Two rulers, one in Africa, one in Asia, are about to undergo the ceremony of baptism following first contact with the Portuguese maritime expansion—but they insist that the rite be conducted in secret. The African ruler is a regional governor (the Mani Soyo) of the Congo King Nzinga Nkuwu who has just converted in 1491. The high king's diplomatic exchanges with the sea captain Diogo Cão had not elicited any real sensation of vulnerability to Portuguese imperial designs, yet he had been happy to convert nonetheless. Now the Mani Soyo is about to follow suit, but he will not have any of his subordinates witnessing the ritual because he does not want them benefiting from the enhanced status and power that the ritual could bestow. In the highlands of Sri Lanka some fifty years later, the King of Kandy is equally intent on keeping his baptismal rites hidden from public view. But his reasons are strikingly different. He does this “lest his people should kill him.” When news of the baptism did leak out rioting followed, and the king had to spread the story that it had all been a ploy to deceive the Portuguese.

The eighteenth-century medical view of the peasantry offers clues to a series of problems. This essay will treat one of them, namely the processes by which the French medical community in the declining years of the ancien régime and the early years of the Revolutionary period came to justify proposals for intervention in a rural society generally hostile to its claims and suspicious of its motives. The theme of the present study is an exploration of how the ideology of rationality and control, which was being developed in the learned world of the eighteenth century, was reinforced by a group within it that was gaining prestige and searching for means to enhance its professional status and power.Since the demands of such an inquiry are rather large, many of the related questions which it raises, such as the nature of medical knowledge, the contemporary disputes in medical philosophy, and the movement of change from one form of medicine to another, will be touched on only insofar as they have direct relevance to the major need to clarify the medical contribution to the development of the new ideology. In my present conceptualization of the problem, I am concerned to show that there was a close interaction between medical knowledge and the social values of the members of the medical trade, even if there existed no conscious direction of the elements connecting the two, and in spite of the difficulties there are in establishing the precise links mediating intellectual products and their social configurations.

There is little doubt that, after a century's exposure, Chinese have absorbed and understand quite clearly the greater meanings of the realm of sport—the connections between competitive athletic endeavor, imperialist bluster, and economic standing in the world community. This article is an exploration of the late Qing Dynasty origins of this modern global culture of physical culture and sport.

In the mid-twentieth century, renewed colonization of the Llanos region of Colombia brought escalated violence to the closely related Guahibo and Cuiva peoples. This violence was made public by two dramatic episodes that became international scandals: a December 1967 massacre of sixteen Cuivas at La Rubiera Ranch, and a 1970 military crackdown on an uprising by members of a Guahibo agricultural cooperative in Planas. The scandals exposed both particular human rights abuses and the regional tradition of literally hunting indigenous people, and provoked widespread outrage. While contemporaries treated these events as aberrations, they can best be explained as the consequence of policies that organize and manage frontiers. Both events took place in a region undergoing rapid settlement by migrants, affected by cattle and oil interests, missionaries, the Colombian military, and U.S. counterinsurgency trainers. This paper draws on archival research to trace the events involved and explains their relation to globally circulating policies, practices, and ideas of frontier making. It illustrates how Colombians eager to expand their frontier in the Llanos emulated and adapted ideas of human inequality, moral geographies that make violence acceptable in frontier areas, economic policies that dispossess native peoples, and strategies of counterinsurgency warfare from distant sources. Ironically, their quest for modernity through frontier expansion licensed new deployments of “archaic” violence. The Llanos frontier was thus enmeshed in an interchange of frontier-making techniques that crisscrosses the world, but particularly unites Latin America and the United States.

Neither the unremitting imposition of alien ways nor the faithful preservation of local ones, colonialism proceeds by the melding of imperial practices with indigenous social forms, creating new arrangements that look like old ones. Moreover, colonialism is an intersubjective, interpractical relationship; as a growing number of historical and anthropological studies have shown, the natives are unlikely to be passive receivers of imposed forms. However difficult their circumstances, the colonized busily construe and misconstrue the colonizers and their social practices, manipulating both to their own advantage. What follows is a “working misunderstanding.”

Professor Smith has produced a comprehensive survey1 of the relations between state and religion in India which will be of great value to students of modern Indian government and politics as well as of religion. Moreover, this useful, stimulating and very readable study raises questions of compelling, interest for all who are concerned with problems of “church and state”. India, the seat of a civilization renowned for elaboration of religious thought and pervasiveness of religious observance has, even by Professor Smith's rigorous standards, successfully established a secular state. In this volume, Professor Smith has undertaken to explain how this has come about, to analyze the Indian achievement and the problems that accompany it and, finally, to indicate how India may advance to the full realization of that “true secularism” which he so enthusiastically endorses.

