When Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was a medical student at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, she spent the autumn of 1901 constructing an anatomical model of a young human brain. Most accounts call it an “embryo” brain, although as we shall see it likely belonged to a fetus or infant. The assignment was her final opportunity to obtain the medical degree after failing four classes in the spring of her senior year. Her anatomy professor, Franklin Paine Mall (1982–1917), offered her a second chance to graduate if she would finish her brain model and write an accompanying manuscript. Stein eventually produced sixty-three drawings and “roughly twenty-five pages of text,” in addition to the model itself (Meyer 2001: 89). She submitted the work in January 1902, but Mall judged it as inept and threw it away. Stein set off for Europe, leaving medicine behind forever. She settled in Paris where she became an avant-garde writer most notably known for her book supposedly chronicling the life of Alice Babette Toklas (1877–1967), who was Stein's longtime lover, secretary, editor, cook, and companion. The book, published in 1933, narrated the life of the inimitable Gertrude Stein, although it was playfully titled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Scholars of democracy from Tocqueville to Habermas have long considered the proliferation of so-called voluntary associations as a sign of a flourishing civil society and as central to the rise of democratic modernity. I contend that the Algerian theatrical and musical associations of the reformist period anticipate another kind of civic history: a history of displays of unanimism in public life. I am interested in how and why Algerians learned to produce public displays of agreement for particular audiences (including themselves) at particular historical moments. I emphasize three factors that contributed to the production of unanimity: the achievement of tawḥīd or unity in the Islamic reform movement, vernacular practices of consensus-based argumentation, and French colonial legal and surveillance mechanisms. The essay engages theories of civil society, colonialism, and performance. It draws primarily on material from the French colonial archives for the city of Constantine, Algeria.

In July 2010, following a year-long nationwide debate over Islamic veiling, the French government passed a law prohibiting facial coverings in all public spaces. Prior research attributes this and other restrictive laws to France's republican secular tradition. This article takes a different approach. Building on literature that sees electoral politics as a site for articulating, rather than merely reflecting, social identities, I argue that the 2010 ban arose in significant part out of political parties’ struggles to demarcate the boundaries of legitimate politics in the face of an ultra-right electoral threat. Specifically, I show that in seeking to prevent the ultra-right National Front party from monopolizing the religious signs issue, France's major right and left parties agreed to portray republicanism as requiring the exclusion of face veiling from public space. Because it was forged in conflict, however, the consensus thus generated is highly fractured and unstable. It conceals ongoing conflict, both between and within political parties, over the precise meaning(s) of French republican nationhood. The findings thus underscore the relationship between boundary-drawing in the political sphere and the process of demarcating the cultural and political boundaries of nationhood in contexts of immigrant diversity.

This essay explores the intersecting socio-material and ethical demands that engineers confront in adapting sea defenses to climate change in Guyana. It focuses on the tensions in climate adaptation that create the possibilities for theorizing innovation as a key theme of counter-modernities in the Anthropocene. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, oral histories, and archival research, I show that engineers’ decision-making regarding whether or not to innovate sea defenses is a fraught process dependent upon processes of erosion and the ontological (in)stability of specific infrastructures known as groynes. To cope, engineers produce what I call “innovation narratives” to describe how obstacles to climate adaptation are created by combinations of neocolonial empire, shapeshifting ecologies, inconsistent maintenance programs, and fiscal debt. At the same time, their efforts signal an emerging global politics of credibility that is reinforced by desires for more inclusive forms of governance rather than brute power or capitalization.

In correlation to the expansion and intensification of capitalist forms of agricultural production in the Malay states during the end of the nineteenth century, the British Colonial administration articulated the need to systematize the policing of agricultural production with increasing strength. The economic prospects of feeding the world market's increasing demand for natural rubber, combined with the objective of decreasing the Malay states' dependence on import of basic staples (notably rice), were taken by the Colonial administration as indicators of an urgent need to spur on the progress of agricultural production. A revolution of agricultural practices, which would transform what was seen as the backward and inefficient techniques of the “native cultivators” into modern and progressive production forms based on scientific knowledge, could only take place, it was argued, by resorting to systematic government intervention.

In 1939, Wisconsin readers of a weekly newspaper column by Mitchell Redcloud, a member of the Ho-Chunk Indian community settled within the rural township of Komensky, were greeted with a set of headlines from the imaginary “Komensky News” about an actual local event. The headlines reported that despite opposition from local whites, Ho-Chunk people had successfully elected a Ho-Chunk candidate to the township board. This article draws on studies of Indigenous media and recent efforts to develop field-theoretic accounts of social action to understand the interdependence of Redcloud's headlines and the Ho-Chunk vote as part of an incipient project of Indigenous political action. Using census records, I first describe the positions in the everyday field of race and class relations that Ho-Chunk people occupied in Komensky, based on their incomes, educations, and occupational statuses. I then draw on this description to understand Redcloud's position-taking strategies before the election. I next examine Redcloud's writing career in the newspaper to understand his strategy of self-positioning as a marked Indian voice within a print-based discursive field that denigrated other Ho-Chunk voices. I finish by examining new position-taking strategies manifest in the 1939 vote and in Redcloud's turn to headline register. I argue that both media and electoral mechanisms offered relatively autonomous fields that made these experiments with Indigenous action possible despite the absence of tribal political institutions necessary to transform the positions Ho-Chunk people occupied in their everyday lives. Together, the headlines and the election suggest the interdependence of activism carried out in media and in governmental structures in the production of transformative acts of political self-representation.

