In Latin America missions have traditionally played a large role in conquering and incorporating native populations into dominant society. Most studies of the missionary enterprise have focused on the colonial period, when the missions reached their high point. The Jesuit missions in Paraguay and the Franciscan missions of central and northern Mexico, for example, ruled over vast territories and thousands of Indians. Although these institutions and their leaders have been widely studied because of their importance and visibility for colonial Latin America, it is not often recognized that missions continued to play a crucial role in the frontier development of the region even after the Spanish and Portuguese had been driven from the continent. Throughout the republican period, missionaries from many orders and creeds became critically important actors who, to a large degree, determined the shape of relations between native peoples and national society. This is quite clear even today in the Amazon basin, where missionaries often provide the natives' first exposure to Europeanized society.

This essay highlights the role of thousands of nineteenth-century Alexandrian residents with multiple extraterritorial legal identities. The manner with which extraterritoriality was practiced in Egypt effectively gave Western consulates legal jurisdiction not only over their citizens but also over all those able, through whatever means, to acquire protégé status. Many Alexandrians acquired legal protection from multiple consulates, shifting their legal identities in order to maximize their immediate social and economic interests. These legal realities present historians with the dilemma of how to account for and “classify” this highly flexible and syncretic society. I strive to answer this question through the use of a borderland lens. Realizing that the heart of Egypt's borderland society was legal has led me to consider the concept of “jurisdictional borderland” as a productive method for examining the complexity of Egypt's nineteenth-century heterogeneous population. I define a jurisdictional borderland as a significant contact zone where there are multiple, often competing legal authorities and where some level of jurisdictional ambiguity exists. Jurisdictional borderlanders have their own unique and independent agenda that often conflicts with many of the competing “national” or imperial positions. Without an allegiance to any single government—be it Egyptian, Ottoman, or Western—and living in a peripheral environment with multiple, separate, and often competing “national” institutions, these borderlanders thrived in the jurisdictional spaces created in between multiple authorities. I conclude by suggesting how a jurisdictional borderland lens is useful for globally investigating other colonial and precolonial cities, many of which had similar extraterritorial legal systems.

In 1606, Bernardo José de Aldrete,Sometimes spelled “Alderete;” b.1560 Malaga, d.1641 Cordoba. (See Mondéjar Cumpián 1974 for discussion of the confusion over these dates and places.) Spanish cleric and humanist antiquarian, published the first history of the Spanish language, On the origin and beginnings of the Castilian language or Romance, which is used in Spain today.Henceforth “Origin.” Translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.Aldrete argued that Castilian—also known at the time as Romance and now commonly known as Spanish—had been derived from Latin over centuries of use, with the Visigoths playing a key role in creating the linguistic change.Throughout this paper, “Castilian” and “Spanish” will be used interchangeably to refer to the language in question.

This paper contributes to the study of new forms of transnational power constituted by the action of international and nongovernmental organizations, to which gravitate loose networks of activists variously promoting democracy, human rights, the empowerment of women, and environmental conservation. The paper's focus is impacts that the massive reconstruction effort is having on Afghan society, examined through a case study of The National Solidarity Programme (NSP), the main project of rural rehabilitation underway in the country. Launched in 2003, its objective is to bring development funds directly to rural people and to establish democratically elected local councils that will identify needs, and plan and manage the reconstruction. Although the NSP's political significance faded in the context of the presidential elections of 2009, which were characterized by quickly evolving alliances, the program illustrates how reconstruction funds are an integral part of Afghanistan's social and political landscape. My arguments are four-fold: First, the NSP subtly modifies participants' body gestures and codes of conduct. Second, the program's fundamental assumptions are at odds with the complex social fabric and the overlapping sources of solidarity and conflict that characterize rural Afghanistan. Third, the ways in which political actors use material and symbolic resources channeled through the NSP mirror national struggles for power. Finally, such programs are one element in a much larger conceptual and bureaucratic apparatus that promotes new forms of transnational governmentality that coexist with and sometimes challenge the more familiar, territorialized expressions of state power and sovereignty.

