The search for medieval parallels and for medieval roots in New World history has become a fascinating genre. My own university has produced one of the major figures in this field, Lynn White, Jr., and has recently honored another, Luis Weckmann. With the Columbus centennial rushing toward us, we may expect more exercises in their spirit. Such an approach is not farfetched or whimsical. We are the heirs of medieval technology and mentalities. In both, as White has reminded us, the United States may be “closer to the Middle Ages than is Europe.“ And the great historian Shelomo Goitein, after spending most of his working life in pre-Nazi Germany and then in Israel, upon moving to the United States was startled to recognize the medieval flavor of our social structures and mentalities; as a lifelong student of the Middle Ages, he found that “one feels quite at home“ here.

This history of Cold War-era migration policy compares two emblematic guestworker programs that recruited several million Mexican and Spanish migrants to labor in the United States and Germany. Proponents of the bilateral accords defended them as diplomatic achievements that secured contractual labor rights, improved foreign relations, and sent migrants home with savings and skills to achieve the diverse development goals of the sending states. The study traces the programs’ historical and ideological roots, juxtaposes the guestworkers’ experiences, and uses the cases of Mexican braceros and Spanish gastarbeiter to explore the contested nexus between migration and development.

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?

This article examines whether and how the figure of Adolf Hitler in particular, and National Socialism more generally, operate as moral exemplars in today’s Germany. In conversation with similar studies about Mosely in England, Franco in Spain, and Mussolini in Italy, it seeks to advance our comparative understanding of neofascism in Europe and beyond. In Germany, legal and discursive constraints limit what can be said about the Third Reich period, while even far-right nationalists often condemn Hitler, for either the Holocaust or his military failure. Here I revise the concept of moral exemplarity as elaborated by Caroline Humphry to argue that Hitler and National Socialism do nevertheless work as contemporary exemplars, in at least three fashions: negativity, substitution, and extension. First, they stand as the most extreme markers of negative exemplarity for broad publics that understand them as illustrations of absolute moral depravity. Second, while Hitler himself is widely unpopular, Führer-substitutes such as Rudolf Hess provide alternative figures that German nationalists admire and seek to emulate. Finally, by extension to the realm of the ordinary, National Socialism introduces a cast of exemplars in the figures of loving grandfathers or anonymous fallen soldiers. The moral values for which they stand, I show, appear to be particularly significant for young nationalists. An extended, more open-ended notion of exemplarity, I conclude, can offer important insights about the lingering afterlife of fascist figures in the moral life of European nationalists today.

This article explores the relationship between tax law and settler colonialism by looking at the ways in which taxes can be part of the “civilizing” process of Indigenous peoples. In 1921, the Territory of Alaska enacted a “license tax on the business of fur-farming, trapping and trading in pelts and skins of fur-bearing animals.” Since most trappers were Natives, the “fur tax” de facto targeted them. This article unpacks the sociocultural and political dimensions of the fur tax against the backdrop of Alaska’s settler colonial history. Despite what the Alaska attorney general claimed was its “strict” revenue-raising function, the tax was part of a much broader settler colonial agenda. That agenda sought to turn semi-nomadic, “uncivilized” Native hunters into spatially grounded, “civilized” farmers, gardeners, reindeer herders, or wage workers. Ultimately, I suggest, within many if not most settler colonial spaces political and sociocultural ideologies alter the initial revenue-raising function of taxes.

The massive and ongoing exodus to cities from the countryside, a fact of life throughout Latin America today, includes Brazil. Although as late as 1960 that nation was a primarily agricultural country, over two-thirds of the population presently live in urban centers.

