Advancement in the provincial bureaucracy of nineteenth-century China depended slightly more on the purchase of substantive posts (chüan shihkuana), particularly posts of the highest ranks purchasable, than on any other single factor yet analyzed. This finding is based on a sample of 1,047 officials, drawn from six different directories of provincial officials (T'ung-kuan lub); Shantung, 1778 and 1859; Hupei, 1831; Honan, 1837; Anhwei, 1871; and Hupei, 1879. Among these officials neither seniority nor family background, nor recruitment path nor age at receiving the chin-shih, was quite as decisive as purchase in facilitating ascent in the nine-rank hierarchy.

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”.

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.

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).

This article examines the concept of the “true hunter” (vrai chasseur) among big game hunters in French colonial Indochina. Drawing primarily on French language texts published by highly experienced European hunters between 1910 and 1950, it first examines in detail the true hunter ethic, which required hunters to hunt and kill their prey in a “sporting” (sportif) manner. This ethic involved adherence to an expansive and complicated set of rules related to stalking, marksmanship, knowledge possession, restraint, prey selection, choice of firearms and ammunition, and others. True hunting was regarded as by definition difficult and, as is argued, the practical realization of the true hunter ideal entailed not simply engaging in hunting as an activity, but instead successfully performing a very difficult but specific type of killing. The article's second purpose is to engage a paradox associated with the texts, their authors, and the ethic. While critical of other hunters for “unnecessary slaughter,” many killed staggering numbers of animals. This paradox is accounted for by placing the true hunters in the broader social context of colonial Indochina. Both their type of sport hunting and the virtuosity of their killing distinguished them from the indigenous populations that served their hunts and other European hunters. This virtuosity also legitimized the scale of their killing and placed these hunters into a distinctive social and moral community.

Since taking the editorial helm of CSSH in 2006, I have watched several intellectual trends shift and gather momentum. Postsocialist and postcolonial studies are merging into a more generalized interest in the politics of empire. Critical impulses once associated with the “post” approaches have found their way into studies of secularism, conversion, translation, and state effects. Increasingly, these topics are analyzed as transregional processes that operate across religious and political logics. In 2009, our first CSSH Conversation dealt with matters of tolerance and conversion in the Ottoman Empire, and in 2010 we filled an entire issue with essays on secularism (52-3). In each case, the ground we explored was contested, but themes of governmentality and moral transformation were central, and the terms of debate were broadly shared.

This article is a study of the Inner Mongolian land reform undertaken by the Qing government in the last decade of its rule. Instead of portraying land reform as a state process of taming and transforming nomads, I examine the metamorphosis of the multi-ethnic governing relationships enabled by the reform. The frontier governance system on which I focus consisted of coalitions and conflicts among four key players: Mongol banners, neighboring Han Chinese provinces, the Court of Dependencies, and frontier military governors. By elucidating the changing relationships that bound these players together, I pinpoint the most significant agendas of land reform, how the Mongols' position vis-à-vis state agencies changed throughout the reform process, and to what extent these changes resulted in state centralization. My study illuminates a variety of topics, including nomad sedentarization, frontier politics, and modern state expansion.

Anthropological studies of Indian villages conducted in the 1950s and 1960s form a valuable archive of rural life soon after India's independence. We compare sections of that archive with recent fieldwork in the same villages in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha. If we trust the ethnography of the 1950s, domestic and caste spheres were the locations of village incivility. It is noteworthy that there is no reference in the early work to the Partition of the subcontinent that had occurred just a few years before. Neither is there mention of discrimination or violence carried out in the name of religion in these locations. New fieldwork reveals a different story about the rise of wholesale religious incivility in the public sphere. Caste has not vanished, but inter-caste relations have taken on new forms. We suggest that the intersection of affirmative action policies, political parties, and the systematic penetration of Hindu nationalist organizations has been crucial in the remaking of rural India.

Throughout the past two millennia or more the Jews of Diaspora have persistently maintained their religious and cultural identity in spite of many vicissitudes. Also, as manifested in Jewish history, where favorable conditions exist, politically and economically, Jewish communities have rarely experienced what may be described as a complete assimilation into their surrounding sociocultural milieu. An exceptional case, however, has been noted in China, where a once prosperous and burgeoning community of Jews did indeed experience that fate.

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.

For Dutch Calvinist missionaries in Central Java, two events bookended the radically transformative decade of the 1890s. The first, at the start of the decade, was the severing of relations with a charismatic Javanese leader named Sadrach, a decision that marked a redoubled commitment to suppress local Christian syncretism and to promote Calvinist orthodoxy in its stead. The second, at the decade's end, was the establishment of a modern clinic to serve as the flagship institution of a reformulated and reinvigorated missionary project. This article considers how these two seemingly disparate events are related. It suggests that much of what was troubling to missionaries about Sadrach and his indigenous Christian movement involved their understandings and uses of the body. I then consider how the mission attempted to use modern clinical experience and the anatomical perspective to address a range of ethical and epistemological problems posed by Sadrach and his followers' understandings of the body. The modern clinic would serve as a key pedagogical and disciplinary tool for the reordering of a vocabulary and syntax of bodies and souls, a grammar of religious and social expression.