Problems of periodization have received but limited attention in Burmese historiography. Precolonial, that is to say, pre-nineteenth-century history, is said to be of a piece, without significant institutional or social transformations. Dynasties and rulers changed, of course, sometimes with stunning rapidity; but it is always assumed that these oscillations occurred within a static framework. Lamenting the failure of the early Kon-baung kings to move their capital to the coast, G. E. Harvey, whose history remains the standard work on the precolonial era, observes, “Their ideas remained in the nineteenth century what they had been in the ninth. To build pagodas, to collect daughters from tributary chiefs, to sally forth on slave raids, to make wars for white elephants—these conceptions had had their day, and a monarchy which failed to get beyond them was doomed.” In the same vein, it has recently been argued that no “significant transformations” occurred between the origins and collapse of monarchical Burma. The entire precolonial royal era “should be viewed as one entity,” for from the mid-ninth to the late nineteenth century “the major features of [Burma's] political, economic, social, administrative, and religious systems were also virtually identical.”

The object of this article is to present the main findings of a study of the functional organisation of the house in postmedieval London. It will also discuss a formal approach to plan analysis that is considered to have wide application in the comparative study of domestic space.

For Catholic missionaries in the early twentieth century, the only way to achieve true conversion of Timorese ancestral ritualists was the deliberate destruction of sacred lulik houses. Although Timorese allegedly participated enthusiastically in this destruction, lulik (a term commonly translated as sacred, proscribed, holy, or taboo) remains a key part of ritual practice today. This article offers a dynamic historical analysis of what may be described as a particular form of Southeast Asian animism, examining how people's relationships with sacred powers have changed in interaction with Catholic missionaries. It links the inherent ambivalence of endogenous occult powers to religious and historical transformations, teasing out the unintended consequences of the missionaries' attempts to eradicate and demonize lulik. Comparing historical and ethnographic data from the center of East Timor, it argues that, contrary to the missionaries' intentions, the cycles of destruction, withdrawal, and return that characterized mission history ended up strengthening lulik. Inspired by anthropological studies of “taboo” and “otherness,” especially the work of Mary Douglas and Valerio Valeri, this article makes visible the transformation of the sacred in relation to outside agents: when relations with foreign powers were productive, the positive sides of lulik as a source of wealth and authority were brought out; yet when outsiders posed a threat, the dangerous and threatening aspects of lulik were accentuated. This analysis allows us to highlight the relational dimensions of sacred powers and their relation to ongoing social transformations.

All militaries try to develop a “winning edge” in warfare. More often than not these attempts focus on new weapons systems and weapons platforms, on new ways of maximizing the offensive capabilities of a military through firepower. These attempts can also involve the training and development of soldiers, including performance enhancements to make them fight better, longer, and smarter than the enemy and to counter human frailty on the battlefield. These concerns and problems have long held the interest of the U.S. military. This article traces the development, rationale, and legacy of one such attempt to deal with human frailty and the “body problem,” a kind of military futurism devised at the peak of the Cold War. Dr. Marion Sulzberger envisioned creating soldiers who had their own kind of special “biological armor,” or what he termed “idiophylaxis.” In 1962, he presented a paper at the Army Science Conference at West Point titled “Progress and Prospects in Idiophylaxis (Built-In Individual Self-Protection of the Combat Soldier).” Sulzberger's call was for a radical rethinking of the combat soldier and the ways in which soldiers were imagined, designed, and developed. His goal was to “armor” the individual soldier both internally and psychologically through new forms of biomedicine and biotechnology. The interventions he detailed in 1962 live on today in the U.S. military's soldier performance enhancement research programs, including DARPA's recent “Inner Armor” program and desire to make “kill-proof” soldiers.

Since Fiji's independence in 1970, a chiefly establishment drawn largely from the eastern regions of the island group has dominated the government there and, through the Alliance Party, has managed, in one way or another, to retain power in successive electoral contests until its outright defeat in the general elections of April 1987. The new government comprised a coalition of the National Federation Party (NFP), supported largely by the Fiji Indian community, and the Fiji Labour Party, which was essentially multiracial. Before the elections, Dr. Timoci Bavadra, the Labour leader, had been chosen to head the coalition. An indigenous Fijian “commoner” from the western region of Fiji, Bavadra's victory in April 1987 represented a break in a long history of eastern chiefly political predominance established and consolidated under colonial rule, and carried forward into the modern context of post-independence politics.

