This article tracks how a trope of middle-class household thrift, grounded on the autarchic Aristotelian oikos, has long fueled derogatory discourses in Britain aimed at low-income urban residents who practice quite different forms of thrift. Since the 1970s this trope has migrated across scales, proving a potent metaphor for national economic policy and planetary care alike, and morally and economically justifying both neoliberal welfare retraction compounded by austerity policies and national responses to excessive resource extraction and waste production. Both austerity and formal recycling schemes shift responsibility onto consumer citizens, regardless of capacity. Further, this model of thrift eclipses the thriftiness of low-income urban households, which emerges at the nexus of kin and waged labor, sharing, welfare, debt, conserving material resources through remaking and repair and, crucially, the fundamental need for decency expressed through kin care. Through a historicized ethnography of a London social housing estate and its residents, this paper excavates what happens as these different forms and scales of household thrift coexist, change over time, and clash. Ultimately, neoliberal policy centered on an inimical idiom of thrift delegitimizes and disentitles low-income urban households and undermines their ability to enact livelihood practices of sustainability and projects of dignity across generations.

The historiography of agrarian Germany before 1914 is fundamentally based upon two moments (in the Weberian sense): one of a structural and the other of an institutional nature. The structural moment comprises an emphasis upon the existence and role of agrarian dualism, that is, upon a sharp contrast, emerging from the later Middle Ages onwards, in the agrarian systems found east and west of the River Elbe and its tributary the Saale, which together formed a line bisecting Germany from Hamburg to the modern Czechoslavakian frontier. The institutional moment consists of the shift from a free-trade to a protectionist policy in respect of cereals after 1879. In the words of a leading West German agrarian historian, “On 1 January 1880 … a new epoch commenced for German agricultural policy.” In addition, the adoption of a grain tariff from 1879 is generally assumed to have had a determining influence upon the subsequent development of German agriculture and, for that matter, is thought by some writers to have exerted a considerable influence upon the entire course of modern German history.

One of the most salient features of the medieval Mediterranean is that it was a zone of intense interaction and long-term cohabitation of members of various ethno-religious communities whose relations are usually conceived of as fundamentally adversarial. Yet Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived amongst each other in both the Christian- and Muslim-ruled Mediterranean, even during the era of the crusades. Typically, such relationships have been presented as either fundamentally hostile, or cordial, and as related to the “tolerance” that host cultures were inclined to demonstrate as a consequence of their own religious orientation. This paper takes a different, phenomenological approach by focusing on a specific manifestation of this interaction: the emergence of out-group political elites in confessionally defined societies. Through the medium of three case studies—a powerful Jew in Islamic Spain, a powerful Muslim in Norman Sicily and a powerful Coptic Christian in Fatimid Egypt—I demonstrate that the status of minority elites was related to concrete political circumstances grounded in the particular environment of the region, and that, despite cultural differences that might have distinguished them, these societies developed near-identical strategies for engaging with minority elites. The language of religious polemic, exclusion, and marginalization was present, but it tended to serve as a post factum rationalization for repression rather than its cause, and tended to be deployed decisively only in certain circumstances. This provides new insights not only into Muslim-Christian-Jewish relations, but the fundamental nature of Mediterranean history and society.

This paper deals with some relationships between Javanese modernization, a Javanese ritual called slametan, and a Javanese folk-show called ludruk. I shall illustrate how slametan and ludruk play complementary roles with respect to Javanese modernization.

In response to the preceding article, Professor Sven-Eric Liedman's very interesting critique of my The Decline of the German Mandarins, let me begin by describing how I selected and approached my sources for that work. I first studied printed collections of speeches given at various German universities during the Weimar period, which I happened to encounter in the library. I next made a list of all nonscientists above the rank of instructor who taught for three or more years in faculties of arts and sciences at the universities of Berlin, Munich, Freiburg, and Heidelberg between 1918 and 1933. I read everything written by these men during those years that was relatively unspecialized or methodological in character. Finally, I extended my reading of university speeches and of my authors' works backward in time to 1890, while also adding major handbooks and anthologies in several disciplines, along with writings by academics—and a few nonacademics—who were not members of my original sample, but who were prominently mentioned in the material I had already read.

Charles Rubia's resignation from office as Mayor of Nairobi on September 15, 1964, set off a potentially dangerous political crisis in Kenya. Although Rubia subsequently returned to office the affair split the major political party, aroused considerable tribal passion, provoked the youth-wing into angry demonstrations and the Kikuyu women of Nairobi into their piercing “ululating” cry in front of the City Hall.

