In 1849, administrator-turned-historian Ganesh Das Vadhera completed Char Bagh-i-Panjab, a history of his native region in India, the Punjab. The Char Bagh was a Persian manuscript written as the Sikh Kingdom of Lahore was being dismantled and the Punjab incorporated into British India, and documented the establishment, decline, and fall of Sikh rule in the area. Vadhera's account was more than a political history of the Punjab, however; it also gave detailed descriptions of many of the towns, cities, and villages of the region leading some contemporary scholars to refer to it as a geography (Brand and Westcoat 2001). Guru Nanak Dev University recognized Vadhera's Persian text as being not only a historical account but a source of valuable “information on social, religious, and cultural life of the Panjab,” and published it in 1965 (Grewal and Banga 1975: 9). Two scholars of the region published a partial English translation a decade later (Grewal and Banga 1975).

Julya paces the parquet, blond hair coiled severely, hands clasped atop padded buttocks encased in a boxy gray, ill-fitting suit. She sputters abuse at her audience: fifteen classmates sprawled on the floor, their teacher seated in a chair, and a video camera. Moscow, November 2002. The Americans prepare to invade Iraq, Putin serves his third year as president, and these students begin their first term at the Russian Academy for Theatrical Arts (RATI/GITIS). Inside its walls, Julya depicts the head of her high school, an older woman in a town two hours north. She yells: “I REQUEST that TODAY at the meeting with ZhshzhshshzhshuGAnov you ALL be there!” (Zjuganov is the leader of the Russian Communist Party.) Some students slap the parquet laughing. Their teacher is less impressed.

A series of diplomatic exchanges has recently unfolded between the Hungarian government and the Commission of the European Union. The stakes are historic for the Hungarian side. Hungary formally applied for full membership in the European Union on March 31, 1994, the first country to announce such intentions among the successor states of the former Soviet bloc. Two years later, the Commission sent a lengthy questionnaire about the “state of the applicant” to all—by then, ten—central and east European applicant states. The Hungarian side filed its comprehensive response three months after the receipt of the questionnaire. The Commission waited until all responses were in and acknowledged the Hungarian answer in a document, issued another year later, whose purpose was to determine whether to recommend that the EU Council should start negotiations with the individual candidate countries about full membership.

The neoliberal reforms sweeping the globe are generating strikingly analogous transformations in diverse politico-economic and ideological landscapes, especially through the spread of democratic-liberal political regimes and an emphasis on the “virtues of the invisible hand”—rather than the state—in the investment of a huge mass of mobile capital (Fishlow 1990:64; Amin 1995; Gill 1993). We are witnessing an increasingly dominant and profitable global capitalist economy with a “highly coercive capacity to ensnare enormous numbers of peoples within its grasp” (Blim 1992:5; Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994; Sachs 1995; Mittelman 1996; Dirlik 1994; Diskin and Koechlin 1994; Hojman 1994).

This essay probes the role of commodities in the crafting of state power, working from the vantage point of contemporary Ghana, a polity at once post-socialist and staunchly neoliberal, least-industrialized and highly cosmopolitan. Among the many commodities which Ghana's citizens and state bodies identify with and rely upon, cars are of critical significance. In what follows, I explore the raft of interventions surrounding car importation and allocation imposed by Ghana's Customs Service, and the resulting public critique, in an effort to capture the shifting contours of state authority in the context of an electoral and economic transition spurred by neoliberal reform.

Lewis H. Morgan's Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) is credited with inventing the anthropological study of “kinship” from a comparative perspective (Trautmann 1987). Since Émile Durkheim's critique of 1898, Morgan is also said to have reduced kinship to biology in keeping with Anglo-American cultural assumptions about “blood relations” given in nature. Yet, on closer inspection, Morgan's “consanguinity” proves to be fraught with contradictions. Debates about the degenerative effects of mixing bloods in marriage—consanguinity with affinity—encompassed not only miscegenation but also “consanguineous marriages,” such as Morgan's own marriage to his first cousin (his mother's brother's daughter) in 1851.

