In 1985 Edmund Leach, well into retirement from his chair of Anthropology in Cambridge, made his first visit to the site of the temple of Diana at Nemi, some fifteen miles southeast of Rome.Leach called this visit a pilgrimage, for Nemi and the problems of its bizarre cult were the starting place for James Frazer's founding work of Social Anthropology, The Golden Bough. This was the spot that Frazer described in such lavish detail in his opening chapter: ‘the sylvan landscape [that] was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy.’ This was the setting for the problem that Frazer set out to solve: Why in Roman times could the priest-king of the sacred grove of Nemi (the so-called Rex Nemorensis) win his priestly office only by killing the previous incumbent; why would he himself lose it only through murder at the hands of his successor? For those who see Frazer's work as the start of anthropological study in its modern sense, the site and the cult of Nemi must hold a particular place: This colourful, but minor, backwater of Roman religion marks the source of the discipline of Social Anthropology.

Shortly before Vasco da Gama returned to Lisbon in September 1499 from his great voyage to India, a Florentine merchant in the Portuguese capital reported troubling rumors that ‘certain vessels of white Christians’ had visited the port of Calicut on the Malabar coast only a couple of generations previously. If true, this would mean that some other European power had beaten Portugal in its long search for a maritime route to the Indies. After speculating that the mysterious mariners were Germans (although ‘it seems to me that we should have some notice about them’) or Russians (‘if they have a port there’), the merchant concluded that ‘on the arrival of the captain [da Gama] we may learn who these people are.’

English cheeses—Cheddar, Gloucester single or double, Cheshire, Stilton, and others—are familiar throughout the Anglo-American world, whether consumed after dinner in English homes or as key ingredients of American tex-mex or vegetarian cuisine. These famous cheeses originated long ago but in most cases reached a zenith in quantity and in reputation during the last century. Little is known about the history of English cheese dairying, despite its fame and its importance to agriculture past and present. Its economic background has received only slight attention, and its social history is almost entirely unexplored; yet clearly the social structure of English cheese dairying has historically exerted a major influence on the industry, because it traditionally depended upon a distinctive sexual division of labor. The history of women's work in English cheese dairying has implications for a broader historiographical question: When and why did women gradually disappear from many kinds of agricultural work in Western societies?

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Argentina and Canada experienced unprecedented economic growth. In the period stretching from 1890 to 1914, Argentina and Canada played host to millions of migrating Europeans and became the largest borrowers on the world's capital markets. The infusion of foreign labour and capital helped to convert the empty grasslands into bread baskets for the world.

The expansion was propelled by crops in the export sector, mainly cereals cultivated on the Argentine pampas and the Canadian prairies. By the early years of this century, wheat became the premier export for both countries, and eventually ranked among the world's top cereal exporters. After World War I, both countries combined to supply around 60 percent of the world's total wheat export trade.1 Argentina and Canada exemplified what was beneficial about export-led development.

When George Balandier proposed his theoretical approach to a colonial situation, the colonization of language was not an issue that piqued the interest of scholars in history, sociology, economics, or anthropology, which were the primary disciplines targeted in his article. When some fifteen years later Michel Foucault underlined the social and historical significance of language (‘l'énoncé*’) and discursive formation, the colonization of language was still not an issue to those attentive to the archaeology of knowledge. Such an archaeology, founded on the paradigmatic example generally understood as the Western tradition, overlooked the case history in which an archaeology of discursive formation would have led to the very root of the massive colonization of language which began in the sixteenth century with the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires.

Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, it has been difficult for anthropology to avoid the fact that its own discourse is ever entangled in a whole Western archive. What became clear, of course, was that the categories through which anthropology constructs descriptions and analyses of the social discourses and practices of non-Western peoples are themselves participants in a network of relations of knowledge and power. Interestingly enough, however, whereas the general import of this Foucauldian thesis has now been quickly assimilated, its challenge has hardly been taken up in terms of tracing out the lines of formation of specific anthropological, or, let us say, anthropologized, concepts.

Colonial discourse, sometimes referred to in the singular, seems unmanageably vast and heterogeneous, for it must encompass not only the broad field of colonialism's relations and representations which constitutes or arises from the business of official rule, including administrative reports and censuses, but also the works of metropolitan literature and other forms of high culture which deploy images of the exotic or the primitive, paintings of unfamiliar landscapes, tourist guides, anthropological studies, and Oriental fabric designs. Colonial discourse includes chinoiserie, Kim, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Camus' Algerian stories, Frans Post, and Indiana Jones, as well as the Vital Statistics of the Native Population for the Year 1887 and the annual reports from wherever.