Using material from the history of African thought, this essay proposes a strategy for writing a comparative history of race that ranges beyond a consideration of white supremacy and its anti-racist inflections. Studies of race outside the global north have often been hobbled by rigid modernist assumptions that over-privilege the determining influence of Western discourses at the expense of local intellectual inheritances. This essay, in contrast, proposes a focus on locally inherited discourses of difference that have shown signs of becoming racialized, at times through entanglement with Western ideas. It pays particular attention to discourses that arranged “human kinds” along a progression from barbarian to civilized, suggesting the presence of African historicisms that in modern times have converged with the stadial ideas that played a major role in Western racial thought.

This article uses commentary on and consumption of popular music as a lens to explore how Peruvian immigrants in Spain experience new notions of belonging and alterity as they tack between official Spanish discourses about difference and otherness and distinct notions of unity and sameness that circulate within the country's wider Latin American community. I examine the uneven, tentative emergence of a local Latino identity, and how this formation compares to the tenets that accrue to the formation found in the United States. I explain how the naturalization of this new and alien way of organizing national difference, in concert with native Spanish ideas about European modernity and the need to suppress ethnicity tout court, tends to marginalize distinctive experiences valued by indigenous and mestizo Peruvians from the country's Andean region. I show how they evade the homogenizing tendencies of Latino discourse, bypass native Spanish opposition to the very notion of deep difference, and seek out spaces for asserting difference. Considered also are challenges faced by a country that has undergone rapid and recent multicultural change, even as it seeks to become part of a European project that citizens view widely as an effort to transcend divisive particularity.

This article presents a little-known story of Jewish-Muslim coexistence in Germany after World War Two. Using an ethnographic case study of Frankfurt am Main’s train-station district (Bahnhofsviertel), the analysis investigates long-term and partially forgotten Jewish-Muslim narratives, relations, and neighborhood encounters, paying particular attention to the changing political, spatial, and temporal dimensions that have blurred or closed symbolic boundaries between Jews and Muslims since the late 1960s. Bringing together the scholarship on symbolic boundaries and urban diversity, the theoretical discussion contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the variegated processes of Jewish-Muslim boundary-making and un-making over time, as well as the macro- and micro-level influences which shape these negotiations and outcomes. Studying Jewish-Muslim relations at the neighborhood level by adopting a boundary-related approach brings out more clearly the tensions over groupism and fluidity in theoretical debates and removes the current exceptionalism around Jewish-Muslim themes, making them more easily compared with other boundary processes within everyday life.

This article rethinks the nature of power and its relation to territory in the photographic event. Focusing on thousands of photographs taken during the British Younghusband Expedition to Lhasa between 1903 and 1904, it reorients understandings of photography as either reproducing or enabling the “negotiation” or contestation of power inequalities between participants. It shows how, in the transitory relations between Tibetans, Chinese, and Britons during and after photographic events, photography acted as a means by which participants constituted themselves as responsible agents—as capable of responding and as “accountable”—in relation to one another and to Tibet as a political entity. Whether in photographs of Tibetans protesting British looting or of their “reading” periodicals containing photographs of themselves, photography, especially Kodak photography, proposed potential new ways of being politically “Tibetan” at a time when the meaning of Tibet as a territory was especially indeterminate. This article therefore examines how the shifting territorial meaning of Tibet, transformed by an ascendant Dalai Lama, weakening Qing empire, and Anglo-Russian competition, converged with transformations in the means of visually reflecting upon it. If photography entailed always-indeterminate power relations through which participants constituted themselves in relation to Tibet, then it also compels our own rethinking of Tibet itself as an event contingent on every event of photography, rather than pre-existing or “constructed” by it.

