The struggle to control nature takes many forms. In the State of Maine, one current struggle for control has been focused on declining stocks of Atlantic salmon. The varied participants in the debates and struggles over Atlantic salmon include federal and state governments and many of their bureaucracies, large international timber corporations, small local businesses, salmon farmers, dam owners, blueberry growers, commercial fishers, recreational fishers, scientists, and a raft of environmental organizations. In different ways, these participants all have a stake in the fate of Atlantic salmon, but they do not have the same power to effect ecological change or to define the debate in terms most favorable to their wishes.The primary sources on the debate include, “Review of the Status of Anadromous Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) under the U.S. Endangered Species Act,” 60 Federal Register 50530 (July 1999); “Proposed Endangered Status for a Distinct Population Segment of Anadromous Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) in the Gulf of Maine,” 64 Federal Register 62627 (17 Nov. 1999); “Comments of the Maine Salmon Rescue Coalition in Opposition to the Proposal to List Atlantic Salmon as Endangered Under the Endangered Species Act” (12 Apr. 2000); and “Comments of the State of Maine in Opposition to Proposed Endangered Status for a Distinct Population Segment (DPS) of Atlantic Salmon in the Gulf of Maine, 64 Federal Register 62627 (November 17, 1999),” (14 Apr. 2000). The published and unpublished documents concerning the endangered species listing have been collected by the Services, and are available for inspection at the National Marine Fisheries Service, Gloucester, Massachusetts, and at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Hadley, Massachusetts.

How conservative a force is Islam in Africa?

The experience of Northern Nigeria would seem to suggest that Islam is indeed basically conservative. Yet, if that is so, there are other factors on the African scene which need to be explained away. When a few years ago Africa was divided into the Casablanca and the Monrovia groups, the radicals were the Casablanca states. Yet of the six countries which constituted the Casablanca group, five were Muslim countries: Guinea, Mali, the United Arab Republic, Morocco and Algeria (then represented by a Government-in-exile). Nkrumah of Ghana was the odd man out at Casablanca.

If only everybody meant the same thing by ‘bureaucracy’—or ‘feudalism’, ‘Old Regime’, ‘capitalism’, and so on, ad nauseam. If we all agreed on what these terms meant a good deal of paper might be saved. Since this is not even remotely the case, I had better begin by saying something about how the term ‘bureaucracy’ is to be used in the pages that follow. A government shall be said to be bureaucratized to the extent that it has come to resemble the organizational portrait drawn by Max Weber in Economy and Society. Weber's so-called definition is a list (or lists) of characteristics whose relative importance and relation to one another have stirred much debate.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a new reform movement rose to challenge the nation's economic oligarchy. It drew its support from an expanding urban middle class and from influential intellectuals and publicists. The party that gave political voice to these interests was led by a popular leader no ted for his vague but alluring rhetoric. He made skillful use of the press and of his party machinery. He and his followers sought to control large economic interests (an important railroad regulation law was passed in 1907) and to democratize the machinery of government (a major electoral reform law was passed in 1912).

According to Xanthus of Lydia, who wrote in the fifth century B.C., the Magi considered it right to have intercourse with their mothers, daughters, and sisters and also to hold women in common. The first half of this claim is perfectly correct: Xanthus is here referring to the Zoroastrian institution of close-kin marriage (khwēdōdāh), the existence of which is not (or no longer) in doubt. But his belief that the Magi held women in common undoubtedly rests on a misunderstanding, possibly of easy divorce laws and more probably of the institution of wife lending. In the fifth century A.D., however, we once more hear of Persians who deemed it right to have women in common; and this time the claim is less easy to brush aside. The Persians in question were heretics, not orthodox Zoroastrians or their priests; their heresy was to the effect that both land and women should be held in common, not just women (though the first attempt to implement it did apparently concern itself with women alone); and the heretics are described, not just by Greeks, let alone a single observer, but also by Syriac authors and the Persians themselves as preserved in Zoroastrian sources and the Islamic tradition.

This article offers the first large-scale analysis of the interlinked dynamics of integration and belonging based on perceptions of “ordinary” German-speaking migrants in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our analysis draws on a corpus of over a thousand letters from the North American Letter Collection held at the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha in Germany. Through computer-assisted text analysis, framed by research on transnationalism and immigrant integration, we explore patterns in integration and identities over time. We show how the migrants continuously redefine their identities vis-à-vis their homeland and the host society, and their letters thereby shape the image of the United States and the homeland for their recipients. Our analysis establishes more comprehensively than have previous historical and social science studies that integration into a host society is a non-linear process. Immigrant identities are influenced less by the time they have spent in the receiving country than by critical political events that affect both the country of origin and that of destination. Such events can reactivate migrant's identifications with their homeland. Immigrant networks filter this dual process in that they can facilitate migrants’ integration while also reminding them of people and places left behind.

