This paper links memory to generations of meaning and argues that generational belonging mediates access to memory. Generations of meaning create memories because they connect experiences, beyond the lifetime of individuals, with the wider cultural existence of social communities. Such connections can be understood as a hermeneutic and relational process. Meaning is not a factor of causation, but is cumulative, as meanings are recollected across generational thresholds of experience. This paper conceptualizes such thresholds of experience through three lines of enquiry. First, generativity produces new carriers of culture and memory, which sustain perceptions of historical beginnings. Second, generational change is a condition of liminality and in-betweenness, which people work to transcend by mediating fractures and thus connecting past problem spaces to frameworks of anticipation. Third, narrative commitments emerge as memories are recollected across different temporalities, incommensurability, and forgetting. Memory is not the product of one determining generation, but relational, cumulative, and stretched out in time.

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.

The entry of a universal revelation into the mundane world of language threatens to be paradoxical: it must take a specific and local form. As such, it becomes implicated in nationalist, ethnic, linguistic, and other sources of community. This article centers on a small melodrama in late twentieth-century Indonesia, home to the largest number of Muslims of any country. After undergoing a mid-life spiritual awakening, H. B. Jassin, a modernist literary critic, editor, and ardent defender of freedom of expression, undertook two projects intended to convey the aesthetic power of the Qur'an to a non-Arabic speaking public. But if Qur'anic Arabic summons a transnational community of the faithful, standardized Indonesian was developed to address a nation of citizens. If scripture speaks in a divine, uncreated idiom, the national language is shaped by human efforts. Jassin's career had served a vision of literature and its public whose values and semiotic ideologies were dramatically at odds with Qur'anic traditions. Although this may appear at first glance to be a familiar story of progress and its opponents, this article asks whether Jassin's critics grasped something about signs and communities that his defenders did not. Examining the furor that resulted from his Qur'ans, it explores an array of conflicting assumptions about language, freedom, truth, and people's lives together in the late twentieth century.

The market of El Hueco in downtown Lima sits inside a large pit dug out for the foundation of a state building that was never built. The below-ground corridors and crammed vending stalls in this poorly regulated market are usually flooded with shoppers, yet government officials and the media frequently condemn it as a vile and dangerous place. But how and why does El Hueco offend? Through an ethnographic account of a day's events, cast against a discussion of Marxism's “lumpenproletariat” and Hernando de Soto's “informality,” I argue that implicit in El Hueco's challenge of state bureaucracy is a class critique that resists conventional class analysis and that affirms the “lumpen” as a politics in its own right. “Lumpen” here does not refer to categories of people but to a resource that can be appropriated and deployed freely. Linked to the anti-political tactics of President Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s, lumpen as a resource has changed the face of postwar Lima by defying and deforming from within the bourgeois ideals of urban development and bureaucratic form. It has also arguably changed the face of politics and played a role in the revival of fujimorismo during and since the 2016 presidential elections.

I unpack the “potter's field” as an everyday practice and a category, especially as it operates in the material treatment of bodies as a mirror of life. I examine this space of “worthlessness” as it exists in liberal capitalism. From the potter's fields of São Paulo, Brazil, I consider how these are, in fact, mundane mass graves, made politically useful as a means to obscure important bodies alongside those who are, today, the subjects of terror. I then ask how the rise of the uncertified potter's field—a burial field for disposable bodies, not made legal by the state—is inseparable from recent historical and contemporary conditions of political abandonment. The uncertified field is made easy by a politics of abandonment, and becomes useful to state institutions as a material invocation of responsibility, interred elsewhere, while nonetheless advancing a larger logic of governance and political will in our times.