A generation ago, alert historians jolted the field of witchcraft studies by calling attention to the fact that it was women in particular who burned on the pyres of the European witch trials. Amazingly enough, earlier historians had overlooked, or at least underplayed that particular skew in the record. Now the idea of witch-hunts as a “women's holocaust” is old hat, and in fact, has made one of those rare successful crossovers into popular culture. Historical approaches never stay still, however, and recent publications have reoriented the discussion yet again. A spate of new interpretations, particularly by Stuart Clark and Robin Briggs, push gender off the center of the screen, arguing that other factors were equally or more important in shaping accusations. Other works muddy the waters by noting the many places, particularly in the Baltic and Scandinavia, but also pockets within Western Europe, where men, not women, comprised a large fraction or even the majority of the accused.Evidence of male witches in Estonia, Finland, and Iceland is found in Maia Madar, “Estonia I: Werewolves and Poisoners,” in Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 257–72; Juhan Kahak, “Estonia II: The Crusade against Idolatry,” in ibid., 273–84; Antero Heikkinen and Timo Kervinen, “Finland: The Male Domination,” in ibid., 319–38; Kirsten Hastrup, “Iceland: Sorcerers and Paganism,” in ibid., 383–401; Marko Nenonen, ‘”Envious are all the People, Witches Watch at Every Gate”: Finnish Witches and Witch Trials in the 17th Century,' Scandinavian Journal of History 18 (1993):77–91. In Western Europe, regions that produced larger trials generally included higher percentages of males among the accused. See E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976); H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch-Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562–1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972). In the heart of Europe, France also offers some exceptionally high representation of males in particular jurisdictions, although not uniformly throughout the country. Alfred Soman finds that over half of the 1,300 defendants who appealed witchcraft convictions before the Parlement of Paris were male. Alfred Soman, “Les Procès de sorcellerie au Parlement de Paris (1565–1640),” Annales 32 (1977):790–814; and “La Sorcellerie vue du Parlement de Paris au début du XVII<+>e siècle,” Actes du 104<+>e congrès national des sociétés savantes, Bordeaux, 1979, Section d'histoire moderne et contemporaine (Paris, 1981); and Sorcellerie et justice criminelle (16e–18e siècles) (London, 1992), 798–99. William Monter finds an extraordinary pocket of male witches in Normandy. “Here, in the Pays de Caux, lay the epicenter of male witchcraft in Western Europe.” W. Monter, “Toads and Eucharists: The Male Witches of Normandy, 1564–1660,” French Historical Studies 20 (1997):563–95, quote on 581. Other discussions of the involvement of men in witchcraft trials include Eva Labouvie, “Männer im Hexenprozess. Zur Sozialanthropologie eines ‘männlichen' Verstädnisses vom Magie und Hexerei,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16 (1990):56–78; Robert W. Thurston, Witch, Wicce, Mother Goose: The Rise and Fall of the Witch Hunts in Europe and North America (London: Longman, 2001), 126–27.On Russia's male witches, see Russell Zguta, “Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-Century Russia,” American Historical Review 82 (1977):1187–207; Valerie Kivelson, “Through the Prism of Witchcraft: Gender and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy,” in Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec, eds. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); A. S. Lavrov, Koldovstvo i religiia v Rossii, 1700–1740 gg. (Moscow: Drevlekhranilishche, 2000); E. B. Smilianskaia, Koldun i ved'ma v kontekste russkoi kul'tury XVIII veka (Moscow: ROO “Sodeistvie sotrudnichestvu Instituta imeni Dzh. Kennana,” 2000); “Sudebno-sledstvennye dokumenty kak istochnik po istorii obshchestvennogo soznaniia (iz opyta izucheniia “dukhovnykh del” pervoi poloviny XVIII v.),” in Issledovaniia po istorii knizhnoi i traditsionnoi narodnoi kul'tury Severa (Sytyvkar, 1997), 168–75; and her forthcoming book, Volshebniki, bogokhul'niki, eretiki. Narodnaia religioznost' i dukhovnye prestupleniia v Rossii XVIII veka (Moscow: Indrik, 2002). W. F. Ryan also acknowledges some gender imbalance among those accused in Russia, in, “The Witchcraft Hysteria in Early Modern Europe: Was Russia an Exception?” Slavonic and East European Review 76 (1998):49–84. Still, little systematic work has appeared that seriously attempts to sort out why in some areas people believed that, “particularly through the agency of woman are infernal enchantments brought to pass,” and elsewhere men became the more common targets of accusation.The quote is taken from an early Russian text, but the presence of this textual tradition did not prevent later Muscovites from accusing primarily male witches. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans and ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Medieval Academy of America, 1973), entry for the year 1071, p. 153.

