Efforts to theorize pluralism have often explored the challenges posed by the public visibility of ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian differences to modernist imaginaries of a homogeneous national body. In this essay, I examine a context in which public expressions of communal differences re-inscribe the categories of the nation they were meant to contest. The situation reveals what I call a paradox of pluralism.

The Gullah/Geechee people are the locus classicus for the study of “African survivals” in North American culture. As such, they have been saddled with the duty to generate universal principles for the explanation of Africans’ acculturation, adaptation, and cultural resistance in the Western hemisphere, and they provide the main North American test case for explanatory principles generated elsewhere in the Americas. Yet, the well-studied Gullah/Geechee case, like the Afro-Atlantic world generally, holds untapped lessons about the historical genesis of cultures and ethnic identities worldwide. Is isolation the normal precondition and conservator of cultural and ethnic distinctiveness? And do the enslaved and their descendants choose their ancestors’ ways and identities mainly when and where isolation from the oppressor has made the oppressor's cultural alternatives unavailable? The existing literature on the Gullah/Geechee people of the southeastern U.S. coast and islands says “yes” to these questions, which also stand at the heart of both black Atlantic and global cultural history.

Although the concept of social banditry has received much critical attention since E. Hobsbawm published his book in 1969, the debate so far has perhaps been narrowly focused (Blok 1972; Vanderwood 1981; Dreissen 1983; Hart 1987; Koliopoulos 1987). Too often that debate has been framed in terms of whether bandits either express pre-political sentiments or prevent the emergence of peasant solidarity, rather than in terms of which types of rural structures encourage its emergence and reproduction, the psychology and sociology of terror, and how bandit myths may be created and used within nation-states or societies aspiring to nationhood.

On 28 January 2011 the Egyptian army was deployed onto Cairo's streets following three days of escalating protests. Upon entering Midan al-Tahrir, a column of newly arriving army tanks and APCs was attacked by protestors. Throwing stones and dousing the vehicles in petrol before setting them alight, protestors pulled soldiers out of their vehicles and beat them. Seizing ammunition and supplies, protestors even commandeered a tank. Minutes later those same protestors were chanting pro-army slogans, posing for photographs with soldiers and sharing food. How protestors respond to the deployment of security forces assumed loyal to a regime determined to end protest is often summed-up in the dyad of “fight or flight.” In this paper, I consider a third option: fraternization. Through a social interactionist lens, I explore the prevalence of pro-army chants, graffiti, the mounting of military vehicles, physical embraces, sleeping in tank tracks and posing for photographs with soldiers in and around Midan al-Tahrir during the 25th January Egyptian Revolution. I draw on the contentious politics literature, as well as micro-sociologies of violence and ritual, to suggest that fraternizing protestors developed a repertoire of contention that made immediate, emotional claims on the loyalty of regime troops. From initial techniques of micro-conflict avoidance, protestors and their micro-interactions with soldiers forged a precarious “internal frontier” that bifurcated governance from sovereignty through the performance of the army and the people as one hand in opposition to the Mubarak regime.

By examining three historical stages between 1914 and the late 1950s in the development of African political ideology in Francophone West Africa, this essay will explore the problem represented by the category of the colonized.1 This category, first formulated in 1961 by Frantz Fanon, has increasingly been used to revise understandings of African ideologies formed before 1960 in terms of political economy. Indeed, ever since Fanon published his polemical, The Wretched of the Earth (1968), the rage of the colonized has been naturalized in academic literature as the reaction to colonization. Yet in arguing that the rage of the peasants did not characterize the reaction of the “most completely” colonized (the elites and merchants), Fanon acknowledged that rage did not define the position of his elite predecessors. Fanon's work appeared in the twilight of the colonial era not as a dispassionate analysis but as a call to action. He intended to awaken the peasant's rage, which he considered the legitimate and local reaction to colonialism, within the elites, who did not share this attitude towards the colonizer.