I spent the 1996 Columbus Day holiday weekend in Bayonne in southwest France lecturing on the ethnographic fieldwork research I had conducted among a community of artisanal chocolatiers six years earlier.See Terrio 1998:18–31. 1996 was proclaimed the Year of Chocolate in Bayonne by municipal leaders and local chocolatiers. This event was an ambitious commemoration involving a series of public lectures organized to celebrate the southwest as the historic cradle of French chocolate production. At the gala dinner following my lecture, there was little talk of chocolate but a lively discussion ensued on the Clovis affair.An earlier version of this essay was presented in a session organized by Jill Dubisch at the 1997 American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings in Washington, DC. For their detailed readings of the text and insightful comments I wish to thank the editors; the excellent readers who reviewed the essay for this journal; David Kertzer, who served as the AAA session discussant; Sylvie Durmelat; and Patti Sunderland.L'affaire concerned the polemic surrounding the national ceremony organized two weeks earlier to commemorate the fifteen hundredth anniversary of the Catholic conversion and baptism of the Frankish king Clovis in 496. That polemic centered on an apparently incongruous cast of characters including the fifth-century Frankish king Clovis, the current President Jacques Chirac, Pope Jean Paul II, the Catholic Church and the French Republic.Journalist Adam Gopnik devoted his regular Paris Journal feature in the New Yorker magazine to an insightful and humorous analysis of the Clovis affair (7 October 1996).

In “The Suggestiveness of Vestiges: Confucianism and Monarchy at the Last”, I wrote of the draining of the monarchical mystique in modern China. Vestigial monarchism, it seemed to me, was related to an equally vestigial Confucianism — really related, that is, not just parallel in some modern course of corrosion. The relation was the thing, a novel one of untroubled association (in a common, new ideology of “national spirit”), unpromising departure from what seemed, more and more, the devious, uncertain, tense partnership of pre-Western days. The loss of this ambivalence, this Confucian-monarchical attraction-repulsion, comprised the Chinese state's attrition. And if in its time that traditional state was a prodigiously hardy perennial, perhaps its vitality, in a truly Nietzschean sense, was the measure of its tolerance of tensions: their release was the bureaucratic monarchy's death.

At the end of 1978, the German art critic Walter Frentz, introducing a film and public lecture in the city of Worms, postulated that Europeans could breathe new life into the idea of European unity by devoting greater care and attention to the shape and form of European cities. The theme of his remarks that night specifically encouraged the preservation of historic urban cores, but more striking was his general concept linking the development of the European Community with the treatment of the European city. As a growing literature on architectural symbolism and urban imagery suggests, cities take the shapes that are expressions of a total society, reflecting the spectrum of their political, economic and cultural life. As Europeans rebuilt and developed their cities in the period after World War II, they also charted the course of their unification.

Every subject of the state, Immanual Kant reasoned in a discussion of “civil equality” in 1793, “must be able to attain the social rank [Stufe eines Standes] … to which his talent, his effort, and his luck can carry him” without hindrance by any “hereditary prerogative.” A year later Kant's former disciple Johann Gottlieb Fichte likewise imagined a society in which “the choice of a Stand” would be “a choice through freedom” to which no “particular action” or “general institution” could pose a legitimate barrier. The two philosophers offered variations on the radical social principle of “careers open to talent,” extending the promise of upward mobility to talented children of the underprivileged. Proclaimed by the French National Assembly in August 1789, the principle also had a German lineage and, in the first decade of the next century, was to figure prominently in the official program for national revival in Prussia.

The geographical distribution of separatist movements in the world today is, and always has been, highly skewed. At any point in history such movements arise only in particular states, and—within these states—only in particular regions. One task of a general theory of separatism is to account for this skewed geographical distribution. Mr. Sloan seems to think that the answer to this problem is ‘imperialism’, tout court. He apparently believes that any region subject to dependent development is likely to spawn separatist movements (hence his discussion of Vermont). According to Mr. Sloan ethnicity has no causal status in a theory of separatism. Thus, to pay it heed is to mistake an effect for a cause.

This essay is no more than a preliminary endeavor to examine analogies between principles of land tenure in the recent history of an East African society and what appear to be strikingly similar principles that obtained in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England. If these analogies are demonstrable with a reasonable degree of plausibility, a useful framework of reference may be established within which some broader theoretical issues can be discussed. One such issue is that, given a degree of structural similarity between two or more social systems, there might be a corresponding equivalence in the logic of legal thought in response to a common object of litigation—in this particular case, the subject of land tenure.

Mr. Davis finds The Moral Basis of a Backward Society subject to criticism on three grounds: (a) inadequacies of method, (b) inadequacies of formal argument, and (c) omissions and commissions in the presentation of the material itself. Let us examine his bill of particulars on each count.