In 1982, Eric Wolf published Europe and the People Without History to identify and begin rectifying large gaps in anthropological knowledge. That project remains unfinished. In the past year,This essay was substantially completed in September 2002. Revisions in preparation for publication a year later were kept to a minimum, in order to preserve for the reader a sense of temporal location and orientation. since September 11, 2001, the necessity of filling in some of these gaps has become urgent. The history of relations between Western powers and transnational Muslim societies in the Indian Ocean is one of them.Of the European traditions, Dutch scholarship has retained the greatest awareness of this issue over the past century, and a number of individual Dutch scholars continue to be proficient in the regional languages, such as both Arabic and Malay, today (van den Berg 1886; Hurgronje 1906; 1931; van der Meulen and von Wissman 1932; van Leur 1955; Schrieke 1960; Meilink-Roelofsz 1962; van Bruinessen 1995; Kaptein 1997). An anthropologically nuanced understanding of such societies as diasporas, thought in tandem with their continued relations with Western empires over five hundred years, lends a useful perspective on a set of conflicts which is massively unfolding. Threatening to become a self-fulfilling prophecy of a clash of civilizations (Huntington 1993) in popular discourse and political decision-making, a phenomenon on this horrendous scale remains within the purview of anthropologists if one sees it as an instance of culture contact under conditions of global imperialism, unmitigated by colonial administration.In his book which elaborated on the provocative thesis of his original 1993 essay, Huntington noted that the question mark in the essay title had been generally ignored (1997:13).

Four books with one title—Empire—are the subject of this essay.Simply including the plural would have extended the list still further: see Susan E. Alcock, Terence N. D'Altroy, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Carla M. Sinopoli, eds., Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). I am grateful to Jane Burbank, Antonio Feros, and Molly Nolan for comments on a previous draft of this article. All were published within the past few years, and the interest they have generated reveals a widespread concern with the exercise of power on a vast scale, beyond the limits of national or continental boundaries. Yet the contemporary use of the word “empire” as a metaphor for unbounded power sits uneasily with scholarship on actual historical empires. Many historians have been trying to show that the long-term survival of empires depended on their rulers limiting their transformative ambitions even as they extended their power. The new interest in empires is nonetheless valuable because it suggests that scholars and intellectuals are emerging from their obsession with the nation-state, seen as the inevitable outcome of a movement from empire to nation, and as the political form characteristic of the “modern” era, which some scholars think is now giving way to new forms of global connections. Empire is being discovered in the past, in the present, and in the future.

This paper means to suggest that it is good at times to step out of the glare of modern frames of intelligibility in order to perceive in ethnographic data dim, or subtle, signs of worldviews no longer apparent. It proposes to show, in this strain, that humble attention to folklore allows us to make sense of seemingly pointless trivia. Overall, the article is an experiment in interweaving ethnologic and folkloristic approaches to expand the relevant contexts of problematic cultural details and thus attain theoretical generalization.

Categories of ‘belonging' and ‘owning' have reflexes in both linguistic and broader social spheres, in which the same cover terms lead a curious double life in both linguistic and social scientific terminology. For example, the opposition between ‘inalienable' and ‘alienable' possession exists both as a linguistic category and a category relevant for exchange (gifts versus commodities), and has generated immense parallel and unrelated literatures in both linguistics (e.g. Chappell and Mcgregor 1996, and references there) and anthropology (e.g., Carrier 1995 and references there). This paper explores the changing pragmatics of a single Welsh linguistic form which indexes ‘belonging,' to understand which, I argue, one needs to understand broader changes in the way that social and political-economic categories of belonging and ownership are differentially infused with affect from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries.

The South African state at the height of apartheid depended upon two kinds of borders. Firstly, there were the boundaries between South Africa and what was tellingly referred to then as “the outside world.” These were, like all such borders, highly porous when it came to the movement of migrant laborers from poorer adjoining countries. But in most other respects, they were impermeable. Indeed, the South Africa of the 1960s and 1970s must have been one of the least “globalized” states of the time. Economically it had pursued a protectionist policy. Flows of even mildly controversial or subversive ideas, of illegal commodities, and of people deemed “undesirable,” were strictly forbidden, and their entry from outside made difficult. Television was banned; books were subjected to rigorous censorship, and radio broadcasts were regulated and often manipulated by the state-controlled broadcasting corporation. The opposition African National Congress (ANC) and a variety of other movements were in exile and their members harassed, jailed, or worse. Physical and cultural borders were well-patrolled by censors, state bureaucracies, customs officers, immigration officers, spies, and police.

At the turn of the nineteenth century in Southeast Asia, the Kingdoms of Burma and Siam were largely stable, independent polities: powerful in relation to their neighbors, self-sufficient in terms of food, and possessing little reason to believe that these parameters would be changing within the clearly foreseeable future.See Victor Lieberman, “Secular Trends in Burmese Economic History, 1350–1830, and their Implications for State-Formation,” Modern Asian Studies 25, 1 (1991), p. 22. A century later, Burma as an independent entity had disappeared off the map, and Siam—at least in terms of its official foreign trade—was an economic satellite of the British Empire. Burmese teak now floated downstream to British Rangoon, while Siamese rice was carried to the world in the hulls of British ships. The Burmese monarchy had been disbanded; 93 percent of all official Siamese imports and exports were in the hands of London's merchants.George Curzon, “The Siamese Boundary Question,” The Nineteenth Century 34, July (1893), pp. 53–54. How did these transformations occur, and why? Were the processes of domination geared toward the economies, politics, or “geobodies” of these two countries, or toward an integrated combination of all three? What role did material objects of trade themselves play in this process, objects that were often deemed illegal as they passed through unstable, liminal spaces along the frontier?