With ongoing consequences for American Indians, the New World Indian has been a pervasive figure of constitutive exclusion in modern theories of money, property, and government. This paradoxical exclusion of indigenous peoples from the money/property/government complex is intrinsic to, and constitutive of, modern theories of money. What is more, it haunts the cultural politics of indigenous peoples’ economic actions. In Part I, I establish that, and how, indigeneity has been constitutively present at the foundation of modern theories of money, as Europeans and settlers defined indigenous peoples in part by the absence of money and property (of which money is a special form). In turn, and more to the point here, they defined money and property in part as that which modern non-indigenous people have and use. These are not solely economic matters: the conceptual exclusions from money/property were coproduced with juridical ones insofar as liberal political theory grounded the authority of modern government in private property (and, in turn, in money). To show how this formation of money and indigeneity has mattered both for disciplinary anthropology and for American public culture at several historical moments, Part II traces how the dilemmas expressed by these texts haunt subsequent debates about the function of wampum, the logic of potlatch, and the impact of tribal gaming. Such debates inform scholarship beyond the boundaries of anthropology and, as each case shows in brief, they create harms and benefits for peoples in ways that perpetuate the (il)logics and everyday practices of settler colonialism.

Functionalist anthropology has a contested legacy. Some scholars have praised functionalism as a contributor to the relativizing of civilizations and cultures while others have criticized it as a colonial science smoothing the interwar workings of indirect rule. This article argues that the colonial politics of functionalist anthropology can only be understood against the background of resurgent settler colonialism in British East Africa. Supporters of indirect rule increasingly relied on a language of scientific administration and welfarist policies associated with the League of Nations to bolster their position against the settlers in the 1920s and 1930s. Functionalism offered them some means of support on this count. The functionalists, meanwhile, co-opted the language of indirect rule to pursue their own intra-disciplinary ends. This combination of interests was pragmatic and flexible rather than ossified and ideological, marked more by what both opposed (settler colonialism) than a shared ideal towards which they aspired (indirect rule). Anthropologists and colonial administrators possessed very different ideas of indirect rule, with strikingly different implications for the future of Britain's African Empire.

Revisiting William R. Bascom's 1948 ethnography of Afro-Cuban religious practices in Jovellanos (a semi-urban site in Cuba's Province of Matanzas) in light of current theoretical concerns in our discipline, this essay constitutes a thought experiment. As such it seeks to re-describe some of Bascom's data in terms of Actor-Network Theory, to see if his patent puzzlement over his interlocutors’ statements concerning the liveliness and even personhood of mineral objects—stones that embody, rather than represent deities—can be resolved that way. At the same time, I offer a critique of current attempts to redefine our discipline's mission under the sign of an “ontological turn” that recurs to notions of radical alterity that strike me as potentially essentialist, and certainly profoundly ahistorical. Drawing on Karen Barad's theories of “agential realism,” I suggest that contemporary concerns with post-humanist anti-representationalism need to be tempered by a view of our epistemic pursuits, including those of anthropology, as embedded in thoroughly historical—and so fundamentally emergent—ontologies. In light of such considerations, the essay concludes with a vision of anthropology as a form of knowledge that cannot afford to evade the historical transformations of the social worlds it aims to illuminate, nor those of the concurrent transformations in its own epistemic orientations. Instead, it must reframe its goals in terms of conjunctures of ontologies and epistemologies of mutually relational and, most importantly, historical scope.

All militaries try to develop a “winning edge” in warfare. More often than not these attempts focus on new weapons systems and weapons platforms, on new ways of maximizing the offensive capabilities of a military through firepower. These attempts can also involve the training and development of soldiers, including performance enhancements to make them fight better, longer, and smarter than the enemy and to counter human frailty on the battlefield. These concerns and problems have long held the interest of the U.S. military. This article traces the development, rationale, and legacy of one such attempt to deal with human frailty and the “body problem,” a kind of military futurism devised at the peak of the Cold War. Dr. Marion Sulzberger envisioned creating soldiers who had their own kind of special “biological armor,” or what he termed “idiophylaxis.” In 1962, he presented a paper at the Army Science Conference at West Point titled “Progress and Prospects in Idiophylaxis (Built-In Individual Self-Protection of the Combat Soldier).” Sulzberger's call was for a radical rethinking of the combat soldier and the ways in which soldiers were imagined, designed, and developed. His goal was to “armor” the individual soldier both internally and psychologically through new forms of biomedicine and biotechnology. The interventions he detailed in 1962 live on today in the U.S. military's soldier performance enhancement research programs, including DARPA's recent “Inner Armor” program and desire to make “kill-proof” soldiers.

