The foregoing histories of the reception of psychoanalysis in Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain offer illuminating comparisons not only with each other but with the well-known histories of psychoanalysis in Austria, the United States, and, known to a lesser extent, England. Both parallels and divergences appear, suggesting cultural variation as well as some underlying commonalities in all of Western culture.

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.

Anyone who sees today's high schoolers sporting beards will be surprised— or incredulous—to read in Homer's Iliad that Achilles, the greatest warrior among the Greeks at Troy, was still beardless. Yet Plato accepted it as a wellknown and unsurprising tradition.

There is an uncanny similarity between regulations on merchant activity in various medieval Western European countries, on the one hand, and, on the other, those in the People's Republic of China (PRC) just after its institution (see Appendix). My discovery of this resemblance informed the research on which this paper is based and directed my attention to some crucial relationships in the interaction between commerce and state at a certain level of economic development. The presence of similar regulations in these societies had to point to (1) like activities going on in them all, along with (2) governmental disapproval of these activities. Thus, a preliminary look at materials on Europe led to new insights into the Chinese situation.

The discipline called the “anthropology of Christianity” began to gain traction in the early to mid-2000s when interested scholars focused on Christianity as an object of collaborative and comparative cross-cultural analysis. Along with several landmark works of Joel Robbins, one foundational text is Fenella Cannell's edited volume The Anthropology of Christianity, published in 2006. In her introductory essay, Cannell poses a pointed question for the volume and the discipline itself: “What difference does Christianity make?” Bracketing the question of whether “difference” can or should be defined (Green 2014), several anthropologists have taken inspiration from Cannell, including Naomi Haynes (2014) in the concluding essay to a recent special issue of Current Anthropology, and myself and Debra McDougall (2013) in an edited volume on Christian politics in Oceania. Difference, as the criterion by which continuity and transformation are evaluated, is arguably the key concept for an effective anthropological engagement with Christianity.

Between 1873 and 1917, the numbers of Barbadian women committed to penal custody on an annual basis surpassed those of men. While women's per capita imprisonment rate was still somewhat below that of men for most of these years, given the wide margins by which women outnumbered men in the population and the labor force, these proportions were nevertheless unprecedented, not only in the British Caribbean but also in other parts of the world. Available figures for Jamaica and Trinidad over sections of the period hover around an 18–20 percent female proportion rate, while in Barbados the rate usually exceeded 50 percent.

From the late nineteenth century through the interwar period, the production and consumption of German things played critical roles in delineating and connecting a wide variety of German places in Latin America. Such places became ubiquitous in Chile and Argentina. They flourished because there was ample room in the German imagination for the multiplicity of German places and the cultural hybridity that accompanied them to extend beyond Imperial Germany's national boundaries and colonial possessions. They also flourished because host societies found virtue in having those German places in their states. This essay uses German schools in Argentina and Chile as a window into the emergence of such German places and the soft power that accompanied them. Scholars often overlook that power when they focus on colonial questions or formal and informal imperialism in Latin America. More than any other institution, German schools became sites where the production and consumption of German things were concentrated and multilayered, and where the consistencies and great varieties of Germanness that arrived and evolved in Latin America gained their clearest articulation. Because those schools were both centers of communities and nodes in a global pedagogical network that thrived during the interwar period, they provide us with great insight into a nexus of motivations that created German places in Latin America. Life around these schools also underscores the importance of studying immigrants and their things together.