Connections, circuits, webs, and networks: these are concepts that are overused in today's world histories. Working from a commitment to reflexive historicization, this paper points to one moment in the consolidation of these terms: the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visual politics of “new imperialism.” Utilizing photographs, engravings, postcards, letters, and colonial documents, the paper argues that connection was mesmerizing and can still mesmerize the historian. Being connected became possible because of visual and infrastructural projects that allowed the production and consumption of lines that literally cut sea and land. At a time of high empire, and in accordance with the dictates of Imperial Geography, particular locales or “nodes” were thus positioned in the “global.” To mount this critique of our language, the paper focuses on the infrastructural development of the port of Colombo, alongside the thinking of Halford Mackinder, the building of breakwaters in Colombo, the arrival of mass tourism, projections of capitalist improvement for the business of transshipment, and the use of the port by Indian laborers on their way to Ceylon's highland plantations. By attending to the place where connection is wrought, its material workings, and its traces in the visual, intellectual, and capitalist archive, it is argued that connectivity's forgettings and displacements come more forcefully into view. If connection had an evacuating character and could be so imperialist, what of its status in our writings?

Who supported National Socialism in Germany, and why? The conventional answers are well-supported and satisfying. The Nazis, we know, gained their decisive electoral support from those “middle” groups of German society that belonged neither to the elite nor to the proletariat and that lay outside the two great “camps”-Socialist and Catholic-of German political life. That means, to name the most significant categories, Protestant (or at least secularized) peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, and white-collar workers, and even some nonunionized manual workers, most of them probably skilled.

The correlation between socialism and industrialism was found to be. 30. Thus, there is a small positive correlation between the two factors. That is, socialism tends to occur most strongly in industrial areas; however, the relation is not especially strong.

The correlation between socialism and fascism as measured by violence per 100,000 population was found to be. 55. Thus there is a fairly strongest.

This paper concerns an idea in which the writer became interested while trying to understand the political institutions of one people – the Baganda of East Africa.1 Fundamentally, however, it is a comparative idea which requires to be tested against a much wider range of data than one person commands. In such circumstances one attempts to achieve a measure of comparative perspective through “reading around” in the history of such other times and places as seem relevant, but amateur groping of this kind is no substitute for criticism by the uniquely wide range of specialists who constitute the clientele of this journal. It is therefore with more than the usual sincerity that the writer invites criticism.

Radiation is a workplace hazard that eludes the sensing body, or seems to. After Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, Kai Erickson described radiation as “an invisible threat,” “the very embodiment of stealth and treachery.” The first generation of Canadian nuclear power workers, from their four decades of experience around reactors has a different sense of the matter. They describe a physical awareness of the morphology and topography of radiation, a cultivated bodily knowledge that informed their actions as they produced power. They describe a “feel and a touch for the plant,” framed in theoretical studies, made through attentiveness and alert expectation, honed by being out and about in the station, being its intimate, “listening to its very cries.” By their telling, “doesn't feel right” ceased to be a metaphor about their workplace circumstance, and through study and practice, became a bodily effect, a report from the somatic. Key to work safety for Canadian nuclear workers were close study of the theory of ionizing radiation, adeptness with both the instruments which made radiation apparent and the calculations that made the readings on dials into qualitatively and spatially distinctive workplace presences, and skill in choosing, donning, building, and removing physical barriers between their bodies and radiation fields. Through this knowledge and practice, Canadian nuclear workers came to embody the hazards of the job. This working knowledge of the insensible enabled them to be responsible for their own radiation protection and for the safety of those with whom they worked.

In the aftermath of World War II, a new international infrastructure based on United Nations agencies took charge of coordinating global biomedical research. Through this infrastructure, European and American geneticists hoped to collect and test blood samples from human populations across the world to understand processes of human heredity and evolution and trace the historical migrations of different groups. They relied heavily on local scientific workers to help them identify and access populations of interest, although they did not always acknowledge the critical role non-Western collaborators played in their studies. Using scientific publications, personal correspondence, and oral histories, I investigate the collaborative relationships between Western scientists, their counterparts in the Middle East, and the human subjects of genetic research. I comparatively examine the experiences of Israeli and Iranian scientists and physicians engaged in genetic anthropology and medical genetics between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, noting how they both applied nationalist historical narratives to their genetic data and struggled to establish the value of their local knowledge and scientific labor. I argue that the Israeli and Iranian experience of transnational scientific collaboration is representative of how Western scientists relegated their collaborators from “developing” regions to a subordinate positionality as collection agents or native informants. Meanwhile, within their own countries, the elite professional identity of Israeli and Iranian scientists granted them the authority to manipulate their research subjects, who often belonged to marginalized minority communities, and to interpret their biology and history within contexts of Jewish and Persian nationalism.