In this paper we wish to postulate and examine kinds of relationships between ritual dramas, ceremonials, and culture change. A number of individual studies concerned with this question deserve to be seen as focusing upon a unitary phenomenon. By this we have in mind ceremonies or ritual dramas which symbolically mediate structural conflicts or oppositions either within a society or between societies. Max Gluckman (1954) and Hilda Kuper (1947, 1964) among others have pointed out that rituals of rebellion symbolically alleviate conflicts at the level of the social structure of a single society, for example the Swazi of South Africa. In doing so the ritual intensifies identification with the traditional social structure in spite of the conflicts within this structure. C. Geertz (1957) and James L. Peacock (1967, 1968a, b) point out that the traditional Javanese slametan ceremony tends to increase neighborhood, or kampung, social integration. Geertz shows that with urbanization and modernization the neighborhood becomes socially and economically differentiated and that in this situation slametans tend to force interaction between individuals who no longer share specific cultural beliefs and symbols and thus increase rather than reduce hostility and anxiety. Peacock extends this argument to ludruck, an urban proletarian drama. In ludruck, Peacock argues, the individual is led to identify not with his kampung (neighborhood) nor with a traditional village set of values but rather with the urbanite and his urban set of values. Turning to Latin America we may cite the study of Maya Passion Plays by June Nash (1968).

We examine Thomas Piketty's explanations for steady and rising inequality in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the decline of inequality in the half-century after World War I, and the return of high levels of inequality since the 1970s. We specify empirical and conceptual problems with his analysis, which stem from his presentation of causality at a highly general and vague level. That leads him to confuse rather than clarify the causal relations among implacable economic forces, changes in technological innovation and population growth, ideology, and governmental policies and the outcomes that he seeks to explain. We identify social scientists and historians who are able to account for temporal and geographic variations in the political coalitions that propelled egalitarian reforms, and that in their absence cleared the terrain for reactionary anti-egalitarian policies that the rich incited for their narrow benefit. We explain why Piketty's limited conception of ideology is insufficient for explaining how mass opposition to inequality is mobilized. We show that if we want to combine the study of capital in the twenty-first century with that of politics, we need a broader conception of ideology than what Piketty offers, one that will allow us to specify how ideology affects parties, states, voters, and activists.

How were monarchy, gender, and nationalism entwined? Through contextualized comparisons of selected case studies (two generations of royal women in four countries: Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia/Yugoslavia), this article explores, in gendered terms, the instrumentalization of nursing as an evolving relationship between state building, warfare, welfare, and voluntary organizations. It argues that certain queens’ interventions in nursing successfully contributed to the “naturalization” of the ruling foreign dynasties in the Balkans and to the militarization of charity. Through such “soft power” they mobilized nursing in different ways to carve out an autonomous space and visibility in wartime as queen-nurses and in peacetime as queen-benefactors. In both cases, royal women personified the “curing” and “caring” dimensions of the modernizing state. Queens’ honorific leadership clearly linked the monarchy and the philanthropic sector but also discreetly expanded the power of the nationalizing state. Queens skillfully promoted a gendered culture of sacrifice, by representing women as caring “by nature,” and thus reinforced neo-traditionalist patriarchal regimes and weakened women’s effectiveness in pursuing their political and economic demands.

:Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines, by Fenella Cannell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). @TX:Syncretism is a word with a history. Much like fetishism, its famously promiscuous cousin, it has been hurled as an accusation and deployed as a theoretical tool. One can try to neutralize this history by drawing a distinction between “processes of religious synthesis” and the “discourse of syncretism”--read condemnation and/or defense--but the word remains productively problematic (see Stewart and Shaw 1994). It not only conjures an orthodoxy against which deviations can be measured; it also tempts us to presume we can identify the ingredients in any particular mixture, and that we know in advance how and why synthesis occurs. At the heart of the concept lurk daunting questions. What do we mean by religion? How do ethnographers and the people they study produce this category, explicitly and tacitly, institutionally and informally, in texts and the practices of everyday life?

