Why did Iran of the late 1970s with a thriving economy, wealthy middle class, repressive political system, massive military might, and powerful international allies go through an Islamic revolution, while Egypt of the early 1990s with similar international allies, but poorer economy, impoverished large middle classes, and a more liberal political system did not go beyond developing an Islamist movement?In 1978 the per-capita income in Iran was $2,400, compared to $660 in Egypt in 1988. During the 1970s, some 15 percent of Tehran's population lived in the squatter areas (and about 15 percent in slums), whereas this figure for Cairo in the early 1990s was 50 percent.

The reasons for the recent and simultaneous appearance, or rise in influence, in much of the world of “fundamentalist” or doctrinally and socially conservative religiopolitical mass movements have been analyzed for individual groups but rarely in a way that compares all the main religions and the regions in which they are strong. Most comparative volumes on fundamentalism are collections, with most authors discussing one area. Exceptions are Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and Bruce B. Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989). Useful collections include the five volumes of the Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby and published by the University of Chicago Press (Chicago, 1991–95; full reference in note 3); Richard T. Antoun and Mary Elaine Hegland, eds. Religious Resurgence: Contemporary Cases in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987); Lionel Caplan, ed., Studies in Religious Fundamentalism (Albany, SUNY Press, 1987); John Stratton Hawley, ed., Fundamentalism and Gender (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Contention, 4:2, 3, and 5:3 (1995, 1996), sections on comparative fundamentalism. Rarer still have been analyses of why such movements have expanded in most areas only since the 1970s, what causes exist in areas where these movements are strong and why they differ from those regions where they are weak or nonexistent, and what, aside from religion, produces different types of movements. Here we will try to see if there are common factors in time and in space that help explain these movements and will look for causes of their similarities and differences. Explanations presented here will stress differences between religious nationalism (or communalism) directed primarily against other religious communities and conservative religious politics directed primarily against internal enemies. Differences between types and levels of preexisting religious beliefs will be examined to suggest why some areas have such movements and others do not. World-wide factors that help to account for the recent rise of religious politics will also be explored.

The slave emancipation problem in colonial contexts, such as the Igbo case in Igboland, south-eastern Nigeria, deserves attention because there are too few relevant studies (Brown 1996; Nwaka 1985; Ohadike 1988). These studies spotlight wage labor above other aspects of the emancipation question. This approach is justified because the colonial anti-slavery policy there centred on the promotion and control of wage labour. The wage labour focus is useful in explaining what the colonial state did, although it does say little about what the state avoided, and why. There was much more to the emancipation question than labour formation and control. The control of land, a critical element of class formation and reproduction in a post-emancipation agrarian situation, was the fundamental arena of conflict in post-abolition colonial Africa (see Cooper 1980; Klein 1993c). In other words, while the most effective means to achieve emancipation was land tenure reform, the colonial state chose to pursue the proletarianization strategy. This essay will examine why this was so.

In this essay I hope to come closer to an understanding of how Mau Mau insurgents created a world in the Aberdares forest composed of individuals and groups who contested the means for which positive social value could be attained.Mau Mau is the name given by whites to the Central Kenyan insurgency that became openly violent in 1952. Most Mau Mau violence was centered in and around the Aberdares Forest, which separated the European “White Highlands” from the African Reserves. Though not entirely a Kikuyu movement, most forest fighters were Kikuyu, and Mau Mau has often been referred to as a “Kikuyu civil war” because so much of the violence was directed at African (mostly Kikuyu) elites and because many Kikuyu (such as chiefs, elites, and Homeguards recruited by the colonial government to fight Mau Mau insurgents) took an active role in denouncing or quelling it. As John Lonsdale (1992) and Bruce Berman (1991) have shown, Mau Mau framed and informed debates about morally appropriate lifeways among a people who were never a cohesive “tribe” and who experienced radically different living and working conditions under colonialism. The world they created was replete with power, and this power was congealed in certain objects and the ability to use them. Many of these objects were literally stolen from the institutions which made up the colonial regime (schools and offices, for example). They circulated within and among groups of insurgents (itungati) in the forest and in some way represented and embodied the enchanted power of the colonial state apparatus.Most authors translate itungati as “freedom fighter” or “guerilla.” Lonsdale (1992) has indicated that the term literally means “rear guard” and probably refers to the self-conception of the original Mau Mau leadership as the rear guard, vis è vis literate nationalists like Jomo Kenyatta, in the struggle for independence. Yet the circulation of these objects into new social space (Mau Mau camps), whose constitution they contributed to, both changed the meaning of these objects and clarified and accelerated divisions within the movement.