1. The Classic Khmer and the Classic Maya civilizations had cult centers but not true cities. They both arose in areas which were regionally undifferentiated.

2. Easy transportation and heavy trade were lacking because of the areawide uniformity of crops and the difficult terrain. Consequently, urban centers were not and could not be supported.

3. Both areas did produce a surplus and therefore could support civilized life. The social orders of each were so set up that through religious sanctions this surplus, which included labor, could be utilized for the creation and support of huge cult centers. Such a kind of organization might be considered as unilateral (mechanical) in the Durkheimian sense.

4. In contrast, true cities arose in productive agricultural areas which were regionally specialized, with symbiotic interdependence of a Maussian nature. Trade and trade routes were highly developed so that commodity prices were sufficiently low to enable large groups of persons engaged in commerce to live together and yet make a profit on their activities. Internally specialized civilizations of this sort have been termed organic.

5. It is suggested that among the organic civilizations, the state may have had its origin in the regulation of trade; among the unilateral civilizations, in the compulsion of tribute and corvee labor.

Strikes became legal in France more than a century ago. Since their first partial legalization in 1864, the right to strike has waxed and waned, the great federations of labor have sprung from conflicts within France's modern industries and bureaucracies, and the proportion of strikes leading to shootings, beatings, sabotage or imprisonment has diminished. The strike has appeared to modernize, to take on new sophistication as a means of regulating conflict, to go from savage to civilized.

How best might one address the relationship between trade and state building in early modern South Asia? The question is hardly a new one. To some, like Anand Ram ‘Mukhlis’ (d. 1751), a Khatri from northern India who, though not Muslim, had been educated in Persian letters and accounting (siyâgat), trade was more honourable and safer than statecraft or government. The fortunes of the nobility were fluctuating ones, and the means by which they had been accumulated were of a questionable legitimacy. Doubts of this sort did not of course prevent his Khatri brethren from entering into government service during the later Mughal period, and several of them can be counted among the a'yân (notables) of the reign of the Mughal, Muhammad Shah (1719–48) (Alam 1986:169–75). They maintained a tradition begun in the reign of Ak-bar with the famous Raja Todar Mal (d. 1589), also a Khatri from the Punjab.

In this paper I shall analyse the rituals for Sanni Yaka (‘the demon of Sanni’). Sanni Yaka is also known as Kōla Sanniya and is a pantheistic deity who incorporates eighteen other demons known as Dahaaṭa Sanni (eighteen Sanni) or simply as Sanni Yakku (Sanni demons; Yakku is plural of Yakā). The rituals performed for the Sanni Yakku appear in a large-scale ceremony known as the Sanni Yäkuma, ‘the demon ceremony of the Sanni’. In my analysis I shall emphasize the dramatic aspects of the rituals, where the demons appear on stage in masked representations. In these rituals a great deal of comic dialogue and obscenities prevail. Their significance has been missed by Wirz who describes one of these rituals, the dolaha pelapāliya (spectacle for the twelve gods) in the following terms: ‘This scene is called simply ‘pelapāliya’, which may best be translated as ‘dance suite’, or ‘musical show.’ … In reality, it is only interposed for diversion and has no deeper meaning’ (1954: 59). A highly sophisticated anthropologist presumably refers to similar comic humour when he says that ‘after more hocus-pocus, Riri Yaka is eventually told that by the orders of the Buddha (Budu anin) and the power of the gods (deviyangē balē) he must accept the dola (offering) and remove his curse from the patient' (Ames, 1964: 42). Almost identical words are spoken to Kōla Sanniya in the Sanni Yäkuma ritual, but we shall interpret and unravel the symbolic meaning of these humorous ritual dramas and consider their evolution and social functions.

