Over the last two decades, consumption, consumerism, and the idea of consumer agency have attracted a great deal attention from scholars across a number of disciplines. Among historians, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been identified as a crucial period for consumption, one in which consumers emerged as an influential group of political, economic, and social agents. Historians of the English-speaking world have advanced bold claims about the prominence and impact of consumers during this period. Consumer movements were conspicuously absent in two major scandals of the early twentieth century, however. This article uses these commodity-centered cases—of rubber in the Congo Free State, and cocoa in the Portuguese colonies of São Tomé and Príncipe—to question the salience of “consumerism” in turn-of-the-century political thought. By tracing the career of British journalist and humanitarian activist E. D. Morel through the “red rubber” and “slave cocoa” scandals, the article demonstrates that consumers were only one of many influences along the commodity chain of production and consumption.

In this paper I examine the economic and political factors that undermined the social class structure in an ethnic community—the Jews of Russia and eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Compared with the documented rise and articulation of working classes in non-Jewish society in that region, Jews were caught in an opposite process, largely owing to discriminatory state policies and social pressures: Among Jews, artisans and petty merchants were increasingly reduced to a single, caste-like status. A Jewish middle class of significant size did not emerge from the petty trade sector and no significant industrial working class emerged from the crafts sector. Historians have largely overlooked the significance of these facts, in part because they have viewed this east European situation as a mere preamble to more sophisticated, modern class formation processes among immigrant Jews in Western societies, particularly in light of the long-term middle-class trajectory of their children. Those historians interested in labor history have mainly shown interest in such continuity as they could infer from the self-narratives of the Jewish labor movement, and have thus overstated the case for a long-standing Jewish “proletarian” tradition. In reassessing the historical record, I wish to put the Jewish social and economic situation in eastern Europe into better perspective by looking at the overall social and economic situation, rather than at incipient worker organizations alone. I also query whether a developing class culture, along the lines suggested by E. P. Thompson, was at all in evidence before Jewish mass emigration. This paper is thus a contribution to the history of labor—rather than organized labor—as well as a discussion of the roots of ethnic economic identity.

For more than forty years now, the French state has produced, legitimized, and supported local identities through national policies of historic preservation and public discourses about heritage. Rather than simply replaying the old, anxious, and nostalgic tune of national identity, the advent of heritage in France marked a singular moment of cultural transformation and rupture. The national past became articulated, in public speech and political practice, with the cultures and identities of local and regional territories. Given France's centralist tradition, and its political culture that is often cast as the archetype of “an ideology concerned with boundedness, continuity, and homogeneity” (Handler 1988: 6), this historical transformation presents a puzzle, to which this paper provides answers through historical and theoretical inquiry.

In December of 1984, Zhang Chengzhi, a thirty-six-year-old ethnologist from Beijing and an important novelist in contemporary Chinese literature, reached a small village on the loess plateaus of northwestern China. An impoverished farmer, Ma Zhiwen, hosted Zhang during his brief stay and introduced him to the local community of Muslims who practiced Sufism, a form of mystical Islam. Night after night, the Muslim villagers sought Zhang out to tell him about events in the history of their Sufi order, the Zheherenye. Zhang learned that Zheherenye Sufis carefully cultivated historical memories reaching back to the mid-eighteenth century when the order was founded by a Chinese Sufi returned from Yemen. Since then, the order had been led by a murshid, the Arabic word for mentor or spiritual guide. During the last dynasty of the Chinese empire, which fell in 1911, the Zheherenye were often outlawed and clashed repeatedly with the imperial army in regional wars that the Sufis always lost. Interpreting their defeats as martyrdom, the Zheherenye narrated the lives of the successive murshid in their transmission of oral histories, but also in handwritten histories that were often written in Persian or Arabic.

This paper examines the ways in which “ordinariness” can come to be exemplified as a virtue. It does so by comparing the status of ordinariness in historical and present-day Predappio, the town in which Mussolini was born and is buried. It describes the ways in which Predappio was mobilized by the Fascist regime as an exemplar of an ordinary Italian town, rendered extraordinary by its wholesale reconstruction as a jewel in the crown of Fascist urban planning. In similar fashion, Mussolini’s ordinary rural upbringing was mobilized in the service of propagandizing his extraordinary and exemplary leadership. In contemporary Predappio, by contrast, ordinariness is what locals reach for to contest understandings of their home as irrevocably associated with the extraordinary Fascist heritage they have inherited. One of the ways in which they do so is to celebrate a local exemplar of this ordinariness, Giuseppe Ferlini, the town’s first postwar mayor. In contrast to Mussolini, Ferlini’s ordinariness is not a backdrop to future greatness, but exactly the quality for which he is celebrated. I assert that these cases demonstrate the need for vigilance in analytic usage of the category of “the ordinary,” which sometimes tacitly assumes the existence of “the ordinary” as a scale in itself, independent of human action. I argue instead that “the ordinary” may be the object of ethical labor, rather than its site, and that exemplification may be a form of such labor, in both our accounts and the lives of those we study.