Western scholars have long identified the existence of writing systems as a near-universal characteristic of high civilization, with Tawantinsuyu, the Inka empire, representing the only significant exception.1 Although writing was absent in the pre-Hispanic Andes, there existed the means of recording administrative information and preserving narratives of the past. Inka imperial overseers and specialized record-keepers produced tribute levies, population counts, and assessments of provincial development potential, using a system of knotted cords (a khipu) as their principal device.2 Such records fulfilled bureaucratic and administrative functions that were satisfied in other societies by writing; however, the maintenance of narratives of the Inka past contrasts with these practices in its hybrid use of oral tradition in consultation with similar record keeping devices.

In 1991, barricades in the streets of Rīga, Latvia, shielded important landmarks from Soviet military units looking to prevent the dissolution of the USSR; in 2006, barricades in the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico, defended members of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca from paramilitary incursions. We employ these two cases to compare the historically specific public socialities and politics formed through spatial and material practices in moments of crisis and in their aftermath. We show how the barricades continue to animate social and political formations and imaginaries, providing a sense of both past solidarity and future possibilities against which the present, including the state of the polity and the life of the people, are assessed. We trace the convergences and differences of political imaginaries of barricade sociality that formed in the barricades’ aftermath and consider what their transformative potential might be. Attentive to the specificity of particular practices and social relations that produce a collective subject, we consider how our case studies might inform broader questions about social collectives like the nation and publics. Though they point in different directions, we argue that the barricades provide an enabling position from which to imagine and organize collective life otherwise. In a moment when much mainstream political activism remains spellbound by the allure of discourses of democracy that promise power to the people, the Mexico and Latvia cases provide examples of social life that exceeded both state-based notions of collectives and what Michael Warner has called “state-based thinking,” even as they were also entangled with state-based frames.

This essay has sought to bring out salient points that can throw light both upon the vexing problems of cultural transformation and on the related phenomena of economic growth. It has employed concepts that are relatively recent in the social sciences and that when synthesized provide the elements of a theory of social change. The five main concepts are: the city as a cross-cultural type; the functional urban hierarchy; the nodular regional structure; effective social, political-administrative and economic space; economic growth as being part of a more comprehensive process leading to successively higher levels of integration of the social system.

From the concept of the city as a cross-cultural type it follows that there are no fundamental distinctions between industrial and preindustrial cities, but both are sharply distinguished from communal village life. All cities have in common a way of life that is characterized by varying degrees of social heterogeneity and cultural vitality, and by inventiveness, creativity, rationality, and civic consciousness. From the fact that cities and the regions related to them may be seen as functionally differentiated and arranged in hieratic fashion it follows that the extent of urban influence will vary with (a) the stage of evolution reached by the hierarchy as a whole, and (b) the relative position of any given city within the hierarchy.

Economic growth has to be seen as part of a comprehensive process of cultural transformation. From the ruthless destruction of old social forms no aspect of society will be spared. It is the influences spreading outward from cities that accomplish both the disruption of the traditional social patterns and the reintegration of society around new fundamental values. The city acts as a coordinating, space-creating force, thus achieving the integration of the social order in its spatial dimensions. Intellectuals, administrators and entrepreneurs are the city's agents in this task. With their success in organizing the life of a society, both as a pattern of activities and as a pattern in space, the traditional notion of a city as a place having definite geographic limits will tend gradually to disappear. Just as Karl Mannheim speaks of fundamental democratization as one of the tendencies of our age, so one may speak of fundamental urbanization as the end-result of modern economic growth. With this, the former distinction between town and country will beblurred and will leave a thoroughly organized, impersonal, and functionally rational society to carry on.

“The personal is political” was a central insight of the wave of feminism which gathered momentum in the 1960s. Within that phrase is condensed the understanding that the seemingly most intimate details of private existence are actually structured by larger social relations. Attention to the personal politics of intimate life soon focused on sexuality, and many canons of sexual meaning were challenged. The discovery of erotic art and symbols as malecentered, the redefinition of lesbian sexuality as positive and life-affirming, and the dismantling of the two-orgasm theory as a transparently male perception of the female body were among the products of this critique.