Since Evo Morales was first elected President of Bolivia in 2005, indigeneity has moved from being a language of protest to a language of governance with concomitant profound changes in how indigeneity is imagined and mobilized. However, one of the striking features of Morales's presidency is his administration's open conflict with various indigenous groups. Although a number of scholars have addressed these issues, they have largely focused on the peculiarities of the Bolivian example in a Latin American context; this has obscured the advantage of significant comparative analysis with other areas of the world. I argue that indigeneity as it is currently practiced and understood is a recent global phenomenon and that there are more similarities between African countries and Bolivia than is generally appreciated. In particular, scholarly debates surrounding the difference between autochthony and indigeneity, and the case of Cameroon in particular, have much to offer in our understanding of the Bolivian case. To date, the primary frame for understanding indigeneity is an ethnic/cultural one and this can obscure important similarities and differences between groups. The comparative framework presented here allows for the development of analytical tools to distinguish fundamental differences and conflicts in indigenous discourses. I distinguish between five related conceptual pairs: majoritarian and minoritarian discourses; claims on the state and claims against the state; de-territorialized peoples versus territorialized peoples; hegemonic and counterhegemonic indigeneity; and substantive versus symbolic indigeneity. These nested pairs allow for analytic distinctions between indigenous rights discourses without recourse to discussions of culture and authenticity.

Anthropological studies of Indian villages conducted in the 1950s and 1960s form a valuable archive of rural life soon after India's independence. We compare sections of that archive with recent fieldwork in the same villages in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha. If we trust the ethnography of the 1950s, domestic and caste spheres were the locations of village incivility. It is noteworthy that there is no reference in the early work to the Partition of the subcontinent that had occurred just a few years before. Neither is there mention of discrimination or violence carried out in the name of religion in these locations. New fieldwork reveals a different story about the rise of wholesale religious incivility in the public sphere. Caste has not vanished, but inter-caste relations have taken on new forms. We suggest that the intersection of affirmative action policies, political parties, and the systematic penetration of Hindu nationalist organizations has been crucial in the remaking of rural India.

Recent scholarship on Indian, African, and Caribbean political thinkers and leaders emphasizes the era leading up to and immediately after decolonization as one saturated with awareness of time and history. While much of this scholarship focuses on temporalities that open up the future, this article instead foregrounds imaginings of the present in the currency of news reports. By examining newspaper reports, we can attend in a different way to renderings of time and freedom. This article applies theoretical work on genre and addressivity to analyze how location, space, and time were simultaneously grounded and overcome by Nigerian newspaper columnists, and how this dynamic of bounded transcendence facilitated an array of social and political projects in the time-space of 1930s and 1940s colonial Nigeria. The pseudonymous writers examined in this article applied the trope of flying to exist in an alternate reality. Each “reporter” outstripped the normal logic of time and space through their ability to “jump” from place to place, and even to be in more than one place at once. By existing, as they claimed, “everywhere and nowhere” they literally and figuratively rose above the material reality of the everyday, thus ordaining an exclusive capacity for revelation.