Blagoustroistvo is an archaic Russian word used today primarily to refer to urban public works. This article, a collaboration between an anthropologist and a historian, focuses on aesthetics, rhetorics, and concrete practices of blagoustroistvo in Moscow during two temporal junctures: the first decade following the October Revolution (ca. 1917–1930), and the decade of Sergey Sobyanin’s Moscow Mayoralty (2010–). Our juxtaposition reveals striking continuities and contrasts. Both in the 1920s and 2010s, we show, blagoustroistvo was characterized by a semiotically-intense presence in the city; associated with an emphasis on deterministic socio-psychological “engineering”; ideologically framed by a “vernacularized” form of Marxism-Leninism; and invested with a powerful role in reconfiguring society’s spatial hierarchies, political geometry, and class consciousness. In the former period, social transformation referred to the inversion of class hierarchies and a partly illusory reconfiguration of power between center and periphery. In the 2010s, however, blagoustroistvo became a project that sought a reversion to class categories and the re-colonial reconstitution of the center’s coercive domination of the fringes. Our analysis proffers blagoustroistvo—a high-modernist, deterministic “infrastructural ideology” that has endured into and flourished in the twenty-first century—as a uniquely illustrative concept for understanding the shifting ideologies of Soviet and post-Soviet infrastructural modernity and its winding but stubborn colonial logics. Moreover, our explication of blagoustroistvo’s trans-epochal meanderings brings comparative nuance to current global debates around the alleged “return” of “social engineering” to urban governance and design in the guise of artificial intelligence, big data, smart cities, and “surveillance capitalism.”

One of the most important developments in the relationship between the state and the individual citizen during the present century has been the growth in the rights of the citizen to claim economic services and cash benefits from the state. Social security programs, which have appeared in nearly every country of the world, are a central feature of this development. Their main purpose has been the prevention of poverty through protection of the individual and his family against loss of income and against certain financial burdens. The growth of these rights, while greatly enriching the status of citizenship, has always been confronted with certain fundamental economic and social questions. What is likely to be the long-run effect on the work habits and productivity of the mass of the people once a nation has eliminated the fear of destitution? Will a growing sense of security increase productivity? Or is it likely that the more surely individuals can count on essential services and minimal incomes, the greater will be the danger of drifting into indifferent work habits? Such a drift would probably take the form of a subtle change in values rather than a dramatic shift in attitude. Whatever the effect may be, it must certainly depend on the nature of the rights granted, social values and attitudes, and a country's economic and socio-political order.

Social reality which is remote in time or in space has a charm of its own. A desire to escape one's own time and environment, the longing for the exotic and bygone (a longing that, at times, is reinforced by the spirit of the time, as during the romantic movement), residual dreams of adolescence, the lure which distance offers to the freely roaming fantasy, the urge for new experience, the turning away from daily and trivial matters, the tendency to criticize oneself through the foreign — there are many and subtle motivations that make the distant and the foreign fascinating. Novalis did not only state that everything becomes romantic and poetic “when it is moved into remoteness”; he also spoke of the “dignity of the unknown”.

At an exhibition in 1992 at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., “Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration,” one room among the four devoted to Ming China was called “Lamaist Art.” In the coffee-table book produced for the exhibition, with reproductions and descriptions of over 1,100 of the works displayed, however, not one painting, sculpture, or artifact was described as being of Tibetan origin. In commenting upon one of the Ming paintings, the well-known Asian art historian, Sherman E. Lee, wrote, “The individual [Tang and Song] motifs, however, were woven into a thicket of obsessive design produced for a non-Chinese audience. Here the aesthetic wealth of China was placed at the service of the complicated theology of Tibet.” This complicated theology is named by Lee with the term “Lamaism,” an abstract noun that does not occur in the Tibetan language but which has a long history in the West, a history inextricable from the ideology of exploration and discovery that the National Gallery cautiously sought to celebrate. Lee echoes the nineteenth-century portrayal of Lamaism as something monstrous, a composite of unnatural lineage, devoid of the spirit of original Buddhism (as constructed by European Orientialists). Lamaism was a deformity unique to Tibet, its parentage denied by India (in the voice of British Indologists) and by China (in the voice of the Qing empire), an aberration so unique in fact that it would eventually float free from its Tibetan abode, an abode that would vanish.

Historical consciousness has not been a prized possession in most human cultures, and a sense of a time that considers social affairs to have been developing over several hundreds of years [prior to the present] and by agents ⋯μοουσἱος ⋯μîνx(of essentially the same being as ourselves) is actually a cultural oddity. Most of the thousands of the world's cultures are discrete primal societies—many of them small—that constitute the ethnographic panorama of today. They remind us that there once lay hundreds of more regionally confined, more homogeneous and tribal-oriented human groupings. For such a vast array of societies, however, we simply lack long-term histories.