One of the most persistent of all New World dreams, El Dorado has acquired new life over the last two decades throughout much of the Amazon Basin. Many of the same golden visions that led Orellana and his men to plunge ahead down an “ocean-river” in the sixteenth century continue to prompt large numbers of people in Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and, above all, Brazil to leave their families and set out for makeshift mining camps to seek their fortunes amidst a sea of mud. This discussion focuses on representations of gold miners or garimpeiros by themselves and others. I argue that although miners unquestionably draw on a much larger oral tradition, their stories stand apart from those told by a more general population in their tendency to portray gold as an active, female agent and in their relative lack of interest in clear-cut morals. In addition, while the vision of nature and natural forces as female and the fixation on violence as a (if not the) key element of life in the garimpo would appear to corroborate precisely those images of miners that reach a national and international public, this surface agreement cloaks important underlying differences that underscore the fundamental multiplicity of metaphor.

The hometown associations (HTAs) formed by international migrants sharing a place of origin are considered the quintessential “transnational” institution linking migrants to family and townspeople who stayed behind. Scholars of transnationalism present HTAs as the expression of a new kind of “transnational community” or “transnational social field” that is redefining what it means to belong to a community by including people who are physically absent but who make their presence felt through regular visits and remittances and by sponsoring charity and development projects in their hometown. New transportation and communication technologies stretching the limits of space and time are said to be the driving forces that allow migrants to belong to a single community anchored in multiple, distant geographic localities. Such migrants transcend the old boundaries of territorial belonging that depended on a sedentary population, and call into question basic social scientific concepts like “citizenship,” “community,” “nation-state,” and “migration.” Even the most recent transnationalism literature, which has retreated from some earlier claims of novelty to rediscover transborder practices of older migrations, continues to claim that new conceptions of membership are necessary to understand both new and older practices (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 1994; Levitt 2001; Portes and Landolt 2002; Smith 2006).

Economically the contradiction between town and country is an extremely antagonistic one both in capitalist society, where under the rule of the bourgeoisie the towns ruthlessly plunder the countryside, and in the Kuomingtang areas in China, where under the rule of foreign imperialism and the Chinese big compradore bourgeoisie the towns most rapaciously plunder the countryside. But in a socialist country and in our own revolutionary base areas, this antagonistic contraction has changed into one that is non-antagonistic; and when communist society is reached it will be abolished.

[Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) 1937:345]

This article develops a theory of interdisciplinarity and examines relations between historians and sociologists in Germany and France over the course of the twentieth century, focusing in on several key moments of interdisciplinary activity. Interdisciplinary engagements are motivated by scholarly problems, field-specific interests and battles, and pressures and inducements coming from states, businesses, and scientific institutions. Analysis of the most productive moments of cross-disciplinary interaction suggests that they occur when disciplines are equal in power and when scholars are motivated by scholarly problems and disciplinary conflicts to move beyond their disciplines. More generative forms of interdisciplinarity are dialogic and processual, characterized by a fusion of perspectives; less productive forms are externally induced, involve asymmetrical partners, and are organized around division of disciplinary labor rather than an interpenetration of perspectives. The most productive interdisciplinary conjunctures result from serendipitous resonances and contingent synchronicities between subfields of semi-autonomous disciplines. It is thus impossible to produce the most fruitful forms of interdisciplinarity deliberately. The article examines three cases of symmetrical, processual interdisciplinarity involving sociology and history. Two of these cases were located in the French academic field, first between the wars, and then again after 1980. The other case of dialogic collaboration between historians and sociologists begins in Nazi Germany and continues after 1945 into the 1960s, leading to the formation of West German Historische Sozialwissenschaft. Examples of unbalanced interdisciplinarity include German “History-Sociology” during the Weimar Republic, in which sociologists’ opening to history was not reciprocated by professional historians and Historische Sozialwissenschaft after 1970.

George Lipsitz, reflecting upon a growing body of American studies scholarship on whiteness, claims we now have a better understanding of “how people who left Europe as Calabrians and Bohemians became something called ‘whites' when they got to America.” As a summary of whiteness studies the statement is accurate. The verb “to become” in Lipsitz's assertion emphasizes the importance of deconstructing race in order to analyze it as an ideological and historical process. The statement implies, however, that European society did not also employ unstable hierarchical racial taxonomies. Indeed, the notion that it was in the United States where people defined by a European region or nation of origin became a race, isolates American racial thought from its Euro-American matrix.George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White' Problem in American Studies,” American Quarterly 43, 3 (Sept. 1995): 370.