In the Global South since the 1980s, when economic downturns under pressure from the forces of neoliberalism eroded social relations, sport and athletes’ bodies have become major loci where masculinity is constituted and debated. Sport masculinity now fills a vacuum left by the evacuation of traditional forms of masculinity, which are no longer available to the new generations of men. For them, the possibility of employment in the sport industries in the Global North has had a transformative effect, despite the extremely limited probability of success. During the same period of time, the world of sport has become commoditized, mediatized, and corporatized, transformations that have been spearheaded by the growing importance of privatized media interests. Professional athletes have become neoliberal subjects responsible for their own destiny in an increasingly demanding and unpredictable labor market. In Cameroon, Fiji, and Senegal, athletic hopefuls prospectively embody this new gendered subjectivity by mobilizing locally available instruments that most closely resemble neoliberal subjectivity, such as Pentecostalism and maraboutism. Through the conduit of sport, the masculine self has been transformed into a neoliberal subject in locations where this is least expected. What emerges is a new approach to masculinity that eschews explanations based on the simple recognition of diverse and hierarchically organized masculinities, and instead recognizes masculinity in its different manifestations as embedded, scalar, relational, and temporally situated.

This article examines extended debates after World War II over the repatriation of Italian civilians from Albania, part of the Italian fascist empire from 1939 until 1943. Italy's decolonization, when it is studied at all, usually figures as rapid and non-traumatic, and an inevitable byproduct of Italy's defeat in the war. The tendency to gloss over the complexities of decolonization proves particularly marked in the Albanian case, given the brevity of Italy's formal rule over that country and the overwhelming historiographical focus on the Italian military experience there. In recovering the complex history of Italian and Albanian relations within which negotiations over repatriation occurred, this article demonstrates the prolonged process of imperial repatriation and its consequences for the individuals involved. In some cases, Italian citizens, and their families, only “returned” home to Italy in the 1990s. The repatriation of these “remainders” of empire concerned not only the Italian and Albanian states but also local committees (notably the Circolo Garibaldi) and international organizations, including the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the International Committee of the Red Cross. In recuperating this history, the analysis rejects seeming truisms about the forgotten or repressed memory of Italian colonialism. Drawing upon critical theories of “gaps,” the article addresses the methodological challenges in writing such a history.

This paper engages in a microhistory of international law, grounded in the contests surrounding the Muscat Dhows case brought by Great Britain against France in 1905. At the heart of the case was the question of whether the French consul had the right to grant flags and navigation passes to dhows from the southern Omani port of Sur that were suspected of transporting slaves. The case became foundational to studies of the law of the sea, and the ruling is still cited in footnotes in law school textbooks. Buried in the case's proceedings, however, are a series of petitions by the dhow captains that give historians a window into the legal imaginaries of Indian Ocean mariners in an age of empire. Through a close reading of the petitions, I explore how captains located themselves within an imperial legal geography, and appropriated legal technologies—passes and flags—to help them shape the legal possibilities of a changing political and economic seascape. I argue that the claims the captains articulated and the practices they engaged in at sea reveal a maritime legal culture at work, one animated by a long history of encountering regional and global empires at sea. Their documentary practices illuminate how they engaged in and domesticated a body of international law, and illustrate how the regime manifested itself in an ocean that ran thick with legal idioms.

This article explores the history of an experiment in architectural education that took place at what is today the University of Nairobi, between 1965 and 1967. Organized by Selby Mvusi, a South African industrial designer, and Derek Morgan, a British expatriate architect, what was known as the “Foundation Course” was both an experiment in architectural education in postcolonial Africa and a serious attempt to think through the African experience of time and equip students with the tools to recognize and respond to the unique conditions of the postcolonial African present. Based on archival sources, including those in private collections, and oral interviews, the article situates the Foundation Course within African intellectual history as an exercise in social theory and phenomenology. I examine the content of Mvusi and Morgan's intellectual partnership and project by tracing their individual trajectories, and especially the pedagogical scheme they developed at Nairobi, which came to focus more on humanity in dialogue with the material environment than on material objects themselves. I trace the intellectual lineages of their concepts and explore their articulation within the postcolonial university until the course was cancelled in 1967. I conclude by considering how Mvusi imagined the Foundation Course as a laboratory for both being and building in postcolonial Africa, drawing from a conference paper he delivered just weeks before he died in 1967.