Mexico's most famous holiday is, without doubt, the Day of the Dead. At the end of October, large numbers of foreign visitors descend upon Mexico to witness colorful—some would say carnivalesque—ritual performances and artistic displays. Decorated breads, paper cutouts, and plastic toys, most of them humorously playing on the theme of death, are evident everywhere. Sculpted sugar candies in the form of skulls, skeletons, and caskets suggest an almost irreverent, macabre confrontation with mortality. During November 1 and November 2, Mexicans clean, decorate, and maintain vigil over the graves of relatives. Tombstones and burial sites are adorned with flowers, candles, and food, all aesthetically arranged in honor of the deceased. Some Mexicans claim that the souls of the departed watch over their living relatives during these few days. Negligent family members await punishment, whether on earth or in the afterlife. This belief is invoked throughout Mexico to explain the substantial time, money, and energy invested in the two-day ceremony.

In the Tibetan Buddhist monastery town of Labrang, located in southwest Gansu Province, China, the past is a heavy, and very often hidden, burden for residents and visitors alike (figure 1). This is not readily apparent amidst the bustling ‘nowness’ of commercial activities in this tourist site and model town for the profitable coexistence of Tibetan Buddhist monasticism and Chinese state-sponsored development goals. But as I discovered over the course of my fieldwork there in the mid-1990s, and again in the summer of 2002, for a population living with unsanctioned memories of the traumatic ruptures of the Chinese Communist-led revolution beginning in 1949, the ‘unsaid’ of history spoke loudly in implication—in implied dialogue with multimedia official histories, in the gaps in written and oral chronologies of events, in the revived performance of the lay and monastic ritual calendars, and in the dodges and silences of my Tibetan interlocutors during our many conversations about their pasts: “I don't know anything! I'm too young, you know!” (Tibetan [Tib.] ngas shes ni ma red, nga lo chung gi mo). Ama Drolma, a village matriarch in her late fifties, repeated this adamantly to me after I and my Tibetan woman assistant had asked her for a taped interview about local “history” (Tib. lo rgyus). She would hear none of our explanations about my interest in people's personal histories and insisted that I seek out old men, they would know about “early, early, early times” (Tib. sngan na sngan na sngan na).

The Canadian government recently concluded a series of land claim and self-government agreements with many First Nations in the Yukon Territory. A result of First Nation claims to land and sovereignty in the region, these modern treaties grant First Nations some real powers of self-governance. They are framed in the idiom of sovereignty, but they also compel First Nation people to accept—in practice if not in theory—a host of Euro-American assumptions about power and governance that are implicit in such a framing. This article focuses on a central premise of the sovereignty concept: territorial jurisdiction. The Yukon agreements carve the Yukon into fourteen distinct First Nation “traditional territories.” Although many assume that these territories reflect “traditional” patterns of land-use and occupancy, indigenous society in the Yukon was not composed of distinct political entities each with jurisdiction over its own territory. Thus, the agreements do not simply formalize jurisdictional boundaries among pre-existing First Nation polities; rather, they are mechanisms for creating the legal and administrative systems that bring those polities into being. The powers these agreements confer come in the territorial currency of the modern state, and territorialization processes they engender are transforming First Nation society in radical and often unintended ways. One significant aspect of this transformation is the emergence of multiple ethno-territorial identities, and corresponding nationalist sentiments. I examine these processes by focusing on two cases of contemporary boundary making among Yukon First Nations.