Perhaps the fiercest conflict within the social sciences today is one that is not even articulated as a recognizable “debate.” Nevertheless, this conflict has generated bitter divisions between academics who only a decade ago might have stood together on the left or the right and has forged equally strange alliances. I am referring, of course, to the split between epistemological and ontological positions which are usually described as radical constructivism and realist positivism. The recent debate provoked by Alan Sokal's article in Social TextSee Alan D. Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries—Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text (Spring-Summer 1996), 217–52; and idem, “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca (May-June 1996), 62–64. The key response is Stanley Fish's article, “Professor Sokal's Bad Joke,” in The New York Times (Opinion–Editorial page, May 21, 1996); see also the responses in the July-August 1996 issue of Lingua Franca; Michael Albert, “Science, Post Modernism, and the Left,” in Z Magazine (July-August 1996); Steven Weinberg, “Sokal's Hoax,” New York Review of Books (August 8, 1996), 11–15; and Tom Frank, “Textual Reckoning,” In These Times (May 27, 1996). I am grateful to Michael Rosenfeld for references to the latter two pieces. brought into sharp focus the growing sense of distrust and anger that divides these academic camps. And, yet, the heterogeneity of each supposed grouping suggests that the dichotomous model masks what is actually a much more complex, multi-dimensional field. On the one hand we find a motley assemblage of positions variously characterized as constructivism, culturalism, neo-Kantian idealism, and postmodernism; the other pole throws together a set of even stranger bedfellows, including rational choice theorists, survey researchers, and traditional historians alongside “realist” philosophers of various stripes.

In 1919, when Carlos Gagini penned this two-sentence definition of hulero for a dictionary of “Costa Rican-isms,” he matter of factly specified murderousness, slaving, terrorism, and Nicaraguan nationality as intrinsic characteristics of rubber tappers. Few other entries in Gagini's compilation reveal so tellingly a key implicit objective of the country lexicons that Central American intellectuals (for example, Membreño 1982 [1895]) began to publish in the late nineteenth century: the specification, through Spanish dialectology, of a still emergent national identity vis-è-vis neighbors who—until recently—had not been clearly distinct Others but simply fellow subjects first of one or another province of the Spanish Captaincy General of Guatemala and later, briefly, of the Mexican Empire (1821–23) and the independent Central American Federation (1823–38). And none of the other generally concise entries in Gagini's dictionary hints so directly at the links between processes of commodity creation, physical and cultural death, and the construction of nations.

Was bedeutet die Bewegung? What does this movement mean?

Bringt die Ost mir frohe Kunde? Goethe, cited from “West-östlicher Divan,” on title page of George B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan: A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures (New York: Knopf, 1968). Sansom, of course, was certain that the West did not need to learn anything from the East. Does the East bring me glad tidings?

An analogy comparing Shin Buddhism—the largest, most active, and most liberal of Japan's traditional Buddhist institutions—to Protestant Christianity has existed for a long time, beginning with the sixteenth century Jesuit encounter with Japan. See Galen Amstutz, Interpreting Amida: Orientalism and History in the Study of Pure Land Buddhism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). The analogy has always been distinctly limited in scope and in important respects has also always—in the context of all world history—remained primarily confined to the Shin-Christian encounter. Apparently, the kind of evolution of consciousness it indicates is historically rare. Notably, the notion of protestant has never developed into a systematic comparative term even in religious studies. See Amstutz, Interpreting Amida, 180–1.

Disembedded capitals are urban sites founded de novo and designed to supplant existing patterns of authority and administration. While a controversial topic in New World archaeology, there is ample evidence from ancient Western Asia and Egypt to demonstrate that disembedded capitals were a well-understood and frequently used option in developed state systems. Ethnohistoric examples from Egypt and Mesopotamia are presented to show the common organizational, ideological, and ecological features of disembedded capitals, and their varying historical and imperial contexts. Disembedded capitals were typically founded by new elites, either usurpers or reformers, as part of innovations designed to simultaneously undercut competing factions and create new pattterns of allegiance and authority. But while intended to break away from existing power relationships, in order to function disembedded capitals were necessarily reembedded back into those structures, In an evolutionary sense disembedded capitals were short-lived phenomena which tended to create long-term societal problems.