In the last few years, modern historians of India have pushed the historical frontier of their field backwards in time. Colonialism is no longer considered the great watershed it once was thought to be. Historians who concern themselves with economic processes such as protoindustrialization tend in particular to minimize the impact of the consolidation of colonial rule in the late eighteenth century. Changes viewed as significant by these historians usually begin with the introduction of capitalism and the early encroachment of a world system, both of which predate the full political realization of colonialism. Historians who concern themselves with political changes tend in the other direction, although increasingly they have proposed major continuities between the ancien régime and the early colonial state. Historians concerned with social change view colonialism as significant but invoke various new forms of dualism to account for the limited effects of colonialism on local social forms. Whatever their differences, all of these historians agree that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are crucial for viewing later changes in economy, polity, and society, and, from their varying theoretical and ideological perspectives, delight in excoriating traditional views of India as static and “traditional” before the arrival of the British.

The object of this essay has been to help examine spatiotemporal variation in literacy. The research reported here centered on the Valley of Oaxaca, an agricultural region in southern Mexico, during the period from 1890 to 1980. The data consist of a systematic compilation of tax and voting lists from the nineteenth century, census responses from 1890 to 1980, community ethnographies, published histories and biographies, and government reports. Attending to both the spatial and the temporal scales of events and causes was methodologically important for this research.

This essay uses a discussion of three recent events in Yemen to dramatize the relationship between state power and the experience of citizenship in the aftermath of national unification in 1990.My analysis depends on readers understanding the differences I am registering among the terms “state,” “nation,” and “regime.” By “state” I mean a common set of institutions capable of distributing goods and services and controlling violence within a demarcated, internationally recognized territory. By “nation” I refer to a shared sense of belonging simultaneously with anonymous others to an imagined community. By “regime” I mean the political order of a particular leader or administration. For example, we tend to say “the regime of עAli עAbd Allah Salih,” but not “the state of עAli עAbd Allah Salih.” The first event is a “direct,” purportedly competitive presidential election on 23 September 1999, the first since unification and unprecedented in the histories of the former countries of North and South Yemen. The second is the celebration of the tenth anniversary of national unification on 22 May 2000, including the extraordinary preparations leading up to the event. The third is the public sensation following the arrest and prosecution of a man touted as Yemen's first bona fide “serial killer,” which occurred during the lead-up to the decennial celebration.

Oku adults have a straightforward rationalization for the existence of folktales: the frightening cautionary tales of the child-eating monster K∂ηgaaηgu serve to warn children not to go to the fields or to stray too far from the house without their parents. But this rationalization is belied by the fact that adults in this chiefdom of the Cameroon Grassfields do not tell folktales to children. Rather, folktales are most often told by children amongst each other, with no adult involvement, and they are consequently learned by younger children from older ones. This is an unusual situation in West Africa, where the norm is for adults to tell folktales to children. For all we know, adult-to-child storytelling may have been the normal practice in the Grassfields in the past, but if it ever was, this practice has now passed into desuetude, and today adults look with mild scorn on folktales (f∂ngaanen, ∂mgaanen pl.) and generally remain aloof during storytelling sessions. Storytelling in the Grassfields is therefore a child-structured form of play in Schwartzman's (1978) sense: it is an activity mediated by children without adult input. Prior to the introduction of schooling in the Grassfields, children used to be made to guard the crops against birds and monkeys, an activity that left them to their own devices in the fields for long periods of the day (Argenti 2001; see also Fortes 1938; Raum 1940). In some cases, children actually slept in small shelters that they built in the fields, and they would consequently stay away from their homes and adult supervision for days at a time. It was in this context, away from the censorious gaze of adults, that children's illicit masking activities developed (Argenti 2001). It may also be in this context that children were able to indulge in prolonged bouts of storytelling without fear of reproof by adults, in whose eyes children should be seen but not heard. Today, children no longer guard the fields, and they have therefore taken to telling their folktales at home.