When I first started fieldwork in Wannian, a village in southwestern Taiwan, I stayed in the village leader's house. At this early stage of the fieldwork, my relationship with the villagers was no more than polite and formal. One afternoon, I heard villagers talking in low and urgent voices about their temple's god statue. When I approached, they fell silent. No matter how I tried to question them about what had happened, they would tell me nothing. In the following days the village atmosphere became ponderous and oppressive, and I felt my presence there becoming increasingly awkward. Thinking that leaving for a while might provide a relief for both the villagers and me, I moved to a neighboring village. Since it was only one kilometer away, the wind brought the sound of the Wannian village loudspeaker. Though they had lowered the volume, I could vaguely hear announcements of preparations for upcoming ceremonies of worship. After a month, I moved back to Wannian, but only several years later did I understand what had happened.

This article examines revolutionary discourses of national historical transformation in Bolivia and tracks the ways those discourses are appropriated, contested, and recast by farmers in the rural agricultural province of Ayopaya. During fieldwork carried out with Quechua-speaking farmers in Ayopaya between 2011 and 2012, I learned about people's enduring concerns with a recent hacienda past. Against governmental declarations that Bolivia's colonial past was dead or had passed, farmers meditated on the duration of earlier histories of colonial land dispossession and violations of indigenous sovereignty. Talk about the region's oppressive history here allowed people to assess deficient state aid and resources but also to oppose unwelcome state interventions pushing a legal model of bounded collectivity. I trace the ways that farmers and villagers mobilized the hacienda past to address inequitable land tenure, violated sovereignty, and women's marginalization from political life, and thereby raise new questions about the critical possibilities opened up by the re-politicization of this colonial history. Rural support for Bolivia's Movement Toward Socialism party government eroded nearly a decade ago, and this complicates both triumphalist and defeatist accounts of President Evo Morales’ 2019 resignation, which tend to paint Morales’ rural indigenous supporters as innocent and naïve.

French literature has specialized, almost since its beginning, in accounts of eroticism and courtship. During the twelfth century, Northern romance and Southern lyric described an idealized heterosexuality and its role in honing the aristocratic individual. In the thirteenth century, a new genre appeared that dealt with sexual encounter in more materialistic terms. The new form, the fabliau, added to literary language a vocabulary of vulgarisms from the spoken vernacular. At the same time, it gave European literature a new theme: sexuality that betokens not personal fulfillment, but rivalrous interpersonal struggle.

This paper is a part of a much larger study in comparative historical sociology addressing the question of the emergence and initial development of the related phenomena that may be subsumed under the umbrella term “nationalism”: national identity, national consciousness, and political collectivities based on such an identity and consciousness—nations. This larger project focuses on the five societies that were among the very first to define themselves as nations—England, the United States of America, France, Germany, and Russia—and examines the social bases of national identity, its embodiment in and perpetuation through institutional arrangements and patterns of culture, and its transformation in the process of diffusion from one culture to another.

The presence at Uganda's 1980 general elections of a Commonwealth Observer Group might be seen as a seminal moment. This was the first formal international observation of polls in a sovereign African state and the precursor of multiple similar missions that later became routine. Yet the 1980 mission sits uneasily in the history of election observation. The observers endorsed the results despite evidence of malpractice, and Uganda plunged into civil war within months. Internationally, the mission is now either forgotten or treated as an embarrassment. Within Uganda, it has been denounced as part of an outsider conspiracy to foist an unwanted president on an unwilling people. This article argues that the 1980 mission was neither entirely seminal nor an aberration, and that both the elections and observation were driven partly by actors within Uganda rather than simply imposed by outsiders. The availability of UK government records allows us to see the events of 1980 as a particularly clear example of a recurring “observers’ dilemma.” Ideally, elections combine democracy and state-building. They offer people a choice as to who will lead or represent them, and at the same time they assert through performance a crucial distinction between a capable, ordering state and a law-abiding citizenry. Yet these two aspects of elections may be in tension; a poll that offers little or no real choice may still perform “stateness” through substantial, orderly public participation. When that happens in what would now be called a “fragile state,” should international observers denounce the results?

It is a commonplace in the study of nationalism that the construction of national identity inevitably relies on the creation and use of narratives—part history, part myth—that imbue nations and nationalist projects with coherence and purpose. This article seeks to render this idea more complex and analytically useful by asking how such narrative discourses become connected to personal identities. Why and how do people invest themselves in nations and nationalisms? An important part of the answer lies in the ways that constructions of narrative and agency at the collective level articulate with experiences of narrative and agency at a personal level. It is our constant existential concern with power that binds together collectivities and individuals, national narratives, and life histories. We must attend to this connection in order to better understand the powerful resonances nationalist discourses often have.

Recently Singer (1966: 497–505), while reviewing a book on economic development and Hinduism, underlined the necessity of recognizing the ‘deficiencies’ of the hypothetico-deductive method in studying social change in India. He alluded to Weber's thesis (ideal-typical relations of the Hindu ‘ethic’ to economic development) and its possible ‘distortions’ under this approach, especially if applied ‘as a basis for quick diagnoses of the ideological and structural factors impeding or facilitating economic development…’ (p. 498), or when applied to a general analysis of the social and cultural ‘transformations’ involved in modernization. He noted two major limitations: first, that under hypothetico-deductive use of ideal types one tries to deduce ‘realistic consequences from basic beliefs, values, motives postulated in isolation from concrete social and cultural contexts’ (p. 501), and second (which is perhaps a related consequence), that when deducing general tendencies, one fails ‘to specify conditions and magnitudes under which the conclusions are valid’ (p. 502). While Singer recognizes that this approach ‘will eventually complement’anthropologists’ narrative, descriptive, and inductive approaches, he stresses that the present need is to accumulate relevant empirical studies of the latter kind, against which we can check the conclusions of hypothetico-deductive theory.