This article explores the history of “Islamic Society” (al-Mujtamaʿ al-Islāmī), a concept whose widespread usage is paralleled by shallow understandings of its origins. Scholars of premodern Islamic history often use this term to describe the ideas and practices of Muslim communities under Islamic political rule, while historians of the Muslim Brotherhood highlight this leading Islamist movement’s commitment to forming such a collective yet treat the concept as sui generis. This article, in turn, draws on a wide array of Islamic print media published by leading Islamic movements and state institutions in Egypt between 1898 and 1981 to tell a story of how this concept became intellectually viable and politically meaningful in the context of transition from colonial to postcolonial rule in the mid-twentieth century. Building on histories of religious nationalism which trace how religious nationalist visions produce novel understandings of religious identity rather than replicating prior models, the article explores the ways in which identity is linked to particular projects of religious practice. In doing so, it casts light on how religious nationalist projects seek to structure social life through calls to continuity with the past even as they adopt the core assumptions of the nation-state project. Specifically, it argues that, as Muslim thinkers, activists, and scholars navigated the transition from colonial to postcolonial rule, they turned to this concept to articulate dueling conceptions of religious change through state power and social mobilization alike.

The renewed interest in the phenomenon of charisma, which was first given coherent conceptual form by Max Weber, shows little sign of abating. It is probably the most easily comprehensible, possibly the most popular and certainly the most dramatic model which can be utilized in interdisciplinary studies. Moreover, the theory has the apparent attractiveness of enabling students to intensively study one leader and his movement and then draw more general conclusions about that leader's impact on the society in which he operated. In an article written in 1966, Claude Ake gave a timely warning to practitioners who made grandiose deductions from evidence about one leader and then drew firm conclusions about his total society. In particular, Ake, at one stage in his critique, pointed out the fallacy of assuming that charisma usually implies integration of a previously decentralized, regionalized or fragmented society. As Ake correctly noted, this is unenlightening, unanalytical reasoning since ‘the theory seeks to explain how solidarity may be forged [by a charismatic leader]; but it does so by means of a concept which assumes the existence of solidarity’, thus producing ‘a circular explanation of integration’.

In the last issue Richard A. Easterlin criticized some arguments which I have advanced. Because I think that his main point is at least partially irrelevant, I shall briefly summarize my argument. I suggested that demographic growth in the pre-industrial West was determined primarily by levels of fertility, levels which depended in large part on economic factors, and that mortality has been the major variable in the demographic growth of most less developed countries today mainly because they do not control fertility in the interest of the maintenance of a given standard of living. From this basic difference, I drew a number of consequences. Among them, but by no means the most important, was the one to which Easterlin devoted most attention. It was my statement: “Hence, there is the possibility that improved nutrition and health will increase birth rates fantastically.”1 Easterlin omitted the first six words of the sentence from his quotation.

Certain analysts have argued in support of liberal democratic rule that this method of structuring political power through parliaments, mass political parties and specialized interest groups is both responsive to mass needs and imbued with high capabilities for public welfare and resource redistribution. Critics2 of this view contend that liberal democratic government merely provides a facade of mass legitimacy that obscures and masks the control of public policy and decision making by privileged and affluent classes that own or control the means of production. This paper attempts to examine these conflicting views on the policy responsiveness of liberal-democratic rule to mass welfare needs in the context of the mainly capitalist societies of Latin America.

Professor Russell was the first historian to try to apply statistical methods to analysis of the effects of epidemic plague on the composition, not just on the total size, of medieval population. He argues now that general plagues differed from the type of the disease that became epidemic after the crop failures of 1315–1317, in sharply lowering the sex ratio and in greatly increasing the burden of child-rearing.

Since 1952 the elaboration of Egyptian ideology has constituted a source of conflict between the regime and the left/right opposition. In trying to capture the ideological center, the regime has inevitably drawn itself into the maelstrom of public contention characterized by mass conformity, intimidation, purges, arrests, show trials and incarceration of all who fundamentally question the principles of the leadership. Democratic cooperative socialism (‘Arab socialism’) is the official ideology, and a spate of books and articles have been published on its significance for Egyptian politics. Despite all these efforts, confusion still tends to reign over this concept, both among Egyptians themselves, and outsiders studying it.