The rapid and pervasive changes of the past decade and a half have thrown the political field wide open across the former Soviet bloc. An extensive array of actors has laid claim to the mantle of the postsocialist state, seeking to siphon off its resources, to leverage its putative power, and often to do both in the same breath. At the same time, others have fled the institutional and discursive purview of the state, taking advantage of the near disappearance of centralized authority in the early 1990s to stake out powerful non- and quasi-state domains. The density of these strategies, which in practice have been complementary as often as contradictory, has made for nothing short of an ethical thicket for postsocialist citizens and state functionaries alike.

Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, the leading cities of the South Atlantic, experienced substantial growth in wealth holding during the first half of the nineteenth century. In this article, we argue that this growth is best interpreted in a broad, comparative framework, which examines these cities in relation to their internal demographic and institutional arrangements and to their external links to the Atlantic World. Our research emphasizes three major comparative findings. First, according to our samples, both Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires experienced substantial growth in wealth holding from the 1820s through the 1850s, well before their participation in the better-known global economic expansion of the late nineteenth century. Second, residents of both South Atlantic cities held wealth broadly similar in scale with their counterparts in comparable cities in North America. And third, wealth inequality was probably no greater in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires than in contemporary cities in the United States. Moreover, we believe that these increases in average wealth holding, as well as changes in the allocation of wealth across sectors, suggests economies that were growing rapidly while becoming more complex.

Historians of Europe may be generally aware of the former significance of Celtic child-fostering, so prominently documented in the law books and legends of medieval Ireland. Yet there is no comprehensive survey of such fosterage from a comparative historical perspective, nor has its archival documentation been collated for analysis. The present essay aims to redress this neglect: it reviews extant evidence of Celtic fosterage in the British Isles, examined with reference to comparable institutions of adoptive kinship documented throughout western Eurasia, which comprised some of its scarcely recognized “elementary structures” of familial clientage and feudatory state formation (cf. Guerreau-Jalabert 1981; 1999; Mitterauer 2006).

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.

It seems remarkable how often we call “myths” the kind of arbitrary constructs in other peoples' worldview that we tend to attribute to the nature of things in our own case. Double standards may be involved, of course; but it could also be the case that one tends to miss the semiotic essence of the cultural construct one calls “reality.” As every anthropologist knows, one's most cherished cultural assumptions tend to remain implicit; otherwise put, worldview is largely unconscious. This paper explores the possibility of plumbing unconscious aspects of one's own culture in order to assess what some might call—regarding other cultures—the mythic underpinnings of worldview.

The global movement of Indigenous peoples has attracted the attention of a number of scholars, notably lawyers, anthropologists, and cultural theorists (Muehlebach 2003; Anaya 1996; Battiste 2000; Churchill 2003; Dei, Hall, and Rosenberg 2000; Independent Commission 1987; Jull 1999; Kingsbury 1998; Minde 1996; Passy 1999; Pritchard 1998; Radcliffe and Laurie 2001; Feldman 2002; Smith 1999; Ward and Smith 2000; Wilmer 1993). With few exceptions such as Niezen (2000; 2003) and Radha Jappan (1992), this growing interest has not extended to the origins and development of this movement. There are obvious reasons for this: as in other areas of the discipline, historians have seen indigenous movements as matters of national history. However, the growth of “world history” (Hopkins 2002a; Bayly 2004: 432–50) offers a mode of analysis in which varied and related indigenous histories can be considered fruitfully. Moreover, the success of indigenous actors in creating new institutional spaces and a discourse of “indigenous rights” compels historical research into the emergence of the global movement, not least in understanding how very different and dispersed communities have begun to self-identify with the category of indigenous peoples. This is especially so as the movement works toward the declaration of positive international law that can recognize and protect the diversity of first peoples under precisely that banner.