In 1959, when struggling to characterize the Black Carib community in which I had recently done fieldwork, I coined the word ‘neoteric’ to refer to societies which are neither primitive nor peasant, in which traditions are absent or very shallow, and which may be said to have arisen only recently in time. I picked the word from Roget's Thesaurus, selecting it because it seemed a good, short, catchy synonym for ‘new’.

If the market has emerged in current Soviet and Western discourse as a notional Rosetta stone capable of deciphering the coded blueprints of post-Soviet reconstruction, its apparent destruction by the Bolsheviks during the Civil War and subsequent resurrection under the New Economic Policy (NEP) is often seen as a similarly defining element of the whole early Soviet project. As many would have it, the party's initial urge to control entirely the whole complex of economic exchange relations firmly situates Soviet totalitarianism in a Leninist political economy. The brutal repression of free traders and the mindless nationalization of production clearly evidences the calamitous utopianism of Bolshevik class-based ideology, while the reemergence after 1921 of limited market mechanisms, even if only a reluctant concession to political weakness and economic devastation, opened alternative paths to a non-Stalinist Soviet modernity involving elements of a civil social order. In a phrase, reified conceptions of the market broadly shape historical constructions of a unique and problematic Soviet past, just as they purportedly demonstrate what is peculiar about the post-Soviet present and necessary for the future.

Few debates have maintained as persistent and passionate a level of interest and international scope—whether in the United States, France, or Turkey—as that around secularism. A cursory glance at the titles alone of books and articles on the subject tells us that this is a debate in which serious personal and political stakes are invested. At the very least the debate has been generated by the recognition that a new language of politics is needed to understand the role of religious self-expression in the public sphere. The received wisdom about distinctions between the putatively mutually exclusive domains of public and private, or sacred and secular, simply does not hold water any more. The secularism debate also raises issues of fundamental significance to the very “personality of the state,” as Talal Asad has characterized it. In France, the laicite debate has highlighted how the claim of a minority population to don items of clothing (a right denied by the secular government in Turkey with a majority Muslim population), which it sees as fundamental to its religious self-expression, has challenged the state's own image as a secular republic. In the United States, controversy has been ignited by challenges to the boundary line between private religious practice and the public domain of the state, whether it relates to school prayer or the ongoing battles between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists.

In China there is less inequality in the fortunes than in the conditions of men. Property in land has been divided into very moderate parcels, by the successive distribution of the possessions of every father equally among his sons. It rarely happens that there is but one son to enjoy the whole property of his deceased parents; and from the general prevalence of early marriages, this property is not often increased by collateral succession. These causes constantly tend to level wealth; and few succeed to such an accumulation of it as to render them independent of any efforts of their own for its increase. It is a common remark among the Chinese that fortunes seldom continue [to be] considerable in the same family beyond the third generation.

“Social disciplining” is the name that has been given to attempts by the authorities throughout early modern Europe to regulate people's private lives.1 In explicit contrast to “social control,” the informal mechanisms by which people have always sought to put pressure on one another in traditional societies, “social disciplining” was a set of formal, legislative strategies through which the emerging early modern state sought to “civilize” and “rationalize” its subjects' behavior in order to facilitate well-ordered government and a capitalist modernization of the economy.2 Whether viewed favorably as an essential stage in a beneficent “civilizing process” or more critically as an arbitrary coercion of popular culture in the interests of elites, social disciplining is increasingly regarded as central to most aspects of political, economic, religious, social, and cultural change in Europe between the medieval and the modern periods.3

This article provides a framework for understanding the continuing political potential of the anticolonial dead in twenty-first-century India. It demonstrates how scholars might move beyond histories of reception to interrogate the force of inheritance in contemporary political life. Rather than the willful conjuring of the dead by the living, for a politics in the present, it considers the more provocative possibility that the dead might themselves conjure politics—calling the living to account, inciting them to action. To explicate the prospects for such an approach, the article traces the contested afterlives of martyred Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh (1907–1931), comparing three divergent political projects in which this iconic anticolonial hero is greeted as interlocutor in a struggle caught “halfway.” It is this temporal experience of “unfinished business”—of a revolution left incomplete, a freedom not yet perfected—that conditions Bhagat Singh's appearance as a contemporary in the political disputes of the present, whether they are on the Hindu nationalist right, the Maoist student left, or amidst the smoldering remains of Khalistani separatism in twenty-first-century Punjab. Exploring these three variant instances in which living communities affirm Bhagat Singh's stake in the struggles of the present, the article provides insight into the long-term legacies of revolutionary violence in India and the relationship between politics and the public life of history in the postcolonial world more generally.