In much of rural China, memories of past violence are crucial to people's sense of their own relation to distant centers of state power. In particular, memories of death from hunger during the Great Leap famine (1958–61)1 In the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward, twenty to thirty million people died of hunger-related causes. The famine is usually attributed to overprocurement, bad harvests, disastrous agricultural policies, chaotic transportation, and natural calamities (Kane 1988). In Yunnan the famine was not as severe as in many regions, but the poor, remote counties in the north still suffered badly. In 1960, according to official figures, the crude death rate rose to forty-two per thousand in the northern counties of Yongren, Dayao and Yaoan, while the rate for the province as a whole was twenty-six per thousand (Yunnan Sheng tongji ju renkou ban 1990). Within these counties, high-mountain, cash crop areas such as Zhizuo, where every household relied on sales of hempen cloth to buy food (see Mueggler 1998b), suffered worst. and suicide during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) continue to haunt people's imagination of state and nation in ways that those of us who did not live through these devastations are only beginning to discover (cf. Watson 1994). Many of the diverse, non-Han, Tibeto-Burman speaking communities scattered through the mountains of Southwest China share traditions of poetic speech, explicitly intended to deal with bodily afflictions attributed to spectral memories of the violently dead. In a Lolop'o (officially Yi) minority community, where I did fieldwork from 1991–1993,Thirteen months of field research were conducted in Zhizuo between October 1991 and June 1993. Sponsoring units were the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences in Kunming and the Yi Culture Research Institute in Chuxiong. poetic speech is used to drive the ghosts of those who died of hunger, suicide, or other violence out of the bodies of their descendants and into the surrounding landscape. The ghosts are driven along a specific route through surrounding mountain villages. Their path eventually takes them down the nearby Jinsha river to the Changjiang (Yangtze). They make these rivers their steeds, riding them across the empire's breadth to the richly-imagined cities of Chongqing, Wuhan, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Beijing. En route, they are to feast on piles of meat and barrels of drink, buy beautiful clothing in the markets, and hobnob with officials.

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.

Since the nineteenth century, today's South and Southeast Asia have become part of scholarly and popular geographies that define the region as a single, superior, civilization with Hindu-Buddhist spiritual traits and its origins in India. These moral geographies of “Greater India” are still current in universities, museums, textbooks, and popular culture across the world. This article explores, for the period from the 1890s to the 1960s, how networks of scholars, intellectuals, and art collectors linking Indonesia, mainland Asia, and the West helped shaping these moral geographies and enabled the inclusion of predominantly Islamic Indonesia. It contributes to recent debates on the role of religion and affections in Orientalism by following object-biographies and focusing on knowledge exchange via the networks they connected, and by exploring the possibilities, violence, and limits of cultural understanding as objects travel from their sites of origin to elsewhere in the world. The article conceptualizes moral geographies as a heuristic device to understand how people have imagined their belonging to a transnational space—in this case Greater India—whether they live inside or outside of that space. It examines the impact these moral geographies have on processes of inclusion and exclusion, particularly their common disregard for Indonesia's Islamic cultures. It warns against pitfalls of transnational, “Oceanic” approaches to Asian history that focus on cultural flows, as these can exaggerate the region's cultural unity and, in doing so, reify the moral geographies of Greater India that the article interrogates.

Chinese practices of matchmaking have been controversial for over a century. Their continued transformations reveal a complex nexus of sentimental and material dimensions in the marriage-decision process at the heart of the negotiations between families and in their selections of proper candidates. This interplay between personal sentiments, concrete considerations, and the desire for success makes marriage controversial, as “love” is claimed and proclaimed at the same time. Moral debates around materialism, which have reverberated through the public sphere over the last decade, show how “love” acts as a tool of social reproduction while it also expresses sincere aspirations for an emotionally satisfying life. In comparative perspective, the complex of romantic love examined here reveals a recent, original synthesis of the tradition of parental arrangement and the political question of the place of love in modernity. The paper elucidates one of the contradictions within Chinese society today: the family remains central, but wider trends of individualization continue to unfold. A multifaceted understanding of love clarifies how it can bind families together while it also discourages others from pursuing romance.

The emergence of one-party political systems among the new nations of Africa, now an unmistakable trend, has been disconcerting to social scientists for at least two reasons: first, this trend was not clearly foreseen during the period leading to independence; and, second, now that it is clearly discernible students of Africa are uncertain as to how the trend should be interpreted and evaluated. This question was discussed in a recent article by D. E. Apter from the viewpoint of political science. The present paper deals with the same problem, but from an anthropological viewpoint. It considers only the new nations in Africa south of the Sahara; these were also Apter's main concern, though he includes in his discussion some of the new nations in other parts of the world as well.