Interest in the consequences for economic activity of the development of disease, preventive medicine, and of other public health problems is not exactly new. Professor Sigerist, in many ways the doyen of the subject, summarized our background quite well in 1941. “We are”, he wrote, “often inclined to believe that the economic approach to medical problems is new, that we inaugurated it. This is not the case …. Max von Pettenkofer in Munich, reasoned very much along the same lines as we do today” [18:2]. Thus, I have precedent for citing work done in this very city as the logical place to start my discussion. One could, as indeed Sigerist himself did, argue that von Pettenkofer (upon whose work I shall base this analysis) wrote with the knowledge of earlier writers like Chadwick, Simon, Snow, and Budd. But, I am inclined to accept Sigerist's assessment of von Pettenkofer's importance and use his two public lectures as the springboard from which to launch my discussion.

This essay is essentially a historical survey of the whole career of civilized societies. It seeks to list major probabilities and possibilities and to identify ascertained fact. It takes stock of the present state of knowledge after a long period, almost a century, of study.

Relations between states are usually framed in human terms, from partners to rivals, enemies or allies, polities and persons appear to engage in cognate relationships. Yet whether or not official ties and relationships among people from those states actually correspond remains less clear. “Friendship,” a term first applied to states in eighteenth-century Europe and mobilized in the (post)socialist world since the 1930s, articulates with particular clarity both the promise and the limitations of harmonized personal and state ties. Understandings of friendship vary interculturally, and invocations of state-state friendship may be accompanied by a distinct lack of amity among populations. Such is the case between China and Russia today, and this situation therefore raises wider questions over how we should understand interstate and interpersonal relationships together. Existing social scientific work has generally failed to locate either the everyday in the international or the international in the everyday. Focusing on both Chinese and Russian approaches to daily interactions in a border town and the official Sino-Russian Friendship, I thus suggest a new scalar approach. Applying this to the Sino-Russian case in turn reveals how specific contours of “difference” form a pivot around which relationships at both scales operate. This study thus offers both comparison between Chinese and Russian friendships, and a lens for wider comparative work in a global era of shifting geopolitics and cross-border encounters.

Les Chinois de Madagascar ont une vie sociale particulière et très caractéristique. Ils ont adapté et transformé leurs coutumes, adopté des habitudes qui leur étaient étrangères en les modifiant à leur gré, ce qui en fait une communauté spéciale, curieuse et intéressante. Pour citer quelques exemples, les Chinois continuent à manger de la cuisine chinoise exclusivement, mais ils ont presque totalement abandonné l'usage des chop-sticks; ils utilisent la cuiller et la fourchette, mais pas de couteau, la cuisine chinoise étant présentée découpée dans les plats. Hommes et femmes s'habillent à l'européenne, et ce n'est que très rarement, lors de certaines fêtes, que quelques jeunes filles portent la robe chinoise fendue sur les cotés (ch'i-p'ao).

Whether observed in French laïcité, Kemalist Turkey, Kantian political theory, Western Christian theology, or North Indian classical music, the presence of modern secularity has been demonstrably complex (Asad 2003; Bakhle 2008; Blumenberg 1985; Connolly 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002). My purpose in this essay is to further examine the intricacies of the modern secular, specifically its relation with what it deems “religious.” My focus will be Edward Said, whose paradigmatic engagement in secular, critical, and comparative inquiry makes his work an ideal place to investigate the modern apparition of the secular. It is widely acknowledged that Orientalism (1979) led to a profound transformation of entire fields of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences, and even the creation of new ones. Said's work as a practice of criticism has been instrumental in addressing the affinities between forms of knowledge and domination, especially in their colonial variety. However, studies of his writings have only recently begun to address the topic of modern secularism in his work, which will be at the center of this paper (e.g., Mufti 2004; Hart 2000; Anidjar 2006; Apter 2004; Robbins 1994; Gourgouris 2004).

This article considers the question of collective identity formation in the Arab Gulf by looking at the distinctive ways in which the genealogies of the dominant kinship collective of the United Arab Emirates, the Banī Yās confederation, have been represented by that country's cultural and heritage-making institutions. I look comparatively at two high profile, state-sponsored, Emirati genealogical projects, one a site, and the other a text, and investigate their significance from a historical and ethnographic perspective. I find that the relatively weak religious gravity of the United Arab Emirates allows for unorthodox representations of kinship at the national level, that women do not necessarily buy into these representations yet contribute in their own ways to a kinship nationalist discourse, and that genealogy is nonetheless a particularly fraught idiom for binding together an ethnically heterogeneous society like the Emirates. Approaching the public representation of genealogies through an integrative framework, this article sheds light on important themes in modern Emirati and broader Gulf social and political life, including the complicated place of religious norms in a newly fashioned Muslim nation, the influence of gender on conceptions of kinship and nationhood, and the challenge ethnic heterogeneity poses to an Arab ethno-national project.