In a famous issue of Times Literary Supplement (TLS) focusing on the state of historical scholarship, Moses Finley called for “Unfreezing the Classics” through “serious history” and lamented that, “Less than a generation ago the profound disagreement between Hugh Last and (now Sir) Ronald Syme about Augustus was . . . serious. But today? While our colleagues engage in polemics over the Tudor Revolution in government, the rise of gentry, the roots of Industrial Revolution or the causes of the First World War, what excites us to debate?”Finley 1966:290. Less than a generation later, the field of classical scholarship had been so transformed that Keith Hopkins, one of Finley's successors as the chair of ancient history at Cambridge could report without much exaggeration that, “Ancient economy is an academic battle ground where the contestants campaign under various colours—apologists, Marxists, modernizers, primitivists . . . Even within schools, there are sects. Besides, new strategies, new alliances, new compromises are repeatedly devised. Fresh contingents of scholars arrive, new tactics (such as underwater archaeology) are developed . . . But no new weapon is finally decisive. The war continues.”Hopkins 1983:ix.

The title of this essay is inspired by Melford Spiro's “Whatever Happened to the Id?” (1979), in which he critiqued structural and symbolic theories of culture that denied Freudian universals such as sexuality and aggression. In some ways, there might be no connections between the Id and the Soul. The Id is associated with the writings of Freud while the history of the concept of the Soul links us to classical Greek philosophy and early Christian philosophers.

Can the concept of “everydayness” help us widen “our understanding of the processes of modernity” (p. 4)? Yes, asserts Harry Harootunian in History's Disquiet, arguing that everydayness allows for seeing assimilations (not copies or alternatives) of modernity as experienced in regions outside Euro-America. Exploring early twentieth-century Japanese notions of modernity in tandem with a much larger roster of European theorists, Harootunian suggests that as both temporal experience and historical category, everyday life allows for a leveling of the analytical playing field across diverse societies such that a “native theory” (6) is not needed to explicate modernity in places such as Japan. Instead, as shared experiences of capitalism that transcend cultural geographies, everydayness allows for a coevalness of capitalist societies in and out of Europe.

Robert Bonner begins this wonderful and engaging narrative with a nod to contemporary debates over the symbolism and meaning of the Confederate battle flag. “In the 1990s,” he notes, “rebel flags became front-page news” as civil right organizations “worked to discredit a symbol they associated with slavery and racism” while heritage groups defended the flag “as a proud relic handed down from heroic ancestors” (p. 1). Bonner emphasizes in his introduction, however, that readers of Colors & Blood should not expect rumination on these contemporary debates. Instead, he has fashioned a fascinating study that explores how a series of Confederate banners and flags evolved out of and, in turn, shaped a “wartime flag culture that set the emotional tone of the Civil War . . . and brought together powerful themes of defiance, sovereignty, and bloodshed” (2). Although this wartime flag culture existed in the North as well as in the South, Colors & Blood focuses almost entirely on the Confederacy.

Semper eadem—always the same—was Elizabeth I's motto, but the accounts and appropriations of her legacy have been anything but. In the century after her death, as John Watkins' study shows, Elizabeth received mostly good press, but she was praised for different reasons by different people, and to greatly varying political ends. Jacobean economists linked James and Elizabeth as saviors of the English nation against Catholic threat. Parliamentarians in the 1630s and 1640s (and Whig historians thereafter) praised an Elizabeth whose supposedly moderate, constitutionalist government contrasted with the tyrannical innovations of the Stuarts; Royalists, by contrast, praised her as a defender of royal prerogative. Elizabeth made an uncomfortable model for revolutionaries, and her famous memory was invoked less during the Interregnum than before or after; but Restoration writers such as Clarendon and William Cavendish advocated a return to Elizabethan government, which Clarendon understood as a via media between tyranny and excessive popular concessions, but which Cavendish frankly praised as a successful despotism. After the Glorious Revolution, the power of the monarchy had become too limited for Elizabethan government to serve as a practical political model of any kind; but popular interest in Elizabeth flourished in “secret histories” which purported to reveal the passions of her private life, a genre which appealed to the public appetite for scandal in high places, and which endures to this day.

The provocative, lucid, and wide-ranging set of essays contained in States of Imagination attempt to fashion a “denaturalizing approach” to the postcolonial state, one that moves beyond both orthodox Marxist renderings of the state as epiphenomenal and modernization-theoretical approaches that substituted a catalogue of negative definitions (narratives of lack) for a critical engagement with postcolonial governance. While rooted in an explicitly anthropological perspective, the introduction and the thirteen essays that follow position themselves in a conceptual “space” between Gramscian and Foucauldian frameworks that have broad interdisciplinary import (p. 3). A central assumption here is that the distinct epistemological grounding of Gramscian and Foucauldian perspectives does not translate into fundamental incompatibility, much less demand a rigorous epistemic hygiene. The conceptually dense introduction and essays seek to parlay the operative metaphor of a “space between” Gramscian and Foucauldian frameworks in order to render intelligible a range of paradoxes constitutive of the state in postcolonial worlds. While the attempted rapprochement between Gramscian analyses of hegemony and class relations and the currently ascendant Foucauldian analytic of governmentality is somewhat uneven in execution, it is motivated by a concern to grasp the “ambiguities of the state” as “both illusory as well as a set of concrete institutions” as “both distant and impersonal ideas as well as localized and personified institutions” as “both violent and destructive as well as benevolent and productive” (5).