A very great deal of our knowledge of urban life in Tokugawa Japan relates to the “happy society” of Genroku in the early 18th century, to the life of the theater and the gay quarters, and to the activities of the great merchant houses and the more extravagant and colorful of their heads. Extensive coverage is given theories of the state, administrative arrangements, and the discrepancies between the actual and theoretical positions of the classes of Tokugawa society. Ordinarily, mobility is treated in passing, partly because vertical social mobility is rightly presumed to have been a minor feature of that society until at least its closing period, and partly because the materials required are so difficult to unearth and so resistant to rigorous analysis. Bellah's observation that “…mobility was largely within classes rather than between them,” is apt, although Taeuber reminds us that “…movements of surplus youth from the rural areas to the cities were adjustments of population to resources and employment opportunies that ante-dated modern industrialization by some centuries.” Lampard completes the thought with respect to its implications for the transition to industrialism in his remark that “…old commercial-administrative centers [provide] ready markets, some tradition of urban life, and constant pressure to secure a livelihood from non-farming activity.”

In its broadest sense, the theory of segmentation provides an analytic approach to the study of the interaction of political units under conditions of minimal or no regulation by a central authority. Under such circumstances, the groups that inhabit a given territory must devise alternative means of managing conflict within and among themselves, for allocating resources, selecting leaders, and for meeting outside threats. They can neither expect nor rely upon a state apparatus endowed with sufficient coercive means to enforce its decisions and to undertake the functions of regulation, allocation, and protection. Consequently, these functions must be performed through autonomous, internally generated mechanisms arising from the structures and interplay of the groups themselves. There is no need here to explore in detail the theory of segmentation as it has been presented by numerous anthropologists. Suffice it to say that we view segmentary tribal organization as a means of conflict and resource management in the absence of a strong central authority.1 The principles guiding its operation can be extended to analogous, albeit non-tribal, situations of political competition, and it is precisely this extension that we propose to make.

In the sociological literature, the study of inter-ethnic relations has been dominated either by the problem of the black-white conflict in the U.S.A. or by the controversy over whether social relations in colonial and excolonial countries are ‘pluralistic’. The history of the Soviet Union provides quite a different context in which various ethnic groups, each with peculiar traditions and languages and at various levels of social, political and economic development, have interacted one with another. Study of the Soviet Union enables one to compare the role of Marxist-Leninist ideology in an ethnically mixed community with the usual examples of the impact of religious and ‘imperialist’ belief systems, and it may help to clarify whether ‘ethnic group’ is a useful analytical category or whether ‘ethnic relations’ can be explained in terms of the more traditional classifications of class, status and power.

In 1905 the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon of Kedleston, was forced to resign as a result of a disagreement with his Commander-in-Chief, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum. What began as a mild bureaucratic affair soon escalated into a major power battle, and the scene of the struggle shifted in turn from the narrow confines of Indian bureaucracy to the exalted chambers of Imperial decision-makers to the public forum of two continents.

The Mexican ejido, the Soviet kolkhoz, the Chinese commune and the Tanzanian Ujamaa village have all been encouraged by governments as a means of reorganizing the countryside on a communal basis. Few policies have had so profound an effect on people's lives as have those associated with the collectivization of agriculture. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the degree of similarity in the collectivization experiences.

Economists have increasingly recognized that one of the main sources of economic development is technological change. Since it is much easier to borrow than to invent new technology, an important source of technological change has been the diffusion of new technology from its place of origin to subsequent users. When such diffusion involves movement between two countries, it is usually referred to as technology transfer.

Flood lights illuminated the southern Brazilian night as thousands of railroad workers struggled to meet their daily trace construction quotas. Brazil Railway Company foremen shouted their orders so as to be heard above the din of massive steam-powered earth movers. These machines, a novelty for the region in 1910, were the North American-owned company's newest ally in its push to meet the rapidly approaching construction deadline. On December 17, 1910, a gayly decorated train crossed the Santa Catarina-Rio Grande do Sul border, thereby inaugurating Brazil's newest railroad line. The company had succeeded in connecting the agricultural south with Brazil's rising industrial star, the state of São Paulo.

This essay examines the sociocultural mechanisms which preserved the Jewish ethnic identity in Yemen over the centuries. The Jewish community of Yemen existed continuously as an ethnic minority for over 1,500 years, dating back to the mid-fifth century and ending with the establishment of the state of Israel, when the Jews were declared persona non grata by the Yemeni government and were forced to leave en masse in 1948 (Ratzaby 1978).