On 30 January 2004, after months of negotiations between Hizbullah and the state of Israel via German mediators, a major exchange of bodies and prisoners was completed. In return for a kidnapped Israeli citizen—alleged to belong to Israeli intelligence services—and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers captured three years previously, Israel released twenty-nine Lebanese and other Arab prisoners, the remains of fifty-nine Lebanese citizens, and, astonishingly, 400 Palestinian prisoners. The prisoner release was something of a coup for Hizbullah and its success led Hizbullah on 12 July 2006 to emulate the same capture operation hoping to precipitate the release of the last remaining Lebanese prisoners in Israeli prisons. In 2004, many from across the political spectrum in Lebanon and Palestine praised Hizbullah's achievement. In Beirut, the welcoming ceremonies for the released Palestinian prisoners were awash in both Palestinian and Lebanese flags. Among the celebrants were tens of thousands of Palestinians. The superior effectiveness of Hizbullah in comparison with then Palestinian leadership was not lost on observers. After all, in its most successful negotiations with the Israeli state the previous August, then Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen had been able to secure the release of only 338 Palestinian prisoners of Israel, most of whom had reached the end of their terms anyway. In his welcoming speech to his Palestinian and Lebanese audience, Hizbullah Secretary General, Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah, further took a swipe at the Fatah-dominated Palestinian National Authority (PNA) by insisting that “We should not fall under any illusions and let ourselves believe that peaceful negotiations are an alternative to military resistance. Effective [military] resistance was the main factor behind our success” (Daily Star, 30 Jan. 2004, my emphases). One Lebanese analyst claimed that the Hizbullah success could not possibly be “a popular deal with Palestinian leadership” (Daily Star, 26 Jan. 2004), because it showed the relative effectiveness of Hizbullah compared to the Fatah-dominated PNA.

The past thirty years in Latin America have produced tremendous transformations of the state's role in society, both in the scope of its activities and the extent of its presence. Sometimes this has led to the state's unprecedented expansion into the far reaches of economic and social life, other times to its retreat from direct institutional presence in favor of indirect market-mediated linkages to society. The impact of these transformations on associational life and the quality of political participation has to some extent been obscured in recent scholarly work on democratic transition and consolidation, important as these issues are.There is an extensive literature that examines the ways in which the institutional organization of democracy shapes the stability and character of post-transition politics. See, for example, Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Juan Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism.” Journal of Democracy 1 (1990), and contributions to Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully, eds., Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Jorge Domínguez and Abraham Lowenthal, eds. Constructing Democratic Governance: Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1990s (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). This paper explores how the transformations in the deeper “structural linkages” between state and society have affected political organization and mobilization in rural Brazil and Chile. In so doing, we contend that institutions not normally seen as central to democratic politics are in fact crucial to understanding political participation and mobilization.

Modernization theory is essentially an academic, and pseudoscientific, transfer of the dominant, and ideologically significant, paradigm employed in research on the American political system. The still dominant paradigm, despite increasing criticism and revisionism is, of course, the pragmatic-pluralist conception of political process, associated with a form of liberalism which links democratic legitimacy with high levels of participation and with egalitarian distributive outcomes. While this paradigm has been criticized as either scientifically inadequate or normatively skewed (toward freedom, against order), its vigor as a legitimating explanation is largely undiminished. This pluralist legitimation of the American political system is based upon a relatively simple conception of political structure, which is understood as producing an appearance of a formal contradiction which is, in turn, resolved by means of the concept of time (or process). Just as Martin Heidegger used the idea of temporality to resolve the apparent contradiction between Being and existence, so the temporality of the pragmatic-pluralist political process resolves the apparent contradiction between the structured inequality of the American system at any given time and the legitimating ideal of equality. Temporality justifies inequality by subordinating it to the freedom to restructure the system through unfettered, self-motivated mobility. In other words, since freedom justifies order, according to this doctrine, an alternative scientific justification of either freedom or order has obvious political drawbacks.

A late nineteenth-century epidemic of banditry seems to have swept through the Egyptian countryside, at least according to the writings and actions of influential Egyptians at that time. Contemporary newspapers recounted daily episodes in which gangs composed of between six and sixty or seventy members raided large estates, robbed travelling merchants, and organized local protection rackets. The threat to public security drew the greatest attention in the decade following the British occupation of Egypt in 1882.

In 1956 the Indian Government invited the Ford Foundation to assist with a master plan for the Delhi region. Two years later, the invitation was extended to help with a separate urban community development program. Even though the master plan was a comprehensive project covering transportation, water, sewage, housing, industry, and zoning, the creation of community and communities was one of its main goals. The Draft Master Plan for Delhi (DMPD) declared “in all planning for man's environments,” it was “extremely vital” to “evolve a well integrated new community pattern that would fit the changed living conditions of the new age and promote genuine democratic growth.” Similarly, the primary objective of the urban community development project, as laid out by the Commissioner of Delhi, was that of “giving form to an urban community, which has been drawn from backgrounds varying from one another and trying to achieve a homogeneity.”

