As most tell the story, the mysterious and fearful twilight of Sukarno's Indonesia began in Jakarta sometime after sundown on the last day of September 1965. That night and in the early hours of October 1, a group led by leftist, middle-ranking military officers calling themselves the September Thirtieth Movement kidnapped and killed six generals in an attempted putsch. In its radio broadcasts the following morning, the movement announced its loyalty to President Sukarno and claimed that it had acted in order to thwart a coup planned by a ‘Council of Generals.’ In the year leading up to the putsch, the president's hold on power had been strained by the increasing polarization between the army and disaffected Muslims on the one hand, and Sukarno and the PKI—the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Kommunis Indonesia)— on the other. Sukarno's ill health, factionalism within military ranks, and the shadow of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) only added to the anxiety and uncertainty. It is unclear whether this Council of Generals had anything more than a phantom existence. What is clear is that the head of the strategic reserve command in Jakarta, Major General Soeharto, was quick to manipulate the situation and bring the movement to a halt within hours. In an evening radio broadcast on October 1, Soeharto described the putsch as a counter-revolutionary movement and told listeners that the army and police under his leadership had regained control.

The impact of Christianity on the functioning of the later Roman empire has been examined by historians ever since Gibbon published his Decline and Fall. Had the Christians hastened the decline and fall of Rome? Outlining some themes of his projected work, Gibbon suggested before 1774 that indeed they had. In 1776, when publishing the first volume of his history, he touched on this same issue with considerable circumspection; but five years later, his earlier opinion appeared in print under the heading of “General Observations on the Decline of the Empire in the West” by way of concluding the third volume of the work. Here, Gibbon stated:

As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear, without surprise or scandal, that the introduction, or at least the abuse, of Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged: and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister; a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.

Central to much recent work in both anthropology and history is the concept of agency. This essay examines some problems with this concept that arise when we look for it across historical and ethnographic contexts. This study focuses on how agency is expressed in differences among the powers that people impute to spoken words and the kinds of subjects to which they attribute the authorship of words. In this article I want in particular to show how attention to the intersections between speech practices and speakers' beliefs about language can shed light on the historical and cultural worlds in which those speakers act.

The problem of agency is often raised by anthropologists and historians in the effort to be inclusive, to take account of “all the players in the game” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991:9). Furthermore, the question of agency increasingly reflects an ethical imperative. As Talal Asad has recently remarked, “The doctrine of action has become essential to our recognition of other people's humanity” (1996:272). The anthropologist's quest for local agency is often portrayed as an antidote to earlier assumptions about tradition-bound natives and timeless structures or to triumphalist narratives of empire and modernity.

This essay is an attempt to map out the rudiments of a theory of manners and formal deference and to demonstrate how such a theory can be usefully applied to certain long-standing problems in the historical sociology of Europe. It is also meant to demonstrate the continuing relevance of comparative ethnography for social theory—something which has been somewhat cast into doubt in recent years.

The historical problems I have in mind is how Max Weber's famous observations (1930) about how the rise of Puritanism was related to the emergence of a commercial economy in early modern Europe can be related to processes that other scholars have noted during that same general period, the rise of “puritanism” in its more colloquial sense, even in areas totally unaffected by Calvinist theology. I am thinking particularly here of the work of Norbert Elias and Peter Burke.

It is a great tribute to the late Norbert Elias that Hans-Peter Duerr has embarked upon a four-volume critique, Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozess, of Elias's original two volumes of The Civilizing Process (recently reissued in a single-volume edition). Duerr's volumes may initiate a major intellectual debate and thus lead to the wider recognition of the importance of Elias—whom Duerr himself rates as “perhaps the most influential and stimulating sociologist of the second half of the twentieth century” (Duerr, vol. 3:11).

Space does not permit us to examine here the wealth of empirical detail which Duerr deploys, so we shall concentrate on discussing the main theoretical issues at stake. We cannot help noticing, however, a certain double standard in his handling of evidence. Duerr is a very severe judge of the way that Norbert Elias handles his historical evidence in documenting medieval customs and sensitivities, and his keen eye in this regard is to be applauded. However, whereas every item used by Elias to support his point of view is subjected to extremely rigorous criticism, all the items that can be used to contest Elias's views are accepted at face value.

In 1866, the Atlantic Monthly published a fictional case study of an army surgeon who had lost all of his limbs during the Civil War. Written anonymously by American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, “The Case of George Dedlow” describes not only the series of wounds and infections which led to the amputation of all four of the soldier's arms and legs but also the after-effects of amputation. Reduced to what he terms “a useless torso, more like some strange larval creature than anything of human shape,” Dedlow finds that in disarticulating his body, amputation articulates anatomical norms. His observation of his own uniquely altered state qualifies him to speak in universal terms about the relationship between sentience and selfhood: “I have dictated these pages,” he says, “not to shock my readers, but to possess them with facts in regard to the relation of the mind to the body” (1866:5). As such, the story explores the meaning of embodiment, finding in a fragmented anatomy the opportunity to piece together a more complete understanding of how the body functions—physically and metaphysically—as a whole.