It has been nearly a decade since Linda Gordon published her influential review of the “new” feminist scholarship on the welfare state. Linda Gordon, “The New Feminist Scholarship on the Welfare State,” in L. Gordon, ed., Women, the State and Welfare (Wisconsin, 1990). In the essay, Gordon traced the contours of the then-blossoming feminist literature on the welfare state and encouraged feminists to move beyond a critique of gender-blind welfare analyses to construct their own, less deterministic historiographies of state formation. In the last ten years, feminists have not only heeded this call but have largely surpassed it, developing a voluminous literature that now addresses gender and the welfare state. Feminist historians have written new origin stories to reveal how female reformers, motivated by both maternalism and professionalism, participated in the building of Western welfare states. For an excellent review of feminist work on maternalism and motherhood, see Lisa Brush, “Love, Toil, and Trouble: Motherhood and Feminist Politics,” Signs (1996), 21:21. For feminist analyses of maternalism and the origins of the welfare state, see Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (Oxford, 1991); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Harvard, 1992); Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Cambridge, 1995); Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (University of Illinois, 1994); Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and Origins of Welfare States (Routledge, 1993); Gisella Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s (Routledge, 1991); Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in Nineteenth- Century United States (Yale, 1990); and Regina Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945 (Yale, 1993). They have also unearthed the gendered scripts adhered to by male politicians, policy makers, and class-based movements. In addition, feminist social scientists have explicated the re/distributive outcomes of welfare states to illuminate how states allocate resources in gendered and racialized ways. For feminist analyses of the gendered underpinnings of state re/distributive practices, see Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices (Minnesota, 1989); Linda Gordon and Nancy Fraser, “Dependency Demystified: Inscriptions of Power in a Keyword of the Welfare State,” Social Politics, 1:14–31; Virginia Sapiro, “The Gender Bias of American Social Policy,” Political Science Quarterly (1986), 101:221–38; Barbara Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workman's Compensation and Mothers' Aid,” in L. Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Wisconsin, 1990); and L. Bryson, Welfare and the State (Macmillan, 1992). For studies of the racialized undercurrents of state re/distribution, see Gwendolyn Mink, Wages of Motherhood (Cornell, 1994); Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (Oxford, 1994); and Eileen Boris, “The Racialized Gendered State: Constructions of Citizenship in the United States,” Social Politics, 2:16–80.

Liisa Malkki's extraordinarily powerful book joins the study of violence and the body with history and nationalism through detailed ethnographic work and a strong grasp of theory. If there is a weakness in the book, it is perhaps that it is burdened with too many themes, since it is also about displacement, marginality and invisibility; about narratives of the self and the conditions of narrative making; and, not least, about the politics of ethnic violence in Burundi from 1972 until the present.

The nineteenth-century has been something of a vortex for Spanish American historians. From the collapse of the Empire in 1808 to 1810 until the consolidation of conservative agro-export regimes by the century's end, the dominant features of the region's historiographic landscape have been revolution, civil war, personalist “tyrants,” and bouts of ethnic uprising unmatched since the first century of Conquest. When Latin American historians, such as Lucás Alamán in Mexico or Bartolomé Mitre in Argentina, sat down at mid-century to write national narratives for their emerging republics, their histories were veiled stories of incompletion, failed promise, and unfinished aspirations.

Few subjects seem more obvious candidates for comparative historical treatment than Protestant evangelicalism, which has played a prominent role in the religious life of English-speaking nations since the eighteenth century. In spite of this fact, until recently historians have tended to ignore the transnational dimension of the evangelical movement and have focused instead on local, regional, and national studies. The contributors to Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990 are therefore to be commended for ministering to a pressing need.

In the 1970s Irish historians were expected to look at the 1790s primarily through the lens of the contemporary Northern Ireland crisis: Did the alliance of Presbyterian radicals and Catholics in the events leading to the 1798 rebellion demonstrate that the Ulster Protestants were “really Irish” and reconciliation inevitable once “the British” stopped interfering? Or did the breakdown of that alliance demonstrate how ineradicable was the sectarian divide in Irish society? One benefit of the retreat of Northern Ireland from the headlines in the 1980s has been the liberation of historians from such loaded questions and the redirection of their attention to what was actually happening in the period.

In this collection of essays, readers can get a sense of the character and history of science policy, the organization of scientific communities, and relations between scientists and the state in nine countries. The volume's editor, Etel Solingen, provides an introduction to orient the discussions which follow. She defines the concern of the collection as “the impact of state structures and state involvement in the international political and economic systems on the domestic political economy of science” (p. 3). Solingen's essay draws on a wide range of literatures, including recent work on the political sociology of the state, research in institutional political economy, and—of course—on the history of science policy. Contributors to the book make an effort to work broadly within the framework which Solingen outlines, though clearly none feels bound by it.

Martin Warnke's book, The Court Artist, first published in German in 1985, could well be subtitled, “How the Bourgeoisie Stole Credit for the Liberation of Art from Craft,” for the author sets out to redress what he sees as an injustice wrought by the middle-class against history. According to Warnke, contrary to common opinion, the origins of the “autonomous consciousness of art and artists” lie not in the world of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century commune but, rather, in that of the late medieval and early modern court. He suggests that the current misconceptions about the origins of “modern” attitudes towards art and artists derive from late eighteenth-century anti-monarchical sentiments which, building on an enduring middle-class suspicion of courtly culture, condemned that world as corrupt and repressive and therefore antithetical to the emergence of a truly free, creative artist. This position was philosophically reinforced in the nineteenth century by the creation of the concept of a Zeitgeist. It was argued that the emancipation of the artist could not have come from the perverse, retrograde world of the aristocracy but must have arisen from the people who were participating in a Renaissance spirit of optimistic freedom which was reflected in the revival of humanistic forms and the creation of a liberating culture.