RURAL ECONOMIES Our understanding of the countryside is under continuing risk of being simplified and flattened in a world becoming ever more urban. The first three articles illustrate the importance of resisting this steady pressure and looking closely at rural economies. The richness of this terrain reveals itself to the long historical view and the close-grained ethnography of a family farm.

In looking at the production of pottery and cheese in the southwest of France, we want to suggest that over the long term the region had a much more complicated history of production than its present, predominantly rural economy might suggest. The manufacturing processes were linked symbiotically with other local activities, and were often carried out by “peasants” working in agriculture for a good part of the year.

The old man's complaint about maize as “European” food in Audrey Richards' now classic 1939 field study reflected his obvious disdain for the new food of the mines and cities of colonial Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). His perception of maize as “European” food was, however, anachronistic even in 1939, reflecting a landscape of memory rather than the creep of agrarian modernism and the maize-based diet of an urban wage-labor economy. In fact, by the 1930s diets and farm plots all over twentieth-century Africa were rapidly changing their seasonal tastes, textures and colors to reflect the inexorable spread of a food crop with origins in the New World, but with an increasingly African personality. These dramatic changes over the past three decades have now superceded the analysis and speculative data of Marvin Miracle's classic work Maize in Tropical Africa, and call for a reinterpretation of maize's historical trajectory in Africa.Marvin Miracle, Maize in Tropical Africa (Madison, 1966). The chronology and meaning of maize's expansion in Africa are the subjects of this article.

This article describes the development of family farms within a Kipsigis community in western Kenya. In Kenya, throughout rural Africa, and elsewhere in the “developing world,” family farms figure as key discursive and geographic spaces where the “development process” is located (see Crehan and von Oppen 1988, McCracken 1982, Ferguson 1990). Family farms are hybrid spaces where individual, local, state-based, and various “expert” visions of development intersect. They have the added virtue of being places whose geographic, historical and cultural specificity makes them accessible to ethnographic description.Of course the same applies to family farms everywhere. Quite distinctive forms of “the family farm” exist in different regions of France, the United States, and other places in the “developed” world. Despite the presumed leveling effects of modernization, such regional differences show few signs of disappearing (see Rogers 1991).

Veenhuizen, an agricultural “colony” for the criminalized poor, is a well-known national historic site in the Netherlands; it is as much a monument to early- nineteenth-century utopian socialist idealism as it is a Dickensian poorhouse, a warehouse for the disenfranchised. Its founder, Johannes van den Bosch, is better known outside the Netherlands for his activities on a different colonial stage as the architect of the Cultivation System, a system of forced crop deliveries by which the Dutch extracted coffee, sugar and indigo from large parts of Java, Sumatra and Minahasa in the mid-nineteenth century. These apparently disparate examples of Van den Bosch's “colonialism” represent more than successive moments in the life of a precocious royal favorite. If we are to take seriously the injunction to “treat metropole and colony in a single analytic field” (Stoler and Cooper 1989:4), we need to focus on the historically specific colonial discourses introduced by figures like Van den Bosch through which “population[s] of degenerate types” were subjected to similar “systems of administration and instruction” (Bhabba 1990:75) in both overseas empires and the newly-conquered territories that were becoming the cores of emerging European nation-states. Veenhuizen and the Cultivation System are the products of a particular strand of colonial discourse that provided new forms of social control in the name of economic development. By focusing on the continuities in the underlying economic ideas that tie these two cases together, I underscore the divergent paths by which social welfare legislation was used in the English and Dutch colonial empires to create and discipline their respective agrarian capitalist regimes. By concentrating on Van den Bosch's Dutch experiments in poverty relief, the role of colonial discourses in forming the metropole is also highlighted. The Dutch state was as much shaped by its imperial project as the colony itself was transformed by European hegemony. This is an example, in other words, of “multi-sited ethnography,” by which the underlying logic of an emerging world system is revealed through the embedded idioms and discourses of local cultural formations (Marcus 1998:97).

In March 1534, the residents of Cuzco, the capital and sacred centre of the Inca empire, witnessed the last ceremony of royal inauguration and triumph to be celebrated in their city by an Inca ruler, Manco Inca Yupanqui.Pedro Sancho, An account of the Conquest of Peru (tr. P. A. Means, New York 1917), chapter 12, 111; Diego de Esquivel y Navía, Noticias cronólogicas de la gran ciudad del Cuzco (Lima 1980), vol. 1, 83. The author of this work belonged to a family of Cuzco notables, on whom see Bernard Lavallé, Le Marquis et le Marchand. Les luttes de pouvoir au Cuzco (1700–1730), Paris (1987). Eight months earlier, in July 1533, the Spanish invaders of the Inca empire, led by Francisco Pizarro, had executed Manco's brother, the Inca Atahuallpa. Shortly thereafter, they named Manco as the next ruler, while at the same time occupying the capital. Although, therefore, the victory being celebrated had been won under Spanish tutelage, some part of the traditional ceremonial was performed on this occasion, and affords a glimpse of the functioning of Cuzco as an imperial capital, of political relationships among the Inca elite, and of the vision of the past that gave meaning to these relationships.

