On 2 October 1952, marking Gandhi's fourth birth anniversary after his assassination in 1948, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of postcolonial India, launched the Community Development (CD) Programs. Dedicating the programs to Gandhi's memory allowed Nehru to claim symbolic legitimacy for them. At the same time, this centerpiece of Nehruvian policy in the Indian countryside was heavily interventionist, billed as “the method ... through which the [state] seeks to bring about social and economic transformation in India's villages” (Government of India 1952). In its heyday, CD preoccupied the Planning Commission, was linked to the office of the Prime Minister, had a ministry dedicated to it, and formed part of the domain of action of the rapidly proliferating state and other development agencies. Fifteen pilot projects, each covering 300 villages, were launched in all the major states. Planning documents of the day register high enthusiasm and optimism for these programs. However, by the mid-1960s, barely a decade after the fanfare of its launch, the tone of planners toward CD turned first despairing and then oppositional. They called for abandonment of its ambitious aim of the total development of Indian villages in favor of more focused interventions to achieve a rapid increase in food-grain production.

When I was a girl, I was taught not to gossip by a school game. We would sit in a circle, and someone would whisper a phrase into the ear of the person sitting next to her. By the time the phrase was returned to the first speaker, it was totally deformed—hilarious proof that hearsay distorted facts. I had already published a book based extensively on oral interviews when I realized how insidious this game was, that it rested on two extremely authoritarian principles: Information should be transmitted passively, and no one has the right to alter or amend received statements.

Nowadays, life itself is one of the most active zones of capitalist production. Not only has biology been upgraded to Big Science, biological material and information are increasingly the subject of engineering, banking, reproduction, and exchange. The description and broad implications of the refiguring of life itself and its intrusion into economics and politics represent some of the most important issues on the academic agenda at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Pálsson 2007). Foucault's works on biopolitics (see, for instance, Foucault 1994) have obviously contributed critical insights with respect to the current refashioning of the human body, illuminating the political and governmental dimensions of these developments (Inda 2005; Rose 2006; Gottweis and Peterson 2008; Nowotny and Testa 2009; Lock and Nguyen 2009). Recently, a series of scholars have revisited the early writings of Marx, sometimes in combination with Foucauldian perspectives, in their attempt to make sense of the political economy of modern biotechnology, including the fragmenting of body parts and the labor process involved. One of the emerging themes in current discussions relates to the conception and role of labor in the reproduction of bodies and body parts. While Marx may not be an obvious source of innovative perspectives on the modern production of human biovalue, a somewhat unique industry that had not arrived in his time, his early works offer useful insights into contemporary developments.

A decade ago, most African states had proclaimed their commitment to centralized planning and administration. At the end of European rule, African leaders saw their countries as poor and malintegrated, but with great potential. That potential could be realized, they thought, only through firm central direction. Scarce resources, including capital and technology, had to be coordinated effectively and managed carefully. The few skilled personnel had to be located at key points. And the divisive tendencies of regional, religious, and ethnic differences had to be constrained by a centralized, national authority.

Following Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), there has been considerable interest in studying gender images and engendered practices that emerged out of colonialism, both during the era of colonialism (Cooper and Stoler 1997; R. Lewis 1996; Stoler 1991; 1995; 2002), and subsequently (Altman 2001; Enloe 1993). Many of these studies have shown how colonized women were subject to the gendered and often sexualized gaze of Western men (Carrier 1998; Doy 1996; Grewal 1996; Yegenoglu 1998), and how colonized men were often regarded as either effeminate or “martial” by virtue of their birth into a particular group. Arguably, the latent ambiguity of regarding all colonized men as effete, and yet categorizing some colonized men as strong and aggressively virile, points to one of the many complex contradictions manifest in the cultural politics of colonialism. A similar point could be made with regard to nationalism, wherein women, and the image men want women to present of themselves, reflects masculine ambivalence about modernity (Chatterjee 1993). In any case, even when colonial discourse essentializes the virile masculinity of various subject groups—in particular the so-called martial castes of South Asia (Hopkins 1889; MacMunn 1977)—the putative masculinity of these groups is ascribed to breeding and latent “savagery,” and is rarely, if ever, conceived of as an achieved status, much less something an individual from some other group might achieve on the basis of training or practice.

The role of language in the processes of state formation and challenges to state authority is insufficiently understood. What interests do rulers have in unifying their realms linguistically? Under what conditions do subjects from upper and lower strata in linguistically distinct regions of a state change their language repertoires in accordance with the dictates of rulers? To what extent is language change a response to political, as opposed to economic or demographic, factors? Under what conditions do languages that face extinction become the object of revival movements?