The theories which have been offered to explain the governmental instability and persistent political fragmentation of the Third Republic have been of two basic types. Either specific institutional structures have been blamed, or the French national character has been cited. Often-mentioned institutional weaknesses have included the multi-party system, the dominance of the legislative branch, the independent and authoritarian civil service, the various electoral systems tried–especially the two-ballot system and proportional representation–and so on. Aspects of political culture which are said to have contributed to instability and ineffective government include an innate distrust of leaders, the avoidance of face-to-face confrontation and compromise, the lack of a training for democracy in voluntary associations, and an authoritarian educational system. The common element in all of these explanations is that they begin at the top; they see France as a uniform society with “average” ways of doing things. That is, these explanations assume that the explanation to instability and fragmentation can be found at the national level by studying the aggregate characteristics of French men and women or by analyzing the political institutions of the nation-state.

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.

In Friction, Anna Tsing uses logging practices and timber consumption, environmental activisms and ideas about nature, local loss of livelihood and local despair over the loss of forest-as-life (as opposed to forest-as-resources), and Indonesian nation-making through business practices and international investment as her entry points for a richly argued and ethnographically nuanced analysis of the social processes by which the spatial, discursive, and metaphoric sites that have come to be known as the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ are made by each other. Her ethnographic contribution is her ability to demonstrate multiple experiences of events—from Meratus Dayak elders to Indonesian environmentalists, from Indonesian businessmen to consumers in an IKEA, from the Korean Development Company to Freeport McMoRan—which each person and institution understands and narrates differently. Indeed, Tsing shows that these people and institutions understand events and misunderstand each other in profound ways, but that the misunderstandings are productive, creating the social fact that is the Indonesian forest.

The role played by Christianity and Christian churches in the demonization of the Jews by the German National Socialist and Italian Fascist regimes remains a subject of intense controversy. The historiography at the base of this debate has been largely rooted in research on either Germany or Italy, yet comparative empirical study is particularly well-suited to allow broader generalizations. Such work is especially valuable given the very different relationships the two regimes maintained with the churches. This article identifies similarities and differences in the Nazi and Italian Fascist uses of Christianity in their efforts to turn their populations against the Jews through examination of two of their most influential popular anti-Semitic propaganda vehicles: La difesa della razza in Italy and Der Stürmer in Germany. Both mixed pseudoscientific racial theories with arguments based on Christian religious authority, and both presented themselves as defenders of Christianity against the Jewish threat. Yet while the Italian publication, reflecting the Fascist regime's close relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, took care to present itself as in harmony with the Church, the German publication adopted a much more critical attitude toward contemporary German churches and churchmen, casting them as having strayed from the true teachings of Jesus.

This paper is a semiological attempt to derive meaning from the recent reconceptualization of the German nation: the thesis of the separate socialist nation as advanced by the Socialist Unity Party (SED) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Before entering upon the question of how the-socialist nation of the GDR is defined and what this definition means in contrast to the definition of the nation current in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), we may well ask whether it makes any difference. In spite of the furor aroused by this idea in the West German press, non-Germans may legitimately wonder whether it is not silly to quibble over whether to the GDR a separate state or a separate nation.

Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations raises intriguing questions about the ways in which various countries' economic fates have been affected by the activities of what he calls distributional coalitions and vested interests. According to Olson, the development of such strategically placed groups has often enabled relatively small segments of society to impede the workings of a country's productive and distributive processes by distorting their functions to serve essentially their own interests more than the broader community interest. This ensures the perpetuation of a beneficial position for themselves, but at the cost of creating rigidities in the economic system that, in the long run, bring about in-built resistance to change, loss of competitiveness, and ultimate stagnation (Olson 1982:74–81). In itself this is not an especially remarkable proposition, but Olson has developed it into an unusually rigorous and at the same time illuminating theoretical edifice. His data have been drawn mainly from studies of the developed nations, the theory being used to explain macro-level economic performance rather than the workings of microlevel institutions, firms, or industries. But there is no compelling reason why his theory cannot be used just as fruitfully to illuminate the situation in developing countries. It may also be applicable to the micro-level analysis of institutions or industries there as well as the macro-level of national economies. Here we propose essentially to apply it to both, using Olson's basic theory as an explanatory guideline in an investigation into the causes of declining productivity in a single industry-the sugar industry-in one developing country-Indonesia.

The domestic and global forces that shaped Mexico's revolutionary struggle of 1910–17 continued to shape its state-building conflicts during the 1920s. Recent revisionist historiography underscores this point by emphasizing the bitter irony of the Mexican revolution. This literature contends that, despite the revolution's populist and nationalist aura, by the late 1920s it had done little more than subordinate the masses to an even more centralized state and deepen Mexico's dependence on United States governmental and capital interests. The revisionists argue, then, that the revolution had basically reinforced the country's old regime legacies and created a more institutionalized version of the Porfiriato's authoritarian state.

Dès qu'il aborde les textes, le médiéviste rencontre des nobiles. Ouvre-t-il Grégoire de Tours, il y voit bientôt cités des nobiles, un nobile genus, un nobilissimus in genre sua. Parcourt-il les Capitulaires francs, il y trouve rapidement un article applicable aux omnes homines laïci, tam nobiles quam ignobiles. Sources narratives ou sources diplomatiques, partout il butte d'emblée sur le problème des “nobles”.