In what follows, I begin by asking a paradigmatic question to clarify some problems of definition (I). Next, Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution is examined as a scientific definition of revolution (II). Its application to the Netherlands revolt concludes the essay (III). Many logical problems are oversimplified and some are ignored altogether. This is done to keep the lid down on several Pandora's boxes, notably those labelled methodology in the social sciences, language philosophy, and historical laws, about which a great deal, some of it relevant here, has been written already. At the same time, I am concerned with the complexity of the problems raised and with suggesting that the ways in which definitions of historical events can be used deserve as much attention as the definitions themselves.

This paper attempts to differentiate the forms of political regime that held sway in the city of Florence over the century following the formation of the Florentine constitution in 1282. It aims to establish certain pragmatic criteria for distinguishing between these Signorie, and to incorporate these into a framework that may be of some value in subsequent comparative study of the politics of the Italian city state in the later Middle Ages. The method employed is inductive. The more conventional deductive approach is rejected because the setting up of definitions at the outset is likely to create the illusion that political forms existed in a pure state. Dictatorship, oligarchy and popular government did not exist in the form of “ideal types” but rather were characterized by frequent changes of form and function. During periods of challenge and struggle their true nature became more clearly discernible than in eras of relative quiescence and this fact in part explains the conflicting interpretations that have arisen.

The politics of nature are at play in forests and nations, as well as within contested memories and variably shaded skin. By tracing the connections between these realms, we can learn how difference becomes racialized in cultural politics. This is Jake Kosek's argument in Understories, an ethnography of the virulent struggles that have raged over the use and control of forests in northern New Mexico. Aligning himself primarily with a Hispano community in Truchas, New Mexico, while also reaching out to local forestry officials and environmentalists, Kosek conducted ethnographic fieldwork and archival study into the conflict that has pitted advocates of conservation, scientific management, and local subsistence use against one other. Kosek found that race was a powerful but frequently avoided factor in the dispute, and rather than shying away from race as a politically sensitive subject, he takes this as a motivation for writing. The book represents a successful example of engaged anthropology, since the analysis is both ethnographically innovative and politically useful to those he studies.

This paper interrogates the specific workings and stakes of slow violence on Indigenous ground. It argues that despite similarities with other environmental justice struggles, Indigenous ones are fundamentally distinct because of Indigenous peoples' unique relationship to the polluted or damaged entity, to the state, and to capital. It draws from Indigenous studies, history, anthropology, geography, sensory studies, and STS, to present results from research with the Mowachaht Muchalaht First Nation, an Indigenous people on the west coast of British Columbia. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, this community used successive strategies to try to render its knowledge about health, environment, and authority visible to the settler state. Each strategy entailed particular configurations of risk, perceptibility, and uncertainty; each involved translation between epistemologies; and each implicated a distinct subject position for Indigenous peoples vis-à-vis the state. The community's initial anti-colonial, environmental justice campaign attempted to translate local, Indigenous ways of knowing into the epistemologies of environmental science and public health. After this strategy failed, community leaders launched another that leveraged the state's legal epistemology. This second strategy shifted the balance of risk and uncertainty such that state actors felt compelled to act. The community achieved victory, but at a price. Where the first strategy positioned the community as a self-determined, sovereign actor; the second positioned it as a ward of the state. This outcome illustrates the costs that modern states extract from Indigenous peoples who seek remedial action, and more generally, the mechanisms through which the colonial present is (re)produced.

How did the Japanese Empire, while adamantly adhering to assimilationism, manage the politics of colonial difference in the interwar years? How should we situate the seemingly exceptional conduct of Japanese colonial rule from a comparative perspective? To examine these questions, this article analyzes the mindsets of mid-level colonial bureaucrats who specialized in social work. Social work became a major field of political contestation in the post-World War I period around the globe. Policies on social work tested colonial officials regarding their assumptions about state-society relationships and Japan's assimilationist goals. Their debates on social work reveal that by the end of the 1920s colonial officials in Korea had reached a tacit consensus to use a particular analytical lens and ideological goal that I call “ruralism.” In the ruralist paradigm, these officials viewed Korean society as consisting of “rural peasants” and understood Korean social problems as primarily “rural problems.” Ruralism was a product of many overlapping factors, including pressures to integrate colonial society into the imperial system, the empire-wide popularity of agrarian nationalism, global discourses that increasingly dichotomized the “rural” and the “industrial,” and the rivalry between the colonial government and the metropole. How social work officials re-conceptualized the colonial masses and attempted to engage with social problems under the rhetoric of assimilationism showed a similar dynamic to the “developmental colonialism” that prevailed in the French and British empires after World War II.

Latin America as an area would yield to few if any other regions of the world in its devotion to what it considers the constitutional process and, indeed, the supremacy of constitutions in establishing and ordering the political life of the several states. If the mere number of excursions into the practical exercise of constitution-making were to be considered significant—which it probably is at most only in a limited way—it might lead to the conclusion that the Latins were affected by some form of legpmania. A compilation of Latin America constitutions published a little more than a decade ago indicated that as of the beginning of 1948 the twenty states had written a total of 200 basic laws since their respective achievements of independence. Several additional ones have since been drafted.