“What do you really want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?” was a question asked of the anthropologist Karl Weule by more than a few of his fellow passengers on board a ship bound for the German colony that is today Tanzania, in 1906. At least this was what Weule himself recalled after he returned from a journey during which he was caught up, and participated in, the counterinsurgency operations that followed one of the greatest anti-colonial uprisings that Africa had ever seen, the Maji Maji uprising. One elegant woman, Weule wrote, demanded: “And what do you want, Herr Professor, from all these tribes? Simply to collect for your museum in Leipzig? Or does the anthropology of today also have other, higher goals?” Anthropology did indeed, Weule explained, have “other, higher goals”: “The museum you speak of, my dearest, exists out in reality, as even the most hard-hearted Philistine would have to admit. … But how will anthropology be able to assert its much-contested status as a science, when it knows nothing higher and better than simply to bring together bows, arrows, spears, and thousands of other things? This collecting and preserving is really just … the elementary branch of our work. The other, higher part is the study [Aufnahme] of mental culture [geistige Kulturbesitzes].”

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.

Driving past the strip malls of Hollywood, Florida, visitors know they have entered the Seminole Reservation when they approach blocks of modest houses punctuated by the thatched roofs of backyard chickees (from chiki, or home, in Mikasuki). On Seminoles' rural Big Cypress Reservation, chickees dot the landscape as storage sheds, front yard spots to sit and socialize, and shelters for taking lunch breaks away from the punishing Florida sunshine. Chickees also convey “Seminoleness” in some tribal casinos' interior design, as vendors' booths at Seminole festivals (figure 1), and even on the Seminole tribal flag, with its chickee logo (figure 2). More than any other element of the built environment, chickees mark space as distinctly Seminole.

Could Britons in India commit murder? More precisely, could they be prosecuted and sentenced for doing so? As these epigraphs suggest, the Raj was deeply preoccupied with elaborating minute taxonomies of violence and death. In a variety of ways, British violence toward indigenes was made an object of policy initiatives by the Government of India. Defining violence, both indigenous and foreign, was one key task of the Raj, along with clarifying the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate violence. But this boundary shifted constantly over the colonial period, and indeed, it has continued to do so ever since. Given the extensive legal violence of colonial conquest, when and why were specific acts of white violence defined as murder?

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.

In 1849, administrator-turned-historian Ganesh Das Vadhera completed Char Bagh-i-Panjab, a history of his native region in India, the Punjab. The Char Bagh was a Persian manuscript written as the Sikh Kingdom of Lahore was being dismantled and the Punjab incorporated into British India, and documented the establishment, decline, and fall of Sikh rule in the area. Vadhera's account was more than a political history of the Punjab, however; it also gave detailed descriptions of many of the towns, cities, and villages of the region leading some contemporary scholars to refer to it as a geography (Brand and Westcoat 2001). Guru Nanak Dev University recognized Vadhera's Persian text as being not only a historical account but a source of valuable “information on social, religious, and cultural life of the Panjab,” and published it in 1965 (Grewal and Banga 1975: 9). Two scholars of the region published a partial English translation a decade later (Grewal and Banga 1975).

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.

Since the 1990s, a transnational network of activists and organizations has played a critical role in new perspectives on rural development and land rights. The individuals and groups that constitute this network are linked by the issues of environmental conservation, social justice, and indigenous peoples' advocacy. This network forms a loose-knit set of overlapping alliances, which have pushed for substantial changes in how international agencies and state governments conceptualize and operationalize plans for development, especially in the developing world. This network challenges many long-held notions, including those of cultural citizenship, individual and group rights, and the state's role in social and environmental projects. Before the 1990s, dominant assumptions about the inevitability of state-led modernity meant that scholars and organizations generally accepted the role of the state as a force of assimilation and social betterment. Now, however, with a concomitant rise in indigenous identity politics and new urban-rural linkages for social justice, many academics and activists have pointed to the negative effects of state policy. In turn, a rising number of actors now champion moves for state decentralization, and the creation and expansion of community-based management. During this time of rapid change, scholars and activists have played critical roles in shaping new international configurations and have contributed to the rise of community-based rights.

The ten authors in this volume address critical concerns about the economics of civil war in Sri Lanka, including how prolonged war affects economic development, why people volunteer to join the military during wartime, and who is benefiting economically from this violence. The collected essays provide analytical and methodological insight for scholars studying conflict and war throughout the world, and its authors question the economics of the current war on terrorism.