This essay discusses some beliefs and activities of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), a missionary body of Evangelicals in the Church of England, as its members attempted to found and expand missionary work in Ukaguru, an area inhabited by the Kaguru people about one hundred and fifty miles inland in east-central Tanzania. In the nineteenth century, Ukaguru lay on the most frequented caravan route used to reach the great interlacustrine kingdoms of Uganda. Initial contact with the Kaguru was made in 1876 by CMS members en route to Buganda. Although CMS work in East Africa was concentrated in Uganda and coastal and highland Kenya, a minor station in Ukaguru was established in 1878, in part as a rest-stop for those proceeding inland but also to save souls.

This article investigates the violent aftermaths of Rwanda's 1994 Genocide and Liberation war by analyzing its Gacaca Courts, which framed themselves as a “traditional” mechanism of transitional justice. These specialized genocide tribunals, in operation between 2002 and 2012, authorized laypersons to sentence their neighbors to up to life in prison. They passed judgment on almost two million cases, at an official conviction rate of 86 percent. I argue that through their practice, “genocide” came to be constituted as a crime whose contours extended far beyond the boundaries of any international legal definition. It included a wide range of acts, utterances, and inner states, as potentially infinite manifestations of a boundless criminal interiority named “genocide ideology,” the necessary ‘driving force’ behind acts of genocide. Within Gacaca, genocide ideology was constituted as the continuing destructive potential of Hutu to menace or even disrespect innocent Tutsi, who were constituted as metonymic of the “new” state. The paranoid hermeneutics of those trials led them to project such an interiority within ‘others,’ imagined as constantly on the verge of erupting into insurrectionary violence, threatening the state's very foundation. The figure of the “Hutu” was transformed into a negative political category operating as a spectral threat haunting the New Rwanda. Gacaca led to a realization throughout the vast population that it marked as “Hutu” that the crime of genocide could potentially inhabit any and perhaps even all of them, thereby producing a generalized fear and pervasive silence.

If one were a Tagalog convert to Christianity in the seventeenth or early eighteenth century, one would have probably been compelled to go to confession at least once a year. Confronting the Spanish priest, one would be subjected to his anxious probing in the vernacular as he proceeded through a checklist of possible transgressions against each of the Ten Commandments. Such checklists in the local language, called confessionarios, were common throughout the colonial period. Compiled by missionaries skilled in the Tagalog, they were designed to serve as mnemonic devices to aid Spanish clerics in eliciting the confessions of their native flock.

In his challenge to the validity and utility of my argument in “Ethnicity and Practice” (CSSH 29:1, 24–55), Yelvington raises a number of issues. He notes, for instance, that I did not, in that article, offer a specific definition of ethnicity, although I did consistently refer to ethnicity as descent symbolism and as fictive kinship. Indeed, I believe ethnicity is, at base, a claim to common identity based on putative shared descent. Wherever we find an “ethnic” category or group of people, we will also find a myth that they all originated in some primordial person, place, or event. Membership in the category or group is validated by pointing to some set of attributes, usually overt culture traits, the members believe they share in common. Given Yelvington's concluding paragraph, it appears we generally agree on what ethnicity is, if not on how to explain it.

In late 1932 and early 1933 a popular rising occurred in the region of Mewat in northern central India. Although this rebellion broke out in opposition to the political power of the princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur, as a peasant rebellion it spread over and was supported from areas of British India. It was not, pace Harold Laski, merely an instance of peasant rebellion in an area of indirect British rule. Popular protest in Mewat arose within the totality of an historical context made up as much of developments in British India as of features that were specific to areas of indirect rule. The ideological and social world of the rebellion was also constituted of elements common to British and princely India and to the local histories of the peasant community of the Meos who rose in rebellion. The context that we write about, therefore, is one of a multiplicity of different, yet interlocking, histories—legendary, secular, reformist, sectarian, legitimist, nationalist, rebellious, nativistic—all of which end, as it were, in a final denouement in the rising of 1933.