In the beginning of the world we had the forge and we forged things, we had weavinglooms and we wove our clothes, we had oracle huts where we consulted the oracle, and we had boats from which we caught fish. We had no guns. We had no cowrie-money (akwá). If you went to the market you took beans in order to exchange them for sweet potatoes. You exchanged something specific for something else. Then the king brought the cowrie-money. What did the king do in order to bring the cowrie-money? He caught people and broke their legs and their arms.

In this paper I shall attempt to consider how far the history of historiography can be treated as the history of the problems occasioned by men's awareness of the past in different societies, and of their attempts to deal with these problems. This kind of approach has not, so far as I know, been made before. That is to say, the history of historiography has not been approached as primarily a part of the history of social man's awareness of his past and his relations with it; and this is understandable enough, as the historical phenomena we call by the collective name of historiography have been by no means limited to the attempts made by historians and other thinkers to understand the past and its relationship to the present.

All the elements of twentieth-century politics in Tamilnadu cohere in 1918–1919: human and natural rights, women's rights, the labor movement, linguistic nationalism, and even the politics of caste reservation. Much has been written of how this politics was mediated by newspapers, handbills, and chapbooks, and the dominant narrative of such events privileges the circulation of print and print culture of vernacular language. This paper explores the relatively lesser-known story of the role and impact of vernacular oratory on the development of the mass political in Tamilnadu from the Swadeshi movement (1905–1908) to the formation of labor unions (1917–1919), and the explicit attempt to persuade non-elites into speech, action, and ultimately politics. I argue that Tamil oratory was an infrastructural element in the production of the political, at least the political as we understand it in twentieth-century Tamilnadu, where oratory became the defining activity of political practice. When elites made the conscious move to begin addressing the common man, when Everyman was called to join into the political, a new agency was formed along with a new definition of what politics would look like. The paper considers what such new agency and definitions entail in pursuit of a better understanding of what constitutes the political generally and the Tamil political in particular.

Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy made explicit an influential but usually unstated principle for comparative political sociology. In his search for the social sources of different sorts of political systems, Moore devoted chapters to revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary upheavals in England, France, the United States, Japan, China, and India. He did not feel it equally important to consider the history of democracy in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, or Switzerland (not to mention Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). The lesser players on the world stage, buffeted by the prestigious ideologies of the greater players, tied to the latter's economies and sometimes assaulted by their armies, are less rewarding as research sites for comparativists looking for distinct national “cases” to test their ideas. Small, weaker powers are not, in this reasoning, independent cases of anything. One presumes the same logic led Moore to include only third world giants like China and India and not the many other countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Characteristically, it is Germany and Russia that Moore regards as the most significant cases of democratic failure omitted from his study: not Spain or Italy, let alone Bolivia or Burma.Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), pp. xi–xiii. Moore went on to tackle the missing German case in Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1978) and, more briefly, the Russian in Authority and Inequality Under Capitalism and Socialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). In many a theory of “modernization,” England—or England and France—have been taken as prototypes or paradigmatic cases, and the broad outlines of their histories are therefore far more likely to have entered the education of American sociologists than the histories of other places in Europe or beyond. Sometimes the presumed centrality of one or more of these cases is made explicit, sometimes not.

A superficial view of what happens when a large number of people forsake their former religion for a new one is that some of the old beliefs become mixed with the new. It is a commonplace to hear that folk Catholicism is mixed with pagan survivals, or that newly converted African Christians are “not real Christians” or “have a veneer of Christianity”, because they have not totally abandoned all that they once believed. Such a judgment, however ethnocentric, would be pardonable in a European missionary who held a particular view of Christianity, which itself furnished a clear criterion of “real Christianity”. But similar opinions are often expressed by sociologists and anthropologists who profess themselves neutral with respect to religious belief. They are usually interested in “acculturation” or “culture contact” and consider it of great moment to be able to say how far any particular belief or practice lies along a continuum whose poles are marked “traditional” and “acculturated”. Such assumptions underlay Malinowski's much criticized scheme for the analysis of culture-contact in Africa and the great bulk of the work, by Linton, Wallace, Lanternari and others, on independent religious movements. This tradition of interpretation is still very much alive.

The British nation is proud of having administered justice to oriental peoples with impartiality and integrity, conscious of the Roman example. These qualities were thought to have been lacking before the British period, and to the extent to which British standards are respected since British rule ceased that heritage is usually considered a ground for pride. Anthropologists have raised, indeed, some doubts. These would have astonished those who introduced British techniques during the critical periods. To them it was self-evident that the strides made in English constitutional history, for example that towards the “Rule of Law”, should redound to the advantage of dependent peoples; it was unthinkable that Britons should communicate less than they themselves had acquired. That they might be doing “harm“ thereby never occurred to them; and indeed it is far from established that they did. It is possible now, however, to take an objective view, and, without passing premature judgments, to observe closely what happened in a country where the process was uniquely difficult: and to see the immediate results of the process.