What role did law play in articulating sovereignty and citizenship in postcolonial Africa? Using legal records from the secessionist Republic of Biafra, this article analyzes the relationship between law and national identity in an extreme context—that of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970). Ideas about order, discipline, and legal process were at the heart of Biafra's sense of itself as a nation, and they served as the rhetorical justification for its secession from Nigeria. But they were not only rhetoric. In the turmoil of the ensuing civil war, Biafra's courts became the center of its national culture, and law became its most important administrative implement. In court, Biafrans argued over what behaviors were permissible in wartime, and judges used law to draw the boundaries of the new country's national identity. That law played this role in Biafra shows something broader about African politics: law, bureaucracy, and paperwork meant more to state-making than declensionist views of postcolonial Africa usually allow. Biafra failed as a political project, but it has important implications for the study of law in postcolonial Africa, and for the nation-state form in general.

It seems remarkable how often we call “myths” the kind of arbitrary constructs in other peoples' worldview that we tend to attribute to the nature of things in our own case. Double standards may be involved, of course; but it could also be the case that one tends to miss the semiotic essence of the cultural construct one calls “reality.” As every anthropologist knows, one's most cherished cultural assumptions tend to remain implicit; otherwise put, worldview is largely unconscious. This paper explores the possibility of plumbing unconscious aspects of one's own culture in order to assess what some might call—regarding other cultures—the mythic underpinnings of worldview.

This article investigates exemplarity from the point of view of the subject, the person who leads an exemplary life. Asking how this differs from the case of someone who intends more simply to lead a morally good life, it argues that the former requires sharp prioritizing among the range of possible human virtues. While both kinds of actor should be understood in relational terms, namely relations to the self, direct interlocutors, and wider society, a subject becomes an exemplar by objectifying and conveying to others the chosen specific form of virtue. Taking the case of Ataman Semenov, a White general in the Russian Civil War, the article then examines the pitfalls of having to take a culturally particular exemplary position. Some of these relate to the problems that occur in general when moral exemplarity is demonstrated, the subject being unable to control misreading of the exemplary act, the hesitations of followers, or the leeway with which they attempt to emulate or imitate the act. Other problems concern the historical positioning of the exemplary subject, particularly in a time of war. By making overt certain specific virtues, and by the same token backgrounding or suppressing others, he or she has to “stand out” amid general confusion and uncertainty and therefore is certain to arouse animosity, as much as loyalty.

This essay reconstructs a scandal in the fall of 1797 involving Ottoman governors, leaders of a notorious network of irregular soldiers cum bandits, and residents of the city of Filibe (Plovdiv in Bulgaria). It erupted over whether or not state officials should pacify successful bandit enterprises by co-opting their leaders. The scandal escalated into a crisis in which the large armies of the governors of Anatolia and Rumeli (the Ottoman Balkans) verged on clashing because each wanted to lead the state's lucrative war against Rumeli bandit networks. Imperial administrators issued dispatches regarding this scandal that were based on gossip and rumor circulating within the general population as well as among bandits. I draw on understandings of gossip as a social and cultural resource from linguistic anthropology to make sense of Ottoman political culture. I analyze these dispatches to uncover how the performance of these informal scripts featured prominently in correspondence with the Imperial Council and related surveillance reports, and thereby mediated resources, power, and authority among different agents of imperial violence. I show that gossip, rumor, and related forms of seemingly informal “talk” played a fundamental role in sovereign decision making. I also transpose methodologies and approaches of “history from below,” conceived by earlier generations of cultural anthropologists and historians, onto elite letters to ask new questions about information brokerage, the negotiation of power among different agents of imperial violence and their interlocutors, and the contested nature of imperial intelligence gathering and sovereignty.

This study draws on ethnographic and archival evidence from the Italian Archipelago of La Maddalena, offshore from the northeastern corner of Sardinia, where in 1972 the U.S. Navy installed a base for nuclear submarines. It addresses two questions: (1) How do non-experts make sense of radiological risk absent knowledge and classified information about its instantiations and consequences? (2) How do objectifications of risk change and stabilize within the same community over time? STS scholarship has emphasized the epistemic and relational dimensions of lay/expert controversies over risk assessment. Many case studies, mostly focused on the Anglo-Saxon world, have assumed lay and expert ways of knowing are incompatible due to clashing cultural identities. I use Keane's concept of “semiotic ideologies” and Peircean semiotic theory to critically reassess the validity of that assumption and examine the role of material evidence in processes of signification to explain how experts and non-experts fix, challenge, and negotiate the meanings of radiological risk in sociotechnical controversies. I critically review empirical studies and analyze ethnographic and archival data to advance a set of methodological and substantive arguments: meanings of risk change as new signs become available for interpretation; and meanings of risk are semiotically regimented: their emergence or silencing depend upon the power relations in place in a given community and organizational efforts to assemble coherent technopolitical arguments. I call this set of organizational practices “politics of coherence.”

With the rise of HIV and other “emerging diseases” having global reach over the past twenty years, interest in historic plague has flourished. The Justinianic plague in and around the Roman empire from a.d. 541 to 750, however, has received far less attention that the Black Death of 1348 and its recurrent strikes in Europe to the eighteenth century. This difference results in part from the comparative paucity of sources for the former and its greater linguistic demands, which require a knowledge of ancient Middle Eastern as well as Western languages. Because of these demands, Lester Little argues persuasively that a multiple-authored work by authorities in different parts of Europe is now needed before a single-authored synthesis can be adequately written.