical transformation in Bolivia and tracks the ways those discourses are appropriated, contested, and recast by farmers in the rural agricultural province of Ayopaya. During fieldwork carried out with Quechua-speaking farmers in Ayopaya between 2011 and 2012, I learned about people's enduring concerns with a recent hacienda past. Against governmental declarations that Bolivia's colonial past was dead or had passed, farmers meditated on the duration of earlier histories of colonial land dispossession and violations of indigenous sovereignty. Talk about the region's oppressive history here allowed people to assess deficient state aid and resources but also to oppose unwelcome state interventions pushing a legal model of bounded collectivity. I trace the ways that farmers and villagers mobilized the hacienda past to address inequitable land tenure, violated sovereignty, and women's marginalization from political life, and thereby raise new questions about the critical possibilities opened up by the re-politicization of this colonial history. Rural support for Bolivia's Movement Toward Socialism party government eroded nearly a decade ago, and this complicates both triumphalist and defeatist accounts of President Evo Morales’ 2019 resignation, which tend to paint Morales’ rural indigenous supporters as innocent and naïve.

The paper explores mobilization to reduce the deepest inequalities in the two largest democracies, those along caste lines in India and racial lines in the United States. I compare how the groups at the bottom of these ethnic hierarchies—India's former untouchable castes (Dalits) and African Americans—mobilized from the 1940s to the 1970s in pursuit of full citizenship: the franchise, representation, civil rights, and social rights. Experiences in two regions of historically high inequality (the Kaveri and Mississippi Deltas) are compared in their national contexts. Similarities in demographic patterns, group boundaries, socioeconomic relations, regimes, and enfranchisement timing facilitate comparison. Important differences in nationalist and civic discourse, official and popular social classification, and stratification patterns influenced the two groups’ mobilizations, enfranchisement, representation, alliances, and relationships with political parties. The nation was imagined to clearly include Dalits earlier in India than to encompass African Americans in the United States. Race was the primary and bipolar official and popular identity axis in the United States, unlike caste in India. African Americans responded by emphasizing racial discourses while Dalit mobilizations foregrounded more porously bordered community visions. These different circumstances enabled more widespread African American mobilization, but offered Dalits more favorable interethnic alliances, party incorporation, and policy accommodation, particularly in historically highly unequal regions. Therefore, group representation and policy benefits increased sooner and more in India than in the United States, especially in regions of historically high group inequality such as the Kaveri and other major river Deltas relative to the Deep South, including Mississippi.

During much of the nineteenth century, Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian capital, was under a selective curfew that made it a crime to be in the city's public spaces after dark. The curfew bent normal rules and attenuated supposedly universal rights, overtly discriminating between people on the basis of class and race. Rules that legally defined the nighttime did not come from any national statute, or from newly independent Brazil's liberal Constitution (1824) or its Criminal Code (1830). Instead, Rio's nocturnal sociolegal world was the product of police edicts, on-the-ground policing practice, and city ordinances. It also emerged from the actions of people who used the darker hours for work, play, and resistance against oppression, especially members of the city's immense enslaved population and the growing number of free persons of African descent. In other words, this is a phenomenon of urban governance that allows, and indeed forces us to look beyond the nineteenth-century nation-state to understand the exercise of power at a local level. This article explores how the curfew established patterns and means of limiting the basic freedom to move about the city. It was at night when both the necessity and fragility of what jurists in Brazil called the “freedom to come and go” came into view. The daily transition between day and night enacted juridical changes that, although invisible at the national level, fundamentally shaped the social categories that determined people's places in society in ways that historical research has yet to explore.

If historians now recognize that the Habsburg Monarchy was developing into a strong, cohesive state in the decades before the First World War, they have yet to fully examine contemporaneous European debates about Austria's legitimacy and place in the future world order. As the intertwined fields of law and social science began during this period to elaborate a binary distinction between “modern” nation-states and “archaic” multinational “empires,” Austria, like other composite monarchies, found itself searching for a legally and scientifically valid justification for its continued existence. This article argues that Austrian sociology provided such a justification and was used to articulate a defense of the Habsburg Monarchy and other supposedly “abnormal” multinational states. While the birth of the social sciences is typically associated with Germany and France, a turn to sociology also occurred in the late Habsburg Monarchy, spurred by legal scholars who feared that the increasingly hegemonic idea of nation-based sovereignty threatened the stability of the pluralistic Austrian state. Proponents of the “sociological idea of the state,” notably the sociologist, politician, and later president of Czechoslovakia Tomáš Masaryk and the Polish-Jewish sociologist and jurist Ludwig Gumplowicz, challenged the concept of statehood advanced by mainstream Western European legal philosophy and called for a reform of Austria's law and political science curriculum. I reveal how, more than a century before the “imperial turn,” Habsburg actors came to reject the emerging scholarly distinction between “nations” and “empires” and fought, with considerable success, to institutionalize an alternative to nationalist social scientific discourse.