On May 29, 1996, travelers visiting Istanbul witnessed a rather peculiar celebration. A group of burly men dressed in Ottoman military clothing, some wearing false moustaches, were dragging a decorated sailboat along the asphalt road toward the central Taksim Square. Although it was no easy task to drag the sailboat uphill under the hot sun and the curious gaze of tourists on this summer day, the laboring men nevertheless displayed a solemn attitude of resolve and austerity, as if to remind the observing public of the grave significance of the historical event they were commemorating.

In the age of Hindu identity politics (Hindutva) inaugurated in the 1990s by the ascendancy of the Indian People's Party (Bharatiya Janata Party) and its ideological auxiliary, the World Hindu Council (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), Indian cultural and religious nationalism has been promulgating ever more distorted images of India's past. Few things are as central to this revisionism as Sanskrit, the dominant culture language of precolonial southern Asia outside the Persianate order. Hindutva propagandists have sought to show, for example, that Sanskrit was indigenous to India, and they purport to decipher Indus Valley seals to prove its presence two millennia before it actually came into existence. In a farcical repetition of Romantic myths of primevality, Sanskrit is considered—according to the characteristic hyperbole of the VHP—the source and sole preserver of world culture. The state's anxiety both about Sanskrit's role in shaping the historical identity of the Hindu nation and about its contemporary vitality has manifested itself in substantial new funding for Sanskrit education, and in the declaration of 1999–2000 as the “Year of Sanskrit,” with plans for conversation camps, debate and essay competitions, drama festivals, and the like.The VHP assessment is cited in Bhattacharji 1990; see also Goldman 1996 and Ramaswamy 1999. A recent review of Hindutva fantasy (and fraud) about indigenous Sanskrit is found in Witzel and Farmer 2000. The “Year of Sanskrit” runs for “Yugābda 5101,” the year of the Kaliyuga dating system now apparently in use by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (“Times of India,” Bombay ed., December 10, 1999).

This volume represents a wide range of disciplines—English, anthropology, history, Irish and European studies, sociology, and geography—and deals with both Ireland and Northern Ireland, stretching from the late eighteenth century to the present. Editors Marilyn Cohen and Nancy J. Curtin define their project as a theoretical analysis of gender, an approach that results in compelling revisions of Irish studies, as well as contributions to gender and feminist theory relevant beyond the geographical focus of the book. For an indication of the range of topics addressed, consider articles by Cohen, Jane Gray, and Gordon Bigelow, which demonstrate how attention to gender can offer insights into migration, industrialization, and domestic economy.

Inner Asian nomadism is often conceived as a self-contained way of life driven to obsolescence by modernity, as in Nikita Mikhalkov's critically-acclaimed film “Close to Eden” (1991). Social anthropologists Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath offer an extensive fieldwork-based study of Inner Asian “mobile pastoralists”—a term they use to avoid the holistic overtones of “nomadism.” They reveal mobile pastoralism as a flexible “series of local knowledges and techniques located in particular historical circumstances” that are applicable to a range of institutional contexts, deployable as part of “technologically advanced and profit-oriented economic activity,” and even compatible with an urbanized lifestyle. Rigorously grounded in a set of ten case-study sites throughout post-socialist Russia, Mongolia, and China, the book shows how speci- ficities in local cultures, regional environments, and state policies differentially inflect global market forces, yielding divergent social and economic outcomes. True to the strengths of British social anthropology, the authors bring out the ways in which new forms of social networks that cross-cut ties of kinship, ethnicity, class, and proximity are shaping the economic and institutional frameworks in which pastoralism will continue to develop throughout this region.

The aim of this book is to explore the practical consequences of chivalric codes in medieval Europe. Strickland strips away the romance of chivalry and exposes the systematic rationality that lay behind the antagonistic behavior of Europe's warrior aristocracy. It is easy enough to appreciate how the ravaging of enemy territory was a calculated act of war and profit, but Strickland shows how even chivalric codes, of which respite, ransom, and honorable treatment of opponents are but a few examples, were conventions adopted by the warrior caste to limit death and injury among themselves. That foot soldiers, crossbowmen, and Celtic pastoralists were not covered by these conventions is made brutally obvious by the mutual massacres that characterized relations between knights and plebeians. The codes were not always followed within the warrior aristocracy, of course, but such cases of abrogation were often either the consequences of a noble feud or tactical moves in the game of legitimation and coalition-building. When kings executed baronial rebels, Strickland argues, this implied that their rebellion had pushed them outside the covenants of chivalry.

The Origins and Demise of South African Apartheid explores the foundations of apartheid political economy in South Africa, its development and the factors that promoted its collapse. The authors use rational-choice theory to reconceptualize the political economy of apartheid, arguing that apartheid was not an immutable, “irrational” form of racism, but rather a redistributive policy designed to benefit whites. In general, the authors contend, the ability of economic interest groups like white workers and capitalists to prevail on the state to meet their interests depended on certain characteristics, like size of organization, which affected their capacity to organize effectively. Lowenberg and Kaempfer further argue that international economic sanctions were of limited importance in ending apartheid: economic and political sanctions imposed by the U.S. and other advanced industrialized countries were supposedly ineffective in part because those sanctions appeared “to reflect the exigencies of interest group policies within the sanctioning countries . . . without regard to their target” (119–20).