The study of the modernization of non-Western cultures has been dominated by the metaphor of the ‘take-off’ introduced by the economists and by the assumption of incompatibility between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ cultures. These interpretations of modernization are shared by both those who view it as a process of diffusing Western culture and by those who view it as an internal process of development which may require an external stimulus to ‘trigger’ the ‘take-off’. On either view, modernization becomes a problem of suddenly transforming a ‘traditional’ type of culture, society, and personality into a ‘modern’ type. This view of modernization is supported, and perhaps suggested, by the classical nineteenth-and early twentieth-century social science theory of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ societies as opposed types, a theory associated with the names of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Maine, and Tönnies, among others.

Considerable attention has recently been given to depicting the present-day conditions of rural life in developing and industrializing states. Anthropologists have begun to doubt whether the familiar term ‘peasant society’ adequately represents those rural groups that are increasingly linked with an urban-based industrial economy and society. A number of alternate terms and constructs have lately been suggested. For example, in a recent article Erasmus (1967) explores what he calls the ‘upper limits of peasantry’ in portions of Bolivia, Venezuela and Mexico. By ‘upper limits of peasantry’ Erasmus refers to those segments of the rural population that are within a market economy and national polity and yet are only partially integrated within an emergent industrial society. To cite another recent example, Lopreato's study of a Calabrian village (1967) details how emigration and the subsequent remittances altered the social and economic structure of a long-impoverished South Italian community. Interestingly, Lopreato entitles his study Peasants No More; like Erasmus he too wishes to indicate the changed character of rural life in industrializing states.

Spectacular events tend to capture our attention—the war in Cambodia, oil exploration and production on Malaysia's coast, the assassination of Benigno Aquino and internal strife in the Philippines, the election of two solitary opposition candidates to Singapore's parliament, the rejuvenation of Indonesia's military command structure, coup rumours in Thailand: an endless string of more or less spectacular or even decisive happenings that find themselves in the headlines of the international press.

Islamic society is ever intriguing. Across broad territories and over millenia of time, it maintains a constant identity; yet it is always elusive, varied, and changing. The study of Islamic urbanism, like so many Islamic topics, oscillates between attempts to define what is fundamental and universal in Islamic city life, and what is ineffably individual about each locality; the contradictory perspectives seem equally valid. While topography, culture, and history have given each locality a unique identity, by the middle ages, Middle Eastern towns between the Nile and the Jaxartes—the core area of Islamic society—shared common features of social organization. Small communities, such as families, neighborhood quarters, and fraternities were the fundamental units of society. Town populations were gathered into loosely organized religious bodies, such as schools of law, Shirite sects, and Sufi brotherhoods, who were dominated by ethnically alien elites organized into slave armies and slave-maintained governments, and who garrisoned and extracted revenues from the towns while remaining separate from local community life. Characteristically, then, Middle Eastern Muslim cities operated on three levels-parochial groups, religious communities, and imperial regimes. Organized urban life depended on the relationships between person and groups within this three-tiered institutional pattern.

This article analyzes representations of the Koli as aboriginal in colonial Bombay, and explores the ends to which various actors have narrated Koli aboriginality. It examines the relationship between the historical deployment of the concept of aboriginality and its mediating role in the power of capital and state-making practices in one colonial urban context. The article shows how the Koli, as Bombay's “aboriginals,” gained concessions that served as an alibi for the market-based dispossession of the remainder of the city's population, and also as a pretext for claim-making by peoples with competing collective identities who used the tale of Koli identity and history as a narrative resource to argue for their own nativity. The Koli case helps us understand the co-emergence of the powers of caste and capital in Bombay, and compels us to revisit important, broader questions about relationships between aboriginal or indigenous peoples, capitalism, colonialism, liberalism, and governance.

The transmission of systems of ideas across wide cultural gaps is hard enough to study on any scale of human organization. It is particularly hard when two large, complex cultures meet under traumatic circumstances, as did China and the West in the nineteenth century. The myriad variables in such a situation dictate special care in defining the specific terms and conditions under which ideas are transmitted. The present case suggests three points worth attention: first, the precise language of the textual material that impinges on the host culture; second, the underlying structure of the historical circumstances into which this material is introduced; third, the process whereby the foreign material becomes important to sectors of society outside the group that first appreciated and received it and thereby becomes a significant historical force.