This article examines the origins of human shielding—the practice of employing hostages on the battlefield—in Arab Palestine during the Great Revolt in the 1930s. The Palestinian rebellion vexed the British for over three years, and during its second phase (1937–1939), lightly armed rebels beat back the colonial authorities from broad stretches of the country, putting continued colonial control of the territory in serious jeopardy. Britain only defeated the insurgency through a harsh repertoire of collective punishments and “dirty war” tactics. British forces used Palestinians as human shields in a systematic fashion during the revolt's second phase, attempting thereby to stave off the insurgents’ consistent and effective attacks on transportation arteries. Beyond its battlefield rationale, this article contends that human shielding was critically tied to two other dynamic processes. The military's adoption of unauthorized tactics like human shielding was part of a broader pattern of rejecting its institutional subordination to civilian authorities and of seeking direct control over the Palestine government in order to assure its unfettered command over the revolt's suppression. At the same time, the conversion of colonized bodies into literal shields bespoke a process of deepening, corporeal racialization that had profound consequences for the Palestinians, stripping them of any figment of legal rights or protections and signaling the utter disposability of Arab life.

In Central Asia, the Soviet state had destroyed most Islamic institutions by the late 1930s, which gradually alienated millions of Soviet Muslims from the basics of Islamic theology and key Islamic practices of virtue cultivation, including the five daily prayers (namaz), Islamic ethics of dressing (like covering certain parts of the body), and certain lifestyle prescriptions (such as the avoidance of alcohol, gambling, and premarital sex). As a result, mainstream Islam in Central Asia came to revolve around the main Islamic life-cycle rites (i.e., male circumcision, the marriage ceremony, and funeral prayer) and occasional practices of uttering blessings, reciting short Qur’anic verses for the souls of the deceased, and visiting shrines, among others. Although more than thirty years have passed since the fall of the USSR, this non-observant form of Islam remains widespread in the region. Inquiring into the conceptual and affective aspects of Soviet forced secularization in Central Asia, I make two interrelated interventions into secularism studies and the anthropology of Islam. First, I theorize Soviet secularism through attending to the modern state’s aspiration to transcend and transform the particularities of lived traditions, which reveals significant overlaps between communist and liberal modes of statecraft and subject formation. Second, reflecting on a non-observant form of Islam in contemporary Kyrgyzstan, I ask: what remains of a tradition of virtue ethics when its modes of abstract reasoning and virtue cultivation have all but vanished?

In January 1909, the students of the Azhar, the Islamic world’s most prestigious university, went on strike. Protesting recent curricular and administrative changes introduced by the Egyptian Khedive, they demanded increased material support and asserted the university’s right to govern itself. After several weeks of demonstrations that drew thousands of supporters into the streets of Cairo, the Khedive suspended the reforms that first caused the Azharis to walk out. Oddly, this remarkable mobilization has nearly vanished into obscurity. Drawing on reporting from the Egyptian press and intelligence memoranda from the Egyptian Ministry of Interior, this article argues that the apparent incongruity of Azharis on strike was no mistake. Their willful rejection of ascribed categories helps to explain both why this movement of unionized seminarians speaking a language of self-government proved so striking for contemporary supporters and critics alike and why this event has slipped through the cracks of a historiography still framed by those very categories. Long forgotten in histories of both nationalism and organized labor, the Azhar strike represented a pivotal moment in the emergence of mass politics in Egypt. In invoking “union,” the Azharis engaged in multiple, overlapping acts of comparison. Inspired by the modular repertoires of militant labor, they simultaneously hailed the constitutional revolution of the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress as a model for political transformation. Rooted in a self-conscious critique of colonial comparativism, their struggle thereby furnished new materials with which to elaborate a telescopic series of anti-colonial solidarities that were themselves fundamentally comparative.

The European conquest of Asia is one of the major historical movementsof our time. Pannikar calls this the age of Vasco DeGama, Parry writesof the rise of European Hegemony, and McNeill sees it as part of an evenbroader historical process that he calls the rise of the west. For all observers it was truly a conquest, a violent and bloody struggle in which Europe gained the ascendence through superior military might.

Recent dramatic changes in the social and political organization of Eastern Europe and what was the Soviet Union have led to a widespread reformulation of certain generic terms that have long plagued comparative scholarship. Similarly, with the destruction of the monolithic Berlin Wall has come the imperative to deconstruct monolithic terms, such as communism or traditionalism, which have often obfuscated difference and negated geographical and historical specificity. In this essay, and in the spirit of laying to rest the ghost of the ideal type, I compare the work and authority relations in Chinese and Soviet factories in the 1960s and 1970s. When the differing variables that coalesced to form distinctive patterns of labor relations in these two countries during those years are more clearly understood, it will be possible to discuss the current patterns of change with greater accuracy. In addition, when the essentially structuralist constraints of an overarching communist type are loosened, it is also possible to reintroduce actors into the dialectic and to enrich the comparison with finer social and historical detail.

