The still modest literature devoted to the history of the family in Brazil offers two conflicting interpretations of elite family organization. On the one hand, scholars have often ascribed an exaggerated organizing propensity to the elite extended family or parentela. Gilberto Freyre's early identification of ‘patriarchal cohesion’ as the foundation of Brazilian national organization persisted as the conventional wisdom until very recently. For Freyre, the elite patriarchal family assumed a ‘civilizing’ mission by imposing solidarity and order in an otherwise disorganized social milieu. Other commentators have been less impressed with the elite family's achievements over time. For them, Brazil's great families were disorganized, destructively violent, and even ‘schools of vice.’ Oliveira Viana, who probably best summed up the limitations of elite family organization, argued that the extended family (clã parental) lacked a common life except in crisis situations when its solidarity was only ephemerally evident.

The Parisian Faubourg Saint Germain and perhaps the Rue de la Paix and the boulevards seemed the adequate measure of luxury to all of the snobs. The old colonial shell of the Latin American cities little approximated such scenery. The example of Baron de Haussmann and his destructive example strengthened the decision of the new bourgeoisies who wished to erase the past, and some cities began to transform their physiognomy: a sumptuous avenue, a park, a carriage promenade, a luxurious theater, modern architecture revealed that decision even when they were not always able to banish the ghost of the old city. But the bourgeoisies could nourish their illusions by facing one another in the sophisticated atmosphere of an exclusive club or a deluxe restaurant. There they anticipated the steps that would transmute “the great village” into a modern metropolis.

—José Luis Romero

In the general election of 1886 Dadhabai Naoroji (1825–1917), one-time Bombay mathematics professor and longtime Parsi merchant-entrepreneur, ran on the Liberal ticket for the constituency of Holborn and lost, with a total of 1,950 votes against 3,651 cast in favor of the Tory candidate, Colonel Duncan.R. P. Masani, Dadhabai Naoroji: The Grand Old Man of India (London: George Allen Unwin, 1939), 247. Naoroji's candidacy received little publicity outside Holborn itself and indeed, but for Naoroji's second bid for a parliamentary seat in 1892 the Holborn debacle might have gone unnoticed in the annals of parliamentary history, as did the attempts of two compatriots: David Octerlony Dyce Sombre, who was elected for Sudbury in 1841; and Lal Mohan Ghose, who ran as a Liberal candidate for Deptford just a few years before Naoroji.Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947 (London, Pluto, 1986), 78; see also S. R. Mehrotra, The Emergence of the Indian National Congress (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 405 and ff. Dyce Sombre (1808–1851) was a person of mixed Indian and European ancestry who, despite the fact this his election was “controverted” the next year, did sit and vote on several bills. I am indebted to Michael Fisher for this information. See his entry on Dyce Sombre in The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Even so, Naoroji's accomplishment—i.e., election to the House of Commons as the spokesman for a colonial territory that many contemporaries, even those who were sympathetic to the cause of India, scarcely recognized as a legitimate nation, let alone a viable electoral constituency—remains one of the last untold narratives in the high political history of the Victorian period.Though he ran for a London constituency and was its official representative, Naoroji was also, and consistently, viewed as “the representative for India” to the House of Commons. This omission persists despite the availability of information on Naoroji's career in Britain through the work of Rozina Visram and others, not to mention the attention given to it in the contemporary Victorian press. More remarkable still, Naoroji's bid for parliamentary representation as an Indian for “India” remains obscure despite recent attempts to understand how thoroughly empire helped to constitute “domestic” politics and society across the long nineteenth century.See for example Jonathan Schneer's London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), which devotes an entire chapter to Naoroji but only briefly mentions the “Blackman” incident.

