Marcel Mauss never provides us with his conception of politics as he conceives it as a scientific. However, this relationship would have been clear for the scholars who dealt with his life and works. The unpublished text that we present will not only enlighten this shadow zone. It also presents the idea of politics cultivated by Mauss as the scientific he was in the last moments of his intellectual life.

The paper analyses the new architecture of global governance which is characterised by unaccountable international institutions and scattered sovereignties. It examines the dilemmas of civil society actors (social movements and NGOs) involved in protecting the rights of local communities through strategic issue-based alliances with the state or the World Bank, whose legitimacy they question in other contexts. The cunning state remains a central actor in selectively transposing neoliberal policies to the national terrain and capitalises on its perceived weakness in order to render itself unaccountable to its citizens. The argument draws on empirical material from India around conflicts over the patenting of genetic resources, biodiversity conservation, forced displacement and privatisation of common property resources.

Norbert Elias went to Ghana as Professor of Sociology for two years. Nevertheless he continued to refer to its inhabitants, despite their rural development, as naturvolk which the civilising process had not touched. That process apparently took off in Europe at the time of the Renaissance and never reached the Third World. The Ghanaians had different kinds of super-ego which did not restrain their behaviour in the same way as Europeans. The lack of restraint is shown in blood sacrifice and in their art, which gives a more direct expression of feeling. Elias' observations were necessarily superficial as he did not carry out fieldwork or learn any languages. He employed them simply to bolster the themes he had developed in a European context rather than using them to modify those themes.

Disaggregating property rights into abstract bundles of rights over the use, control, and alienation of property facilitates the systematic comparison of property regimes across time and space. However, because these analytic distinctions ignore the criteria by which individuals choose among competing claims of ownership, they cannot capture the moral reasoning that ultimately institutionalizes a property regime. Using focus group debates over competing claims of ownership to newly privatized urban real estate, this essay identifies four grounded logics of entitlement by which Shanghai residents determine just claims in one post-socialist property regime: a logic of family justice, a logic of state regulation, a logic of the market, and a logic of the family estate. Of note is that the primary criteria by which individuals decided among different logics of entitlement were the rules of the property regime at the time the dwelling first became the family home rather than differences attributable to societal inequalities tied to distinctions of gender, generation or occupation.

New political legitimacy is the sticking point of Chinese modernity, which has puzzled Chinese intellectuals for centuries. Since Mao's death in 1976, the debate about the necessity, conditions, and strategy of democratization in China has taken place among scholars of all factions and tendencies. However, only the process of reform provides the possibility discuss of such sensitive questioning; however only eventual democratization could help us carry this process through.

Being an ‘antiglobalizationist’ comes easy as a political label but as a theoretical endeavor, it is more difficult. Globalization encompasses a bundle of meanings. The paper disentangles some of the multiple implications of globalization and its purported enemies through the Big Mac-Roquefort opposition; it examines the taste differential of the two products, their symbolism and their stakes in the construction of ethnic, cultural and class identities. The simplistic opposition between globalization and its enemies is reinterpreted in the context of commercialization, Americanization, democratization, high-and massculture and-consumption, only to be cast in the age-old tensions of modernity.