My original idea was to discuss, in the group of sociologists from different Asian countries, the applicability of Western sociological concepts in an Asian environment. After thinking it over, I decided to tackle the problem the other way around and to ask myself to what extent a sociological study of Asian societies could contribute to general sociological theory, and perhaps even to a deeper understanding of Western society. As a matter of fact, such an approach will automatically amount to a better understanding of some of the defects, lags, and gaps in general sociological theory, as current in some of the literature.

There has been an unending debate in American historiography about the distinctive features of the ante-bellum South. One widely shared view is that the South, by virtue of its dominant agricultural character, was committed to a set of values “inconsistent with a high rate of industrialization”. Writers in this tradition have assumed that agrarian interests entail an anti-industrial bias. They look upon the civilization of the ante-bellum North as “coarse and materialistic” and that of the South as highly refined and aristocratic. The opposite view is that ante-bellum Southerners were no less commercial capitalists than their Northern brethren. Agrarian capitalism, these critics assume, has conflicts of interest with industrial capitalism, not cultural conflicts. The question this essay seeks to answer is whether Calhoun, admittedly a prominant spokesman of agricultural interests, was thereby committed to either an anti-industrial bias or a conventional capitalist position.

The purpose of this paper is to present briefly the theories of secular social and economic development which can be found in the work of Karl Marx and to place them within the context of general thought and theorizing on these matters during the nineteenth century. I shall not present in this paper any new interpretations of Marx's theories, but shall merely try to show that Marx's views are related at many points to other theories on social and economic development proposed during his life and that in many ways he must be regarded as a typical thinker of that period of European social thought.

In a recent essay in CSSH (16:1) Oriol Pi-Sunyer has joined in debate with our article ‘Modernization and Development…’ (CSSH 14:3). The thrust of his critique is that our model of social change in the Western Mediterranean leads us inexorably to lump Sicily and Catalonia together with respect to general social and economic developments since World War II. He argues in terms of modernization theory that Catalans long ago developed industry and have always shown a propensity to organize in corporate groups whenever the central government gives them the opportunity to do so. In short, our model is lacking in ‘time depth and political sensitivity’ (pp. 128–9) since it puts the Catalans in the same class as the Sicilians. We wish here to demonstrate that (1) in our article we discussed the differences between Sicily and Catalonia in much the same way that Pi-Sunyer did in his critique; (2) that, in fact, Sicily and Catalonia have undergone similar processes of social change since World War II, in ways that threaten the historical continuity of these societies, both formed over centuries; and (3) that Pi-Sunyer's misreading of our materials is due to his unfortunate confusion of modernization with development, which is precisely what we tried to get away from in our essay.

In the small provincial cities of the eastern Netherlands, the annual election of magistrates and town councilors was perhaps the most important public ritualof the year under the old regime. The elaborate and often solemn ceremony symbolized ancient chartered liberties—even when results of the co-optative elections were a foregone conclusion—and thus served to reinforce the community's sense of corporate identity. In 1786, however, in the midst of astruggle for control of the city, the annual Petrikeur in Deventer got out of hand. The day started out normally enough with the traditional worship service in the Grote Kerk, but after the black-robed members of the town council had passed in procession across the square to the stadhuis, a group of dissident councilors, who called themselves Patriots and were implacably opposed to the influence of the stadhouder in municipal politics, attacked aportrait of Prince William III of Orange, the stadhouder who in 1675 first insinuated himself into the electoral process.

Ideologies of reproduction are social facts, collective representations, of the dramatic ways in which human beings construct and appropriate gender for the imaging of social reality. Such symbolic universes are often centered on the body (Foucault 1980; Martin 1989; Turner 1984; Douglas 1973). As a template of cultural signification, the body becomes a model through which the social order can be apprehended. For instance, gender hierarchies are sometimes envisioned by means of an anatomical or physiological paradigm (Needham 1973; Hugh-Jones 1979; Theweleit 1987). However, the operation of societal power is generally focused on women's bodies and bodily processes. Women, according to a widespread (and controversial) paradigm, are grounded in nature by virtue of the dictates of their bodies: menstruation, pregnancy, birth (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 1969; Ortner 1974; Ardener 1975; Mac-Cormack and Strathern 1986).

In this article a system of ordering space found among the people of the central and western Caroline Islands of Micronesia will be described, the fundamental concepts of which bear a striking resemblance to particular regulative principles found among various Southeast Asian peoples. If a genetic connection is accepted for these parallels the form taken by Southeast Asian cultures after contact with ‘Hindu/Buddhist’ peoples can be interpreted as a natural outgrowth of concepts already basic to these cultures before such contact. The ethnographic information presented here, therefore, is directed to the comparative analysis of the culture history of Southeast Asia and Oceania and should be viewed in conjunction with the recent work of linguists and archaeologists on this topic (e.g. Benedict, 1966, 1967; Grace, Solheim and Chang, 1964).