Primitive societies and barbarous societies and the historical societies of Europe and the East exhibit almost every conceivable variety of institutions, but in all of them, regardless of the form of social structure, men are always in the ascendancy, and this is perhaps the more evident the higher the civilization … so far as I can see, it is a plain matter of fact that it is so. Feminists have indeed said that this is because women have always been denied the opportunity of taking the lead; but we would still have to ask how it is that they have allowed the opportunity to be denied them …

The territories of the circum-Caribbean region contain some of the most complex societies in the world. Their complexity lies not in their size, degree of internal differentiation or technological development, but in the dependent and fragmented nature of their cultures, the ethnic diversity of their populations, the special nature of their dependent economies, the peculiarities of their political development and the apparent incoherence of their social institutions. It has been suggested that many Caribbean societies have no history of their own but should be viewed as an extension of Europe. Dr. Eric Williams, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, has recently written in reference to his country:

On August 31st 1962, a country will be free, a miniature state will be established, but a society and a nation will not have been formed.

This article uses the case of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to make a conceptual argument about sovereignty. Despite its aura of natural order, sovereignty is ultimately self-referential and thus somewhat arbitrary and potentially unstable. At the heart of this unsteadiness, we posit, lies the paradox between the systematic tenets of rational governance and the capricious potential of sublime violence. Both are highly relevant to the LTTE case: the movement created de facto state institutions to mimic governance, but simultaneously deployed an elaborate transcendental register of sacrifice, meaning, and intractable power wielded by a mythical leader. To capture this paradox, we connect the literature on rebel governance with anthropological debates about divine kingship. We conceptualize sovereignty as a citational practice that involves the adaptation, imitation, and mutation of different idioms of authority: political and religious, modern and traditional, rational and mythical. Understanding sovereignty in this way debunks the idea that insurgent movements are merely lagging behind established states. As sites of mimicry, bricolage, and innovation, they transform the way sovereignty is practiced and understood, thus affecting the frame that sovereignty is.

In the Global South since the 1980s, when economic downturns under pressure from the forces of neoliberalism eroded social relations, sport and athletes’ bodies have become major loci where masculinity is constituted and debated. Sport masculinity now fills a vacuum left by the evacuation of traditional forms of masculinity, which are no longer available to the new generations of men. For them, the possibility of employment in the sport industries in the Global North has had a transformative effect, despite the extremely limited probability of success. During the same period of time, the world of sport has become commoditized, mediatized, and corporatized, transformations that have been spearheaded by the growing importance of privatized media interests. Professional athletes have become neoliberal subjects responsible for their own destiny in an increasingly demanding and unpredictable labor market. In Cameroon, Fiji, and Senegal, athletic hopefuls prospectively embody this new gendered subjectivity by mobilizing locally available instruments that most closely resemble neoliberal subjectivity, such as Pentecostalism and maraboutism. Through the conduit of sport, the masculine self has been transformed into a neoliberal subject in locations where this is least expected. What emerges is a new approach to masculinity that eschews explanations based on the simple recognition of diverse and hierarchically organized masculinities, and instead recognizes masculinity in its different manifestations as embedded, scalar, relational, and temporally situated.

There is a curious awkwardness about discussions of “types” in comparative politics. Aristotle and Montesquieu taught us to proceed by classifications of regimes, and the current generation of computer enthusiasts have offered us more and more powerful tools for the handling of wide ranges of attributes of political entities and for the establishment of complex multi-dimensional typologies. Yet as soon as we are confronted with a concrete table of alternative types and look over the lists of cases assigned to each cell, our first reaction is almost immediately to add further distinctions, to reject the imposition of similarities across historically distinct units. The student of politics is torn between two sets of super-ego demands: he feels an obligation to reduce the welter of empirical facts to a body of parsimoniously organized general propositions but he also feels under pressure to treat each case sui generis, as a unique configuration worthy of an effort of understanding all on its own. This is of course a dilemma common to all social sciences but is particularly difficult to handle in the study of such highly visible, amply documented macro-units as historical polities. Students of census records, elections and survey data have an enormous analytical advantage: they deal with large numbers of anonymous units and can therefore proceed with the analysis of their data with a minimum of interference from exogenous “noise”. The student of comparative politics is roughly in the position of a social scientist asked to analyze the census records or the survey responses of a set of close friends: he cannot prevent himself from bringing into his analysis of the coded data on the punched cards a wide range of uncoded “surplus” information acquired through years of acquaintance with the subjects. The standardized sample survey derives great methodological strength from its programmatic insistence on equality, anonymity and distance in the treatment of the information collected: the data are given once and for all in the protocols or on the IBM cards and there is no allowance for fuzzy interaction with the subjects outside that framework.