In 1866, the Atlantic Monthly published a fictional case study of an army surgeon who had lost all of his limbs during the Civil War. Written anonymously by American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, “The Case of George Dedlow” describes not only the series of wounds and infections which led to the amputation of all four of the soldier's arms and legs but also the after-effects of amputation. Reduced to what he terms “a useless torso, more like some strange larval creature than anything of human shape,” Dedlow finds that in disarticulating his body, amputation articulates anatomical norms. His observation of his own uniquely altered state qualifies him to speak in universal terms about the relationship between sentience and selfhood: “I have dictated these pages,” he says, “not to shock my readers, but to possess them with facts in regard to the relation of the mind to the body” (1866:5). As such, the story explores the meaning of embodiment, finding in a fragmented anatomy the opportunity to piece together a more complete understanding of how the body functions—physically and metaphysically—as a whole.

'A revolution', writes Samuel P. Huntington in Political Order in Changing Societies, 'is a rapid, fundamental, and violent domestic change in the dominant values arfd myths of a society, in its political institutions, social structure, leadership, and government activities and policies'.1 In The Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Lenin provides a different, but complementary perspective: 'Revolutions', he says, 'are the festivals of the oppressed and the exploited. At no other time are the masses of the people in a position to come forward so actively as creators of a new social order'.

On various occasions civilized man has found himself marching side by side with men at lower (or different) levels of social and cultural development. The great civilizations were accustomed to compare themselves quite favorably with these barbarian neighbors, whom they viewed with varying degrees of condescension, suspicion, scorn, and dread. Civilized man, with his urban institutions, his agrarian way of life, his technological and economic sophistication, and his conspicuous literary and plastic artistry, conceived of himself as superior to these other folk with whom he sometimes competed for domination of the richer parts of the world. Long before the ancient Greeks invented the word ‘barbarian’ to describe the Scythians and other peoples who differed from them in not subscribing to the ideals of Greek culture, other civilized men had expressed similar sentiments toward alien peoples with whom they came into contact. This was the point that the old Akkadian author was trying to make when he spoke of neighboring tribes as people ‘who knew not grain’ and who ‘had never known a city’.* Subsequently, both in Asia and Europe the spokesmen of a civilized style of life expressed their dislike or distrust of the barbarian by means of a stereotyped image of him which was couched in terms favorable to civilization. A Chinese chronicler, for example, remarked of the fierce Hsiung-Nu, who troubled the peace of the Middle Kingdom, that ‘their only concern is self-advantage, and they know nothing of propriety and righteousness’.

In southern Ghana, where I have been conducting research on the genesis of popular Christianity for almost twenty years, Christian imagery is everywhere. The Ghanaian state re-adopted a democratic constitution in 1992, and this was followed by a liberalization and commercialization of mass media, which in turn facilitated the spread of Pentecostalism in the public sphere (see De Witte 2008; Gifford 2004; Meyer 2004a). Within this process, Christian pictures have become ubiquitous. Pentecostal-charismatic churches assert their public presence and power via television, radio, posters, and stickers, and there has also emerged a new public culture rife with Christian imagery. This visual and aural expansion of Christianity and its particular aesthetic severely challenges what is being called African Traditional religion, and clashes with initiatives developed by the state and intellectuals to secure a national heritage.

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).

A great deal of research over the past decade or so has been concerned with understanding the processes of objectification of “custom” or “traditional culture” in Melanesia and other parts of the South Pacific, reifications which have accompanied, or are accompanying, the emergence of new ethnic and national identities (see, for instance, Jolly and Thomas 1992b; Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Linnekin and Poyer 1990a; Norton 1993). As Foster (1992:284) among others has noted, colonialism has been viewed in much of this research as the key factor giving rise to these hypostatisations of culture, especially hypostatisations involving objectifications of entire “traditional” ways of life as cultural wholes.

Summary of Argument

It has long been recognized that upper class Romans in their desire for small families practised abortion on a large scale. What is not well known is the extent to which these same upper class Romans were concerned with contraception. Some of the methods advocated by Greek and Roman doctors could have been very effective, and aspects of ancient contraceptive theory were as advanced as any modern theory before the middle of the 19th century. Such contraceptive theory was part of a lively literary medical tradition, appearing first in Aristotle and in the Hippocratic Corpus; its repeated appearance in our fragmentary sources, when considered together with the organization of doctors’ training, argues for its significance in medical practice, at least among the upper class. Nonetheless, the total effect of contraception upon fertility in Rome cannot be seen only in these terms.

It is well known that upon emerging victorious from the Mexican Revolution in 1920, the Constitutionalists confronted a dilemma. Having defeated the popular armies of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, they believed that they had won the right to construct a postrevolutionary state reflecting their interests. Yet the spectors of the popular armies were to haunt them. The new revolutionary elites were forced to determine how to create a state in their own Constitutionalist image and simultaneously how to avoid provoking further popular insurrection.