In the 1950s, French political geographer and social critic André Siegfried denounced modern mass tourism as “tourism de série . . . organized, almost mechanized, collective, and above all democratic.” Echoing derisory discussions of mass culture and mass consumption, Siegfried criticized modern tourism as a degraded aspect of cultural and social democratization, best exemplified by banal American hotel chains. Siegfried complained that modern tourism had essentially destroyed older regimes of pleasure and substituted only amusements. Someone who yearned for the older “aristocratic” era wherein wealthy leisured elites sojourned in grand hotels, he believed that the only hope for the future was with “people of refined taste, knowing how to distinguish . . . between filth and beauty.”André Siegfried, Aspects du XXe Siàcle (Paris, 1955), 107, 123–25 and 148.

In the middle of fourteenth century in Western Europe, a turning point occurred in the modern inquiry into the nature of money. While political unification of the states made monetary standardization and centralization key issues (establishing the distinction which still exists today between authentic currency and spurious or quasi-currencies), some of the wisest minds of the period, such as Nicolas Oresme, speculated on the reasons and consequences of the rapid loss in the value of money. The Black Plague, which took lives but not goods, left an accursed legacy: inflation, fed by the excess of wealth in the hands of survivors, dedicated to a ‘sumptuous consumption.’

It has long been recognized that great social-political revolutions have tended to be marked by three common experiences: (1) the ironic completion of the state building project of the ancient régime through strengthening of the state and its bureaucracy; (2) external warfare; and (3) the deployment of revolutionary terror, often initially restricted to obvious enemies of the new order, then expanding to larger groups in society and eventually consuming much of the revolutionary elite itself. Through investigation into the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (1950-1953), this essay concentrates on the linkages between these three elements, focusing particularly on the complex interaction between state building, state sponsored terror, and state paternalism in the early consolidation of the PeopleÕs Republic of China.

Since the military coup that toppled the government of Sylvanus Olympio in Togo, West Africa, no less than seventy African leaders throughout sub-Saharan Africa have been overthrown by the armed forces. In the first two decades of independence alone, there were forty successful coups, not to mention the countless coup attempts (Meredith, 1984; Kitchen, 1985)

In the 1840s, the time of Sir Robert Peel's great ministry, the British House of Commons debated and voted upon a number of substantial political issues. The Parliament of 1841–47 not only repealed the Corn Laws; it also placed on the statute books important legislation regulating factories, banks, railways and mines. It approved the income tax, reintroduced by Peel in 1842, and the Poor Law, which was renewed in 1842 and again in 1847. It discussed and voted upon, though it was far from approving, proposals for the extension of the franchise, the adoption of the secret ballot and the restriction of the special legal privileges of landowners. There were divisions as well on various aspects of the Irish question, religious questions and the position of the Church of England, army reform, fiscal reform and other matters.

“What do you really want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?” was a question asked of the anthropologist Karl Weule by more than a few of his fellow passengers on board a ship bound for the German colony that is today Tanzania, in 1906. At least this was what Weule himself recalled after he returned from a journey during which he was caught up, and participated in, the counterinsurgency operations that followed one of the greatest anti-colonial uprisings that Africa had ever seen, the Maji Maji uprising. One elegant woman, Weule wrote, demanded: “And what do you want, Herr Professor, from all these tribes? Simply to collect for your museum in Leipzig? Or does the anthropology of today also have other, higher goals?” Anthropology did indeed, Weule explained, have “other, higher goals”: “The museum you speak of, my dearest, exists out in reality, as even the most hard-hearted Philistine would have to admit. … But how will anthropology be able to assert its much-contested status as a science, when it knows nothing higher and better than simply to bring together bows, arrows, spears, and thousands of other things? This collecting and preserving is really just … the elementary branch of our work. The other, higher part is the study [Aufnahme] of mental culture [geistige Kulturbesitzes].”