On February 19, 1990 a national conference opened in Benin at the Hotel PLM-Aledjo in Cotonou. Participants included representatives of the ruling People's Revolutionary Party, trade unionists, civil servants, students, religious leaders, a few agricultural producers, elements of the military, former heads of state, as well as Beninese living and working abroad. Members of the diplomatic corps and officials from the international financial institutions (IFIs) were also in attendance. The conferees claimed to represent the nation in its entirey—toutes les forces vives de la nation, quoi quoi que soient leurs affinitées. In reality, they were drawn from the political class and the educated elites of civil society. President Mathieu Kérékou opened the conference with a call for political renewal and a pledge to implement the IMF's structural adjustment program. He focused on the country's severe economic crisis and called on the delegates to draw up a list of the problems to be addressed.

Over the 1990s, Western images of Africa became dominated by a social landscape of mobile people fleeing disaster. In the aftermath of the horrendous 1994 genocide in Rwanda, refugees and IDPs (“internally displaced people,” the term used for uprooted individuals within a state) were especially visible in Central Africa, but West Africa also was the locus of a series of complicated refugee movements (from Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, and elsewhere), and northeast Africa (Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia) generated many more. Such flight from fear, however, was not new to Africa. Many people had fled colonial extractions or had been forcibly moved for purposes of colonial labor; many more were caught up in precolonial relocations. Of course many were forcibly moved as well in the massive displacement of slaves from and within Africa, and voluntary movement was also common, for land, trade, or religious duty. Consequently, while in the West, Africa is often thought of as a continent in stasis, with the rural poor tied to their land, in fact, the historical record indicates that Africa has always been a continent of enormous mobility.

This essay explores Greek responses to the debt crisis, particularly middle-class Greeks and their current experiences of Greece's putative subordination to Germany in particular, and IMF and EU monitoring generally. I focus on the sphere of materiality and embodiment, while also exploring the role of desire and pleasure in Greeks’ responses to their growing sense of subordination. Graffiti, popular protests, hip-hop expressive culture, and sexual joking are lenses through which I examine these themes. I also scrutinize my own positionality as a way of understanding the bitterness and ambiguity entailed in Greek reactions to the crisis. The essay illuminates how Greeks experience subjugation and respond to it through explosive resort to historical comparisons, sexual metaphors, and ill-mannered jokes.

In the early nineteenth century, many private, well-to-do persons collected rocks, minerals, fossils, insects, skeletons, animal skins, Indian artifacts, and so on, for their aesthetic appeal or mystical connotations. Their fragmentary and miscellaneous collections incited wonder and admiration in those privileged to see them while communicating a narrative of the prestige, esoteric knowledge, and adventurous spirit of the collector. Referring to aesthetic and mystical, rather than scientific criteria, collectors juxtaposed a seemingly incongruous hodge-podge of objects in their cabinets—armadillos and ostrich eggs, quartz crystals and rattlesnake rattles, for example. These collectors sought to celebrate the stability of their belief systems through the commonly understood marginality of the strange freaks and curiosities that sparked their imaginations. The rare, abnormal, bizarre, and the old were especially valued.

Nationalism is a kind of ideology (or secular religion) which holds that there should be congruence between cultural boundaries and political ones (Gellner 1983; Anderson 1991 [1983]). This essay discusses what such congruence should entail; notably, whether or not it necessarily means that the members of a nation ought to belong to the same ethnic group for the concept of nationhood to be meaningful. The empirical material to be discussed in some detail derives from Mauritius, a polyethnic island state which is probably less atypical, globally speaking, than European evidence on nationalism may suggest. A main contention in the present essay is that nationalisms quite different from the European ones are being developed in various countries. Particular nationalisms, and perhaps especially emergent ones, ought therefore to be examined comparatively.

Theories about the politics and economics of resource-rich or “rentier” states have been around for almost four decades now (Mahdavy 1970; Beblawi 1987; Chaudhry 1997; Humphreys et al. 2007). Political scientists and economists have argued that rents have a negative impact on levels of democracy (Luciani 1987; Ross 2001), on the quality of institutions (Chaudhry 1997; Isham et al. 2005), and on economic growth (Sachs and Warner 2001). Although much debate has been conducted over these macro-correlations, far less attention has been devoted to the causal mechanisms behind them. There is still no unified theory of rentier states, and the micro-foundations of rentier systems in particular have gone largely unexplored.

In the century since Franz Boas began his field work on the Northwest Coast, the Kwakwaka'wakw1 potlatch has proved irresistible to the anthropological imagination. It has been variously interpreted as an interest-bearing investment of property (Boas 1897), as a demonstration of a paranoid, megalomaniacal personality (Benedict 1934), as a substitution for warfare (Codere 1950), as a means of distributing food (Piddcocke 1965; Vayda 1961), as a phenomenon of social morphology (Levi-Strauss 1969; Rosman and Rubel 1971), and as a religious event (Goldman 1975; Walens 1981). Indeed, an intellectual history of anthropology can now be written simply by examining how the Kwakwaka'wakw potlatch has served the various theoretical schools (see Michaelson 1979). If anything unites such disparate accounts, however, I suggest it is an underestimation of the impact of European colonization on Kwakwaka'wakw society.2 Our understanding of the nineteenth-century potlatch has been limited by a tendency to exclude Kwakwaka'wakw cosmology from the colonial power dynamic. This study contributes, then, to the longrunning, and at times vociferous, scholarly discourse on the potlatch by focusing directly on the cultural repercussions of the colonial experience. Consequently, it is not an analysis simply of the funding or logistics of exchange: This essay attempts to situate the cosmologies behind the gift in their changing historical context in order to assess the socio-cultural impact of the colonial encounter on native systems of belief.

The late colonial period was generally an era of anxiety for royal officials in Spanish America and its neighboring areas. To the turmoil caused by massive rebellions, especially in the early 1780s, was added the volatile political atmosphere resulting from the French Revolution. Several “seditious” incidents occurred subsequently throughout the colonial landscape. Both the popular rebellions prior to and the plots following the French Revolution were compounded by an increasing “public” awareness and discussion of politics and modern ideas.

One of the earliest and most highly developed areas of orientalist scholarly production was the study of Islamic law. Modern western investigation of Islamic law emerged during the era of European colonial expansion, and the first studies of the subject were written by citizens of the colonial powers, many of whom had lived in the colonies for extended periods. These men produced the first translations of legal texts, the first studies of individual legal institutions, and the first comprehensive studies of Islamic law, thereby laying the foundations for the modern discipline of Islamic legal history. Surprisingly, students of orientalism have devoted little attention to the colonials' views of Islamic law—that is, to the attitudes and assumptions that underlay their writings and interpretations—or to the impact of those views on the development of Islamic legal studies as a discipline.

Most runaway slave communities in the Americas were quickly overcome by whites. However, a good many of those communities not only survived but became legally recognized towns whose residents eventually blended into the surrounding population. The first part of this article attempts to demonstrate that, although whites managed to eventually destroy most New World fugitive slave settlements, a surprising number of them managed to survive. The second section analyzes the social, demographic, and economic changes that one such community, called Mandinga, went through in evolving from a runaway hideout to a legal township.

The first reports of popular disturbances in connection with Decree 798, calling for obligatory civil registration of births and deaths in the Brazilian empire, surfaced in the early days of January 1852. In the ensuing weeks, men, women, and children from across the impoverished northeastern Brazilian backlands convened in small settlements and towns to protest the decree. Local authorities reported being forced to abandon their posts, fleeing from the “mass of ignorants,” who, armed with knives and stones, threatened violence against those who would implement the law. Disturbances were reported in at least thirty-one localities, with crowds estimated at one hundred to several thousand people.

This essay presents a study of the influence of certain cultural, social, and architectural factors upon the meaning and use of domestic space. It attempts to promote an understanding of the history of the kinds of ideas which are invested in the spatial form and use of houses. In addition, it establishes the principle that the meaning and use of domestic space are not intrinsic to a set of physical characteristics, nor the